Comment by nixarn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nixarn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Have you tried co-pilot? I don't want to code without it. Saves so much time and produces good results, instead of searching for answers online, which isn't easy as you get into ad filled sites, find shitty Stack Overflow answers and webpages with outdated docs and examples.

Two examples from this week. Formatting dates in javascript, I had a datetime string and I wanted to show it as YY-MM-DD HH:MM for our internal tool. I don't know by heart exactly what to in this case although it's far from rocket science, so now I could write a comment what I wanted done and copilot coded it for me.

Same when I wanted a request to become a file download for the user, not something I've done many times before, and I could kinda reason that it probably needs the header to be set to something. And googling for this didn't give good results, yo need the right language, framework etc. With copilot I just wrote the comment // return file as download, and co-pilot wrote the code to set the header and send the bytes. Amazing!

> Have you tried co-pilot?

I wanted to try co-pilot, but noped out when I saw it required a subscription. I thought it was in some kind of beta and would still be free. Is there a way to try it without signing up for a subscription?

My general worry is about becoming personally dependent on a paid tool just to do basic programming work.

Your worry is going to become obsolete pronto, just like you are not worried about depending on a paid CPU to perform basic computations. The meaning of "basic programming work" will be redefined by these tools.

The entry barrier of the subscription is a shame, that's for sure. But before open models are avilable, the field is proprietary today: we are going to witness a battle of AIs that will be as bloody as the Unix Wars of lore.

I suspect you're right, and I'm generally optimistic about this future efficiency. But it doesn't make me any less of a cheapskate :)

Totally understandable, Chat GPT Plus is the most expensive subscription I ever had.

I still want to know if MS lets, say, Windows or MS Office developers use it. If not, they must consider it too risky from a copyright standpoint, which means so do I.

> . Is there a way to try it without signing up for a subscription?

Yes, you can sign on the wait list and get 2 months free trial.

So it set some headers. Did it pick the right headers? Did it know what headers the recipient was expecting?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com