Senior Full-Stack Engineer Sam Holmes knows her way around a dev tool. Throughout her 7+ year career, she’s worked at companies of nearly every size and on products ranging from internal CRM systems to fully back-end projects. These days, she works mostly on customer-facing web applications and ups her productivity with Pieces.
Sam’s first interaction with Pieces wowed her right away. “I was able to add my entire repo and it pulled out 50 snippets for me,” Sam explains. But, In-Project Snippet Discovery was just the tip of the iceberg. “The really useful part of Pieces is the context that it adds. It adds exactly what the code does,” she says, “and the shareable links are awesome. I love that it includes all the context, so you don't need to do that much work to explain what you're sending over to someone, just give them the link. It has everything you need in there.”
Benefits Highlights:
- Simplify Sharing Code and Context: Pieces simplifies the process of sharing code and its context by providing shareable links that include all the necessary information. This eliminates the need for extensive explanations when sharing code with others, improving code collaboration and reducing workflow complexity.
- Pieces Copilot Enhances Solo Projects: Pieces Copilot significantly enhances solo projects by providing automatic enrichment, snippet discovery, and shareable links. The Pieces Chrome Extension seamlessly integrates into the workflow, offering instant answers and solutions to coding queries and problems, ultimately boosting productivity.
- Increased Productivity and Idea Generation: By leveraging Pieces Copilot, developers like Sam experience a notable increase in productivity and idea generation. The AI coding assistant not only provides solutions but also facilitates brainstorming sessions and offers insights, akin to collaborating with another person.
- Efficiency and Seamlessness in Workflow: Sam finds Pieces to be a valuable addition to her workflow, recommending it to colleagues and intending to continue using it daily. The tool's ability to streamline the path to viable solutions, automate writing documentation, and serve as a reliable companion on solo projects contributes to increased efficiency and seamlessness in development processes.
Sam’s Tech Stack:
- Languages: Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, Scala
- IDEs: Vim, IntelliJ, VS Code
- Other Tools: Pieces, Notion, GitHub
Simplify Sharing Code and Context
Finding good answers to internal coding questions has been a perennial problem on Sam’s various engineering teams. She’s worked with everything from Google Docs to Notion to company-specific forums, à la Stack Overflow. “It's always been a pain to document code in a way that combines context and words with the code,” Sam says. “In terms of actually finding code snippets or finding questions that were asked before, I use Slack a lot for internal questions I have on code.”
But Slack’s search is a major pain point for finding code because it’s an exact-text-match search. “I have to remember I wrote something to someone and how I worded it. I have to remember exactly how I wrote words because you can't just search, ‘That time we were talking about the code snippet for how to do XYZ.’”
Pieces, and its shareable links, offer a solution to the challenges of re-finding context across tools and sharing that code and context once you find it. Sam thinks this could seriously simplify workflows. “It’s very good for collaboration if you're not the one who wrote the code,” she says. “What I love about the code snippets is I can search that context. So the issue of exact text match in Slack won't exist anymore. It’s a simple example, but search, ‘build users name’ and they'll find my full name method. I love that you're searching the actual functionality of the code, which I can't do anywhere else.”
Pieces Copilot: A Coworker for Solo Projects
Automatic enrichment, Snippet Discovery, and shareable links are all powerful upgrades to Sam’s workflow, but incremental. One Pieces feature is hugely impactful: Pieces Copilot. “I use it every time I code now,” says Sam. “Especially with the Chrome Extension being directly on the side of my browser, it doesn't disrupt my workflow at all. I'm using it now as my first tool for searching; before I go to Google, I go to Pieces Copilot.”
Sam first used Pieces Copilot for a personal project that involved building a calendar timeline. When deciding how to experiment with the copilot, she thought, “What I would usually look through the documentation for? I was able to ask Pieces Copilot, ‘Can this do multiple events at the same time?’ It was able to give me those answers immediately. I was super impressed by that.”
Even though she’d already solved it, Sam challenged Pieces Copilot to solve a tricky library implementation problem. “I asked it the same question I had: ‘Can I use prime react to do multiple events on the same time grid?’ And it was like, ‘No, but you could use custom CSS.’ It came up with the same solution that I came up with instantly!” Sam was floored. “You can imagine how much of a productivity boost that is. I'm going to Pieces Copilot first when I'm problem-solving.”
As helpful as Pieces Copilot can be, Sam knows that AI is fallible, just like people. “There are always multiple ways to solve things, so I'm not always going to accept the first thing it says, but I think it can shorten idea generation,” Sam explains. “I can also bounce ideas off of it. I can imagine talking to it, asking, ‘Is this solution scalable? What problems do you see with doing this?’ It did even point out issues with custom CSS like it can get complicated and it's not scalable. It's just like working with another person.”
Similar to coworkers, Pieces Copilot has context about your code and repositories that other AI code generation tools don’t. Recent improvements to Pieces Copilot’s context retention have been great for Sam’s productivity. “I love that I don't have to keep reminding it of the context of what I'm doing. I can just continue the conversation,” she says. That context makes working together practically seamless. “It’s a paired relationship, like driver/navigator. Pieces Copilot is like my navigator,” says Sam. “It's getting research for me while I can keep coding and get those answers immediately.”
Final Thoughts
Overall, Sam thinks Pieces is a value-add to her workflow. “I would absolutely recommend it. I'm definitely going to share it with my co-workers,” she says. “I plan on continuing to use it every day as I'm working.” Cutting down on the time to a viable solution, automating documentation, and bringing a coworker along on solo projects have been huge benefits for Sam, and they can be for you, too.
