My company has paid for Copilot in our VSCode.
All I use it for is fixing up type errors so far. And even that it's not that hot on.
I don't really dare let it generate code from scratch for me, and I turned off the type ahead stuff as it was driving me bonkers.
What is it actually good at?
All I use it for is fixing up type errors so far. And even that it's not that hot on.
I don't really dare let it generate code from scratch for me, and I turned off the type ahead stuff as it was driving me bonkers.
What is it actually good at?
Comments
I love @amyhoy.bsky.social's point — if we let these things type stuff out for us (or write text for us), we deprive ourselves of the learning that comes with doing.
And learning is a lot of fun. It makes no sense.
Should be noted that I don't use in a work capacity nowadays
But, I have coded since age 9, and in high level scenarios for 10+ years🤔🤷♀️
Sadly…
My company offered it to everyone who works with code, I was the only one that refused (and the only non cishet white man) we’re publically funded so it felt wrong.
Try /doc and /tests inline commands with GitHub CoPilot
Most recently, adding and later removing detailed timing logs.
Also have used it for quickly generating utility classes based on custom properties, and other mundane things like that.
It is absolutely a godsend for writing things like unit tests. It pays attention to your particular code base, and allows you to more quickly orient yourself in a new code base.
Write your documentation first. Let it try to fill in the function. See what you get. A lot of times, it will choose a different, better means of accomplishing the same goal than what you had in mind.
Works pretty ideally for everything. It’s not perfect & it may be a crutch for beginners, but I’m not a beginner & I am a hell of a lot faster than without it.
// here we register a mousedown listener, but not
And watch it school you about how you should probably be using the pointerdown event instead.
I remember when it did that to me & I was like “well damn, it’s right.” It’s done stuff like that for me more than once.
imo the sweet spot is low stakes and/or easily verified. don’t use it to generate auth code where subtle yet dangerous bugs can hide. but bugs in like SVG manipulation code are both easy to spot bugs & also not a big deal.
I mostly ignore it for business logic tho. It's a nice helper, not a magic wand.
Genuinly it's handy at summarising a minified block of condensed operations. But Chat GPT can also just do this for free.
I do wish it had a better understanding of my codebase rather than guessing based only on open files.
Been doing it manually for over 20 years now so I like it for the mundane stuff. It’s quite good at making me comment my intentions before I write code though as its suggestions get far better with comments.
I use e.g. Claude/ChatGPT web interface, apparently their "best" models for generating larger chunks of code and even then they're awful and unreliable and I have to hold their little digital hands through the entire process.
Otherwise it’s just me & my smart IDE autocomplete. The web interface doesn’t have the context of my code base.
- Giving me a general pattern or generic solution in chat.
- array methods and similar JS features
- shell scripts
- git and similar shell commands.
Basically whatever the models have stolen from stackoverflow, so I don’t have to google and go there.
I don’t see benefits for copilot in my ide as it does not see the context for my code.
I use Cursor for my hobbies, and Sourcegraph at work. Cursor is my fav being so fast!
used it a lot when i was doing country list related stuff, it's practical to generate those arrays, etc
but yeah mostly a fancy autocomplete that gets in the way x)
Also: I am weak in php date functions and copilot can set you in the right direction. So I am less on Stackoverflow.
But in CSS no KI can beat me by now 😅
// "I know this is a hack I'm sorry" I promise I'll fix it but I'm just so tired and bad at life and I just need this to deploy
It's good at saving you keystrokes, but not much else IMO.
After a month of working with Copilot I'm forced to assume anyone singing its praises is a grifter.
I'd liken it to fast-food and taxis. It's healthier to make home-cooked meals, use public transport, and walk places, but modern life conspires to put the latter out-of-reach, while these less healthy solutions are *right* there.