Hacker News Reader

Comment by meijer | Hacker News Reader

> There's literally no point coding without it.

Except maybe that it is still not generally available.

True. My son is on the waiting list several week now. But honestly traditional coding is the past. Soon they might be asking for someone with 12 months copilot experience. I don't mind the negative downvotes from luddites. Copilot is smarter and faster than you. Accept it and learn to use it.

If copilot is smarter and faster than you, that says more about you than it does about copilot :)

If you don't think it is. It says a great deal about you too :)

I don't just think it isn't, I know it isn't. I've tried it, and watched friends try it too.

Copilot is decent at speeding up some commonly occurring boilerplate in a common language, and pretty bad at anything else.

FWIW, there was also this https://challenge.openai.com/codex/leaderboard, and Copilot's 'time' was laughably bad compared to any decent human.

Does this mean that it couldn't potentially be a useful tool? No. I think it could be, and for some projects I would probably use it myself to speed up some laborious tasks. But currently, claiming it can help with anything remotely more complex is just untrue.

If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

Not sure what you would take as evidence. You seem convinced. I have github repos. If you like, take any app idea. In any language you want. We can both spend 2 weeks building it. Screen record yourself making it and ill use copilot, you don't. We can see who's is better?

edit.

- ok so you conceded in your sentence that it's faster and you would use it for that reason.

so your only disagreement is it can't help you solve harder problems?.

- the average dev is hitting stackoverflow 10x a day for that very reason. And that data is embedded in copilot. I've literally typed the name of functions I was going to have to spend 20 minutes googling to figure out how to achieve. typed the pseudo code comments and boom. copilot has done it before I even had to think. If not I just have to change how i prompt it by feeding it a few variable names or changing my comments. As I said. You can get good at using it. If copilot is crap it's because of the person using it. I.e. if you are looking for a bike and you google 'chicken sandwich' well. You aint gonna get a bike.

That sounds like an interesting idea, but to me a more convincing thing would be seeing the same person do something with + without copilot and see if it makes a big difference when used correctly.

To me 'smarter and faster' means being able to solve harder problems + accurately reason about things, etc. (And not introduce security issues, which is a whole other thing...)

If it is just a replacement for stackoverflow, it's probably useful and it could save time, but I'm not sure it's 'smarter and faster' any more than any other feature in an IDE (you could also create a hotkey or something to search SO which would probably be just as fast too).

You really notice when you don't have it anymore after using it for several weeks. Writing each line again, each painful character one at a time. I keep accidently opening sublime and going to type then realising it doesn't have copilot. And think ugh.

It's nice to reason about your actual problem and not the features of code.

Or trivial matters like “license compliance”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com