The irrelevance of IDE auto-completion is staggeri...

# intellij

[louiscad]

The irrelevance of IDE auto-completion is staggering…

I'm shocked by how it ignores the parameter names and most obvious types, i.e. the most basic hints.
(Android Studio 2025.1.3)

It's actually annoying now. Such a far cry from how Java completion was working very well even 10 years ago.

I guess it's because IDE's K2 mode was pushed before actual feature/behavior parity, and I don't like it 😞

[louiscad]

id as first result for the parameter email? Really?

[louiscad]

Do you want to replace TODO() with TODO()?

[louiscad]

stability and code analysis improvements.

Hum…

[Oliver.O]

I can relate. Things could be better. I hope that this turns out to be a price worth paying for getting K2 out and stable, opening up Kotlin's evolution for its next steps. But yes, I really hope that auto-completion will catch up soon.

[eygraber]

Yeah this has been going on for a while.

See https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/386087991 and https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KTIJ-32954/

[louiscad]

P3 💀

[Oliver.O]

On the JB side it's Major.

[wasyl]

It's not only K2, but also the ML completions I think. At least I remember declining quality around the time ML completion was introduces. I also feel that sometimes the initial completion is ok-ish but then more options show up, rearrange the initial ones and they're not helpful anymore. I also hate that parameter names are not prioritied

[wasyl]

And this really comes up regularly — both reduced quality of Kotlin completions and K2 feature parity 😕 I got a huge amount of notifications for tickets closed around K2 inspections so hopefully it'll get better soon™

[Teodor Irkhin]

Hey everyone!
Thanks for bringing attention to this problem.
We are continuously working on improving completion, honestly, with every release.
Completion is a big and complex system, so moving it from K1 mode to K2 isn’t something we can just “lift and shift.” The K2 completion is an almost complete rewrite (which was necessary due to the new compiler), and that’s why there is a drop in the quality currently, but it is improving steadily and will continue to improve.
I completely understand how frustrating this feels in daily work. I hope you will feel the difference in the next release already.

With Android Studio, it’s a bit trickier because of the version gap, which means completion improvements land there a bit later than in IDEA.

By the way, do you also notice similar issues with full-line completion?

[Teodor Irkhin]

BTW, every screenshot and code snippet you post is very useful because we can easily reproduce them and check our completion improvements against them. We are grateful for them, please add more when you notice them.

Do you want to replace TODO() with TODO()?

And many of them are really funny and silly too

[louiscad]

full-line completion isn't supported in Android Studio, I guess for commercial reasons?

Last time I used it in IDEA, it was working well maybe 2/3 of the time, but the last 1/3 it was distracting me with mistake-full suggestions, and it was breaking my flow, not fun, so I disabled it, preferring to slow down a little, but keep my focus. I didn't like the flipped boolean expressions and wrong pattern guesses.

[louiscad]

For full-line completion, I wish it was available with a special shortcut to invoke it, for the times where I feel lazy and want a little help.

[louiscad]

Noted for the screenshots, I will keep posting them in the issue (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KTIJ-32954/)

[louiscad]

Looks like disabling ML assisted completion helps a bit, at least for some stuff:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KTIJ-35576/K2-Completion-suggests-deprecated-symbol[…]t-wrong-order-due-to-Machine-Learning-Assisted-Completion