I feel you. I totally disabled AI completions as they actually were often sidelining me from my reasoning.
It is like having an obnoxious co-worker shoving me to the side everytime i type a new line and complete a whole block of code and asking me if it is good without regards to how many times I rejected those changes.
I still use AI, but favor a copy paste flow where I at least need to look at what i am copying and locating the code I am pasting to. At least i am aware of the methods or function names and general code organization.
I also ask for small copy paste changes so that I keep it digestible. A bonus point is that ChatGPT in firefox when the context gets too big, the browser basically slowsdown locks and it works as a form extra sense that the context window is too big and LLM is about to start saying non-sense.
That said AI, is an amazing tool for prototyping and help when out of my domain of expertise.
So one really big thing that can make the AI autocomplete super useful is to follow the old method from "Code Complete", Pseudocode Programming Process (PPP).
Write a comment first on what you intend to do, then the AI generally does a good job auto-completing below it. I mean you don't have to "sketch everything out", but just that the AI is using the page as context and the comment just helps disambiguate what you want to do and it can autocomplete significant portions when you give it a nudge with the comment.
I've almost fully converted to agentic coding, but when I was using earlier tools, this was an extremely simple method to get completions to speed you up instead of slow you down.
It is like having an obnoxious co-worker shoving me to the side everytime i type a new line and complete a whole block of code and asking me if it is good without regards to how many times I rejected those changes.
I still use AI, but favor a copy paste flow where I at least need to look at what i am copying and locating the code I am pasting to. At least i am aware of the methods or function names and general code organization.
I also ask for small copy paste changes so that I keep it digestible. A bonus point is that ChatGPT in firefox when the context gets too big, the browser basically slowsdown locks and it works as a form extra sense that the context window is too big and LLM is about to start saying non-sense.
That said AI, is an amazing tool for prototyping and help when out of my domain of expertise.