Ask HN: How have you used GitHub Copilot so far? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How have you used GitHub Copilot so far?

7 pointsraunak6 comments

I’m curious to hear from the larger community - I’ve mostly used it for completing mostly repetitive classwork (OCaml) and basic web dev (Django). It’s worked like a charm for the basics - I’d estimate speeding me up in terms of LOC written by 2-3x for sure. Any other input?

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Whenever I need a function that i know has been done a million times before but for some reason isnt on stack overflow ill use copilot

E.g. converting default EM value and REM value to pixels

Like i couldnt seem to google what the default EM and REM values were but copilot knows better than me

I use copilot when writing new apps / scripts. For instance, i had to parse a tsv file into json recently, which i wrote a small python script for. I can never fucking remember how to read and write files in python, so copilot helped with that. After the writeheavy work is done, and only the adjustment work remain, i turn copilot off because the suggestions are distracting.

Same, I’ve found it incredibly productive for scaffolding web apps, also helps when I’m less familiar with a language or framework.

I found it very useful and delightful when I was doing something so obscure as writing a Zig binding for FreeType and HarfBuzz. It didn’t always generate correct Zig code but it was still really good and I was so impressed by how it picked up the FFI conventions and reused its knowledge of those libraries in this new language context.

To add on most of the time I dont use copilot because it takes time for me to read and understand what copilot is doing, and sometimes it gets stuff like typescript types wrong/inaccurate and the code style is slightly different too

I am using it for Reactjs and it has been helping a lot, I just write the name of the function and Copilot suggests the code which is almost everytime correct say: {search} or {sort} functions.

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