Does anyone has any interesting AI tool you use why doing Flutter/Dart?
I have only experience with free version of https://codeium.com which I use mostly as an autocomplete which works quite well and I especially like when I have to write a sequence of stuff, I write the 1st and it autocomplete the rest based on it for me etc.
Would like to know your opinions and tips on other tools!
I’m currently using GitHub copilot, I’m enjoying the autocompletion so far, the chat to talk about some code
I used to use Github Copilot, then switched to Codeium based on an independent comparison (video). I might switch back or pick up yet another tool based on updated benchmarks. I also briefly tested out IntelliJ’s built-in solution. In all cases, I use it like you — as a fancy autocomplete.
The one thing I learned to do that makes me more productive is having a keyboard shortcut set up to quickly enable / disable the autocompletion. (For Copilot, it’s Ctrl-Shift-O. I bound the same keystroke for Codium.) This lets me focus on my flow when coding most of the time, without the distraction of wrong auto-suggestions, and then use the AI only when I know it’s going to be useful. Before learning this “trick”, I often spent more time reading and rejecting garbage suggestions than doing actual coding, and losing concentration. As you note above, the AI is best at sequences of repetitive or obvious stuff.
In the past, I periodically tried the other things that LLM coding tools provide, and so far I have always been disappointed. I’m talking about things like the chat interface inside the IDE that lets you ask the LLM to rewrite code for you. I tried that with Codium, Copilot and the IntelliJ AI solution. In all cases, the results were dismal. I might try it again.
As I get Copilot for free as an OSS publisher I mostly use Copilot. What is really helpful to have a separate key-binding which will only accept the next word it proposes so if the proposal is partly bullshit you don’t have to delete most of it afterwards.
Besides that I made pretty good experiences with Claude.ai if I want more complex changes or creation of some scripts
For me copilot is great for finishing or predicting some stuff but claude was great for actually writing code. Tho I think I saw copilot can now use third party AI, so with anthropic (claude) should be. Great
I’ve felt that there’s little to no point trying to be an early adopter in all of these AI tools as the best one will emerge in a few years time.
Between now and then you will end up trying various AI tools, realizing some are awful and some are okay and then later a lot of these AI tools will disappear as companies fail to have a profitable model.
The companies which remain will have you at their mercy and be able to continually jack up prices like Netflix / Spotify is doing because the majority are VC backed who care only about profit making.
Throughout this time you will have wasted days worth of development time testing the various different AI tools and trying to adjust your workflow to incorporate them and if anything your problem solving skills will become rusty as you build up a dependency on these tools.
It’s sort of a slippery slope. I too m not really happy with using it on the other side repetiv tasks can be done so much faster with it.
Or for example I needed some python scrip to pitch some generated Dart files. It was way faster to explain Claude what I need with examples before and after the patch than to write it manually.
Knowing that others take advantage of Ai tools makes it hard not to follow.
I too see the danger that at some point there will be a massive concentration and prices will go up.
After several months using GitHub Copilot I switched to https://www.cursor.com . Especially the composer is quite impressing. It can create or change several files in response to a good prompt and shows all changes as diff, just like in a merge request.
They write that you can use VS code plugins do you know how that works?
Is cursor pure online IDE or can you install it locally?
Cursor is a clone of VScode and is installed locally. It suggests to install all extensions from a VScode instance. I had no problem with all the typical extensions used for Flutter development.
I use https://supermaven.com/ and it’s really great. I wonder how it compares to codeium, maybe I’ll try it this week.
I generally use only supermaven free tier for autocomplete.
And I’m learning aider, cline and continue.dev with gemini flash, but if I would pay for a model, it would be claude or deepseek.
I’ve been using a paid version of Cursor.
While I did tried other ways of leveraging LLMs to help me code, the ones I tried were too slow.
I have my eye on Ollama + Continue (VSCode) but also AnythingLLM + a local vector DB.
Well Supermaven has just been bought by Cursor, but they say they’ll keep developing and supporting the IDEs extensions
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