(I stay away for obvious copyright reasons.)
I tried copilot during the beta, and apart from the obvious legal licensing issues, I simply could not find a valid usecase for any of the codebases I usually work with.
At my day job, I spend more time thinking of better ways to do X, rather than writing boilerplate code :)
Are you telling me there isn’t a fair bit of boilerplate in bog standard implementations of OP_ADD or in a grid layout with a sidebar and a footer?
The irony here is that the level of abstraction necessary to remove all boilerplate means that you’re removing the descriptive nature of the boilerplate and making your code difficult to understand.
Boilerplate isn’t necessarily a bad thing but sometimes it can be rather verbose and it is very nice to offload that typing to a tool.
I think the thing that weirds me out about copilot is that I can't peer inside it. I guess I like knowing something will always work?
> At my day job, I spend more time thinking of better ways to do X, rather than writing boilerplate code :)
Not that you are suggesting otherwise, and I am being somewhat facetious, but oftentimes boilerplate is preferred to boiling the ocean.
Not all jobs are on mature projects.
I get tired of highly subjective anecdotes being used as concrete truths.
You are not the center of reality as we don’t know there is one. So good on you for having a job where the boring work was already in place. Look how far you have come on your own leveraging past effort. So proud of you.
10%+ speedup is a huge, obvious win. Anything that increases my productivity is good.
I feel like it's possible some time could be shaved off somewhere there, but this all happens very quickly and it's not an area where optimization would improve things much overall. For this to amount to literal hours of typing, I think I would need to be either very much slower at typing, writing an immensely large volume of boilerplate, or working over many many years. Typing stuff is essentially never a bottleneck for me.
But afaik almost everybody uses it as autocomplete on steroids.
So the reasoning behind using it is the exact same as using autocomplete in I.e. Intellij.
It's just slightly more powerful, since it will usually autocomplete the whole line (occasionally a bit more), instead of just the current keyword.
And it's scary how good it is for "autocomplete" sometimes. I've found it much more useful on our angular webside frontend rather than the c# backend.. but man on the angular/javascript side it really saves time.
I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head, but every few days I literally am wondering to myself "how did I now I wanted to do exactly that!"
I do find it's much better in some languages though. And probably especially with languages you're new in. It doesn't do much for me in PHP, but does a lot in JavaScript.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, opinion is my own.
Often, it creates code that follows the style of the surrounding environment.
Honestly at this point, the copyright concern seems either ignorant or paranoid to me. The program is interactive and generally only creates small chunks of code at a time. You can read and modify the code it generates (I always do). I only operate on it in digestible chunks, none of which are "original" enough to be considered copyright. Surely, you as a developer can easily say whether the code generated is just some non-copyrightable snippet (some simple BFS code) vs stolen code lifted off a codebase (weirdly specific implementations, fast invsqrt, comments that look like they were written for a different context, magic numbers, undiscovered algorithms).
I would argue that if you can't differentiate between meaningful IP and boilerplate algorithm implementations (with variable names conveniently matching the surrounding context), then you have a different problem.
Yesterday I implemented a BFS in about 30 seconds because copilot recognized the pattern and auto-completed. It took 5 seconds to autocomplete, and 25 seconds to read and fix one line that was wrong. That normally would have taken me 5-10 minutes to code + debug (the copilot code didn't have any errors, minus the 1 I easily found). The productivity gains are too good.
This is the first time I've ever seen this lol. I'd have had a hell of a time learning how to code if that were true!
To cover the lack of good libraries and/or language abstractions.
Is there a job title where I can put this to use? I'm alright in general feature work, generally exceptional in bug fixes or finding exploits, and exceptional in code reviews. I always get stuck in leetcode tests of technical interviews though despite having like 8 years of experience.
Harder doesn't mean quicker :)
it is "intelligent context-aware code autocomplete on steroids"
You mean the part where I said that I haven’t tried it?
1) When it's 100% correct, I smile, because it's often very clever, and as a programmer whose very existence is based on work elimination, when that amazing technological weapon is aimed at my own work needs as a developer, this is some Inception-level glee.
2) It's often wrong. Maybe like, 33% of the time? BUT when it's wrong (note that 95% right is still "wrong," so it's still very good), I smile, because it's often STILL clever, even in its wrongness, and this cleverness amuses me while working. For example, I use Elixir, which linguistically (but NOT semantically) is very similar to Ruby, so on occasion I've seen it make a Ruby-flavored suggestion to my Elixir. "Silly Copilot," I'd say smiling as I'd correct it (and probably teach it further).
So basically, it's made my day slightly more joyful, which is great. I already enjoy programming, so watching a program try to write my code ahead of me is absolutely fascinating.
Simple example of labor saving- I was doing some bash scripting and I wanted some constants for ANSI colors. Well I started writing them, and Copilot finished the whole damn table (with correct constant names, using the naming pattern I'd already established). And all the color codes were correct. This was wonderful! It's GREAT for language domains you're not hugely familiar with. Like, know how you have to often look something up working in a lesser-used language? Well in Copilot, you can just start writing a comment describing what you need or what the code will do, and 8 times out of 10 it will then spit the actual correct code out for you, it's just amazing.
Oh, tip: There's a keystroke combo that will advance through various suggestion possibilities. Often the first suggestion is not quite there, but another suggestion is.