> Nothing you say is credible unless you tell me you have tried copilot. Without you having tried copilot and seen its capabilities we have no common ground. So get back to me once you have used it.
I posted elsewhere in this thread talking about my experiences (both old and recent) using it. Dismissing a reply you don't like simply because of a (terrible, given the tool is very available) assumption is just a poor quality response.
> I claim copilot is capable of creating. When copilot writes an amazing lodash one liner in my code --that isn't regurgitating an existing lodash snippet, it's creating something new to fit my use case. This is undeniable and there is nothing to argue here. Copilot regularly looks at my code and writes new code that is highly specific to my existing code. It's honestly better than me at languages I don't know well (like C).
> And yes, 0.1% of the time copilot is spitting out existing code verbatim; the other 99.9% of the time copilot is not overfitting and is synthesizing new code. Luckily most companies don't needs clean room implementations.
Where do you get this figure of 0.1%? I'm not aware of anyone having studied it, and absent that the figure seems entirely fabricated and could be higher or lower. Indeed, the way it works via prompting suggests that an overall percentage is irrelevant if 100% of the time you ask it for specific things it generates copyrighted or strictly licensed code. If you have references though, I'm interested.
> Copilot writes code that is adapted to my existing code base. This is quite obviously and undeniably not just regurgitation because my codebase is unique to me.
Using your code to show you code you might likely write isn't "creative" and is exactly regurgitating what it's seen. Is a Markov chain "Creative"? That's essentially what you're describing here.
> Lastly copilot is a better programmer (locally) than many of my peers. It can write better lodash one liners, amongst other things, and while that's embarrassing it's true.
You've used lodash one-liners as an example a couple of times now. Why? Why is that a litmus test for a good programmer? What makes the copilot generated ones superior? Do you have examples?
My experiences with copilot as I've shared elsewhere are that it produces about 90% of the time code that needs to be debugged, doesn't quite fit coding conventions we use, and often doesn't do exactly what I'm looking for. It's fine if you're using it to stub in specific kinds of boilerplate or using it to generate a function to do some very standard math thing that exists or should exist in a library somewhere.