I may be in the minority, but after the initial “wow” period, I have been underwhelmed with co-pilot.
Don’t get me wrong, there are few times it has really really impressed me. And there are a few things it really shines at, but most of the time I find it getting in the way.
I’m not so concerned about the craft of programming. But those that make a good living automating trivial tasks should be more worried.
Used it a couple of times. Never found it useful or thought of a situation in which it would be useful.
If you are doing something that is identical to something that has already been done, maybe it works...but then you just look at GH anyway.
For any other situation it is useless because it doesn't know how to program. Pretty much no company wants you typing in random shit into the internet either, it is accident waiting to happen.
Doesn't even work for automation. This is still an absolutely huge area of potential productivity gain. If we still don't have most people taking full advantage of computers, are they just going to magically automate everything? No.
Completely the same, sometimes it does something cool but a lot of the time I start writing a comment to get it to generate even something simple like e.g. some boilerplate test code and it can’t manage it. It’s happened often enough that I don’t bother most of the time now.
Plus it really annoyingly doesn’t seem to handle quotes and brackets, if I’m halfway through writing a line of code and it suggests a reasonable completion I’ll press tab and it’ll fuck up all the brackets and quote marks, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong here but it really annoys me.
We had a guy from Github do a demonstration for us and the most complicated thing he got it to do was write some getters and setters for a class representing a linked list iirc. And even then he spent more time having to cycle through suggestions to find one that he wanted than he would have spent just writing it out of his head.
Something to note here is that copilot is pretty old tech at this point already - GPT4 API is just absolutely worlds better, and it is also about to be old news soon too! With GPT5 coming probably next year, we don’t know what advances it will make but surely basing your understanding of it on copilot will leave you shocked soon enough.
That’s a good point. I do find gpt 4 to be excellent at generating code snippets.
I think as the technology improves, it’ll get better. But I’m more hoping it’d be able to do something more interesting, say generate tests in the background.
Don’t get me wrong, there are few times it has really really impressed me. And there are a few things it really shines at, but most of the time I find it getting in the way.
I’m not so concerned about the craft of programming. But those that make a good living automating trivial tasks should be more worried.