Even allowing for some hyperbole, your programming experience is extremely different from mine. Looking anything up outside the IDE, let alone via Google, is by far the exception for me rather than the rule.
I've long suspected that this kind of difference explains a lot of the difference in how Copilot is perceived.
What I'm not good at is memorizing API's and libraries that all use different verbs and nouns for the same thing, and other such things that are immaterial to the actual work. How do you use a mutation observer again? Hell if I remember the syntax but I know the concept, and copilot will probably spit out what I want, and I'll easily verify the output. Or how do you copy an array in JS? Or print a stack trace? Or do a node walk? You can either wade through google and stackoverflow, or copilot can tell you instantly. And I can very quickly tell if the code copilot gave me is sensible or not.
I’m not sure when and why reading documentation and man pages became a sign of a lack of skill. Watch a presentation by someone like Brian Kernighan and you’ll see him joke about looking up certain compiler flags for the thousandth time!
Personally I work in C, C#, F#, Java, Kotlin, Swift, R, Ruby, Python, Postgres SQL, MySQL SQL, TypeScript, node, and whatever hundreds of libraries and DSLs are built on top. Yes, I have to look up documentation and with regularity.
On another note, even if you are experienced it helps when doing new stuff and you don’t know the proper syntax for what you want. For example let’s say your using flutter, you can just type
// bold
And it will help put the proper bold stuff in there.
Maybe you don't push your boundaries as an engineer and thus rarely need to know new things or at least learn new API surfaces. Maybe you don't know how to effectively prompt an LLM. Maybe you lack the mastery to analyze and refine the results. Maybe you just like doing things the slow way. I too remember a time as an early programmer where I eschewed even Intellisense and basic auto complete...
I'd recommend learning a bit more and practicing some humility and curiosity before condemning an entire class of engineers just because you don't understand their workflow. Just because you've had subpar experiences with a new tool doesn't mean it's not a useful tool in another engineer's toolkit.
I serve Cody a direct question about 1-3 times a week. Of that, it gets maybe 50% correct on the first try. I don’t bother with a second try because by then I’ve already spent the equivalent amount of time looking at the relevant library source code and/or docs would have taken.
I'm firmly in #2. My other comment goes over how.
I'm intrigued to see how devs in #1 grow. One might be wary those devs would grow into bad habits and not thinking for themselves, but it might be a case of the ancient Greek rant against written books hindering memorization. Could be that they'll actually grow to be even better devs unburdened by time wasted on trivial details.
