Latest experiences with Visual Studio Code and AI coding assistance

This week, I started again on some smaller Python coding projects.

First of all Visual Studio Code is a really great, free IDE. It is a lot better than other free IDEs I have tried in the past. Disclosure: I am probably strongly biased towards VS, because in my professional career as software developer, I worked mostly in VS.

Well, I have about four AI coding extension installed, i.e. Copilot, Claude, Gemini, and Windsurf. They seem to get along with each other, no conflicts noticed. 😊

However, my experience was very mixed so far:

1. It seems they pick up on my practices after some time and start following my practices. That is a plus!
2. They seem to be very good with e.g the "print(f'...')" statement. This helpful!
3. Automatically creating docstrings for functions/methods seems to be working fine too!
4. Many code suggestions are very annoying if not wrong and you have to pay close attention not to mess up things.
5. Some (too few) code suggestions (including multi line) were extremely helpful and surprisingly correct, even following my practices.
6. In a few cases, they suggested the complete multi-line code for new functions/methods that I had indeed in mind solely based on the name for the function/method that I provided. Great!