I have yet to see an example of Copilot do something that doesn't seem like basic autocomplete/snippets that editors and IDEs have been doing for decades or code so basic that it betrays the lack of competence by the user.
IMO chat-based question-asking when encountering unfamiliar language constructs or framework idioms is where LLMs shine in coding assistance.
This matches my experience perfectly. It gets decent/usable results like 40% of the time, but latency kills it.
> IMO chat-based question-asking when encountering unfamiliar language constructs or framework idioms is where LLMs shine in coding assistance.
I have never found this to be productive. It gets details wrong frequently enough that I can't trust the output which effectively doubles (or more) the cognitive effort because you have to validate that it's correct against a more reliable source, or find out the hard way that it's wrong when code/systems break.
These are just a few examples. I've found it to be nearly useless for anything where a semblance of correctness matters. Every single thing it says must be validated against external sources and it can easily lead you down rabbit holes.
GPT-4 was a little better than 3(.5), but I've yet to see it be good at anything enough to warrant the price tag or the time.
Even if you type at 140wpm it is effective.
It should be better at auto importing and status indication I think.
Also it never makes typoes or rarely index+1 errors, things like that.
It is much less mental fatigue compared to if I have to make sure I did those things correctly myself.
I think the delay I kind of in my head use like a guessing game of what it will exactly give me or I will plan other things ahead.
Because it is also always interesting to see how accurate my guess for what it will give me is. Guess it is kind of fun.