I am not very interested in most AI tools but Github Copilot has sometimes been very good at guessing what code I want to write and generally saving typing more than intellicode previously in visual studio! However it seems to be going paid-only.
So have you used alternatives like Windsurf as a VS plugin (or if you must Rider AI)?
How did they compare for you?
I’ve tested a bit of everything and I find that, broadly speaking, they’re all quite similar, with some handling certain specific features better than others.
The big downside, in my opinion, is that as soon as you do something fairly new, the completions really lose their interest and fairness.
For ECS, for example, this kind of tool is clearly unusable and ends up adding more work.
But otherwise, I now alternate between JetBrains’ AI and Copilot, and I’m pretty happy with it.
Yeah, kind of. I use Rider and am sometimes amazed how much I can write by just typing one or two characters and pressing Tab to complete the line. It works very well for repetitive, similar code.
On the other hand, just like Intellisense, it keeps bringing up Intelli-nonsense suggestions which makes these suggestions also very frustrating. Just to give an example, it’s the kind of nonsense where it will insist on suggesting System.Random rather than UnityEngine.Random despite the latter being used a lot in nearby context.
IMO it didn’t really improve much on Intellisense, on one hand it does have benefits and on the opposing side it sometimes fails really badly, autocompleting to a hard to spot bug if you’re not careful.