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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

> If this already increases coding productivity by up to 50% (depending on kind of work)

Does anyone believe that?

edit: I'm surprised to see that (so far) 3 replies actually agree with the statement. Is there a video that you'd recommend that shows realistic usage and gain from copilot? Maybe a livestream or something.

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On menial task, it's way more than 50%. For quick scripting, dirty parsing, PoC and plumping, this is about 300% for me.

However, for anything that requires me to think, it's 5% at best.

Don't take up the 50% figure as anything serious, I think it's just a way to state "if it is a such a meaningful boost in productivity".

Which it is, for a lot of tasks, because the vast majority of programming jobs are boring stuff outside of the HN bubble.

It's amazing how much of the world economy runs on csv uploaded to ftp servers.

It is indeed a cheap script boy for me as well

It does mundane work exceptionally well

Agreed with this. If the main bottleneck is typing, then Copilot can dramatically speed up the process. If the bottleneck is thinking, it doesn't help out nearly as much unfortunately.

I'd add that for me at least it's quite good at some small specific subsets of "requires me to think". For example, I do a lot of 3d rotations & transformations, and it's very good at figuring out the math of that based on the function name I chose etc. Most of those would take me a piece of paper and 5-10 mins, but it usually gets it in 1 or 2 tries.

But yes, mundane work it is best at. Some things I have found it made particularly easy:

- scraping websites

- file i/o

- "mirroring" things (I write a bunch of code for doing something on x axis, it automatically replicates it for y and z etc with the right adjustments, or cardinal directions, or arrow keys, etc etc etc)

Sure. I'm way more productive with Copilot. I haven't been coding much lately but I could imagine it would double my productivity with regards to the actual "get an implementation of a thing done" bit of the work.

In terms of design, I had a long conversation with ChatGPT the other day about designing a database, including optimizations that could be made given certain requirements and constraints, etc. It was a big productivity boost, like rubber ducking on steroids.

Can you give us an example how it helped to design the database?

I could not think how it would have helped me, but maybe I m limited in my imagination or don’t know how to ask.

I told it I was designing a database. I told it that my database could tolerate failure levels where more than a quorum of nodes failed at a given time. I then asked it about different algorithms for consensus; RAFT, Paxos, swarm based, etc. It described algorithms for me. I told it that in my database I could guarantee certain things, like that every operation commutes, and I asked how that would let me optimize things - it explained that I could paralellize certain parts of those algorithms.

At one point I told it to name the algorithm we had been discussing something like "OptSwim" and we just kept iterating on the idea.

Well then. The singularity is here. Almost no humans understand these things.

I think people may be downvoting you because technically, neither does the AI.

But aren't you afraid that whenever you veer discussion from Wikipedia/stackoverflow type explanations it's likely lying to you? This was my general experience -- it's great at querying for stuff which already exists and is popular on the internet and for conversing on a surface level or broad level but as soon you delve into details it starts confidently lying and/or hallucinating things, which undermines my trust in it, which in turn means I need to verify what it says, which means it did not increase my productivity that much after all.

It routinely invents arguments, functions or concepts which don't exist in reality or don't apply to the current context, but look like they could, so you are even more likely to get caught by this.

Haha, yes, it indeed invents arguments that aren't part of specific APIs and would offer to do something that you'd like to do in a very easy way, but since they actually aren't part of the API, well, you're out of luck.

It's just taking the "I wish they'd thought of my use case when designing that API" on the next level by simply pretending in a very sincere and convincing way that your wish came true, then writing a usually-pretty-correct program around that assumption that would actually work _if that wish had come true_ - but unfortunately that API doesn't really accept this convenient parameter, so...it's not that easy in reality.

I tried it to help me optimize some sql, but even after many attempts it didn't really do anything useful for me. The best thing was really to show how the syntax works for features that I rarely use - so in that sense it's a better stackoverflow.

I used CoPilot last Advent of Code and really liked it.

This year I recorded most of my days and uploaded them to youtube. So if you want to get a realistic view, take a look here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOqPGQCzgieAOL6iOJjj8hg.

The earlier days you can see it speeds you up a lot. The later days (such as today) you still want to wrap your own head around difficult computer science concepts so it is kind of useless.

Let me know if you have any questions!

I finally got it to do something useful for me the other day. I got it to invert the rendering of rows and columns in a React widget I was writing.

It wasn’t something I actually needed help on, though. When I tried to go further with it and complete more of the task, it got stuck in a loop of just suggesting more and more comments but never offering more code, and then it mysteriously stopped responding at all.

This is the best experience with it I’ve had so far.

Absolutely. 50% feels conservative. The thing is that Copilot becomes so ingrained in your workflow that you don't notice it until internet goes down and you feel completely handicapped. Only then do you realize how much you rely on it.

I haven’t tried Copilot but I’ve used ChatGPT to help with doing Advent of Code in Python (which I don’t use regularly so I forget bits of syntax).

At first I found it very useful to ask it to parse the input. Much faster than looking up three separate docs to piece together what I had in mind.

But then I asked it to parse a more complex input and it just kept failing badly even when I gave it sample inputs and outputs.

I’d say it definitely offers some productivity gains and is worth trying.

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