I also don’t know any professional devs who have used tools like copilot and said they were anything but a toy. I am more bullish on LLMs than most of my coworkers. I think there is a lot of potential there. I do not see that potential in the current commercial offerings, and the financial outlay to fine-tune an open-source model and run it at scale is…prohibitive.
Really? I'm academic now but I find Copilot at least moderately helpful when I'm writing a library. It's pretty good a lot of boilerplate functions, docstrings, regex, etc. I certainly don't want to go back to not using it, my code is a lot closer to production quality now and looks nicer.
Thinking back to my days in back-end it seems like it would have been very helpful/sped things up so I'm surprised to hear it's just a toy but I've been out of the professional game for a while now. What's the main criticism?