The Grey Text Finishes Your Line Before You Finish the Thought

You were writing a function. You knew the name. You knew the inputs. You paused, because the next line was the decision, how to handle the case where the list is empty. Before you had decided, the editor had. Grey text, six lines of it, already sitting in the gap. You read it. You did not choose to. Moving text in the middle of your field of view gets read. It was plausible. It returned an empty result. You were going to throw an error, probably, for a reason that was half formed, and now there was a finished version on the screen and a half formed one in your head. You pressed tab. The pause is not idle time. It is where the thinking happens. Inline suggestions are built to appear in pauses, after a short wait from your last keystroke, because a pause is when you might want help. It is also when you are deciding. So the tool fills the exact moment you most need empty, and fills it with someone else's answer to a question you had not finished asking. Every suggestion is a small review task. Read, judge, accept or dismiss. Dozens an hour, each one quick, each one pulling you from writing into checking. Checking is easier than deciding, so you drift towards it, and by the end of the afternoon you have accepted a lot of code and made very few choices. Keep the help. Change when it arrives. Most editors let you switch automatic suggestions off and ask for one with a key. Then it comes when you have decided, not while you are deciding. Turn them off in the files where you think more than you type. Design notes. Tests. The core of the domain. Leave them on for the boilerplate nobody needs to think about. And before a hard function, write its comment or its test first, in your own words. Then let the machine fill in what you meant, instead of you learning what it meant. The blank line is not a gap to fill. It is where your opinion forms. Give it a few seconds. – Serguey Asael Shinder