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Comment by bhhaskin | Hacker News Reader

It's just not that good beyond basic tasks.

Agreed. I finally tried Github Copilot for a bit at work. It felt like babysitting a bad developer. I have no confidence in the correctness of the code it produces, so everything requires careful review. Sometimes it spits out very broken code on non trivial tasks.

I’m still figuring out if/how it can make me more productive. First impression is it’s more a drain on productivity than not.

I have found it does a ok job of writing simple bash utility scripts.

Stuff like "I need a bash script that saves my current git branch into a temp file, then another script to create a new git branch based off the value in the file"

>> It's just not that good beyond basic tasks.

A ton of dev work is basic tasks, esp writing unit tests.

It’s not even good at writing unit tests. It’s good at writing bad unit tests but that’s not the same thing.

Have you tried o1-pro or o1-2024-12-17?

Actually writing tests often requires more contextual knowledge than writing code itself.

I get you hate writing unit tests (we all do), but in reality it's a more technically difficult and intricate problem than writing business logic code itself. Testing is the very last place I'd trust an AI.

The hard part is knowing what to test. Once I do, AIs do a pretty good job at doing most of the typing for me.

writing useful unit tests is not basic at all. it's only basic if it's purpose is to lift the test coverage.

This is unrelated but I just wanted to thank you for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41901622 as it's too late to reply there.

You put your finger on something really interesting there!

probably the last comment i'd have expected an explicit thank you for. but anyway, you're welcome. care to share why it feels so relevant to you?

Once I read your comment I could feel that quality (something uncanny valley about his "empathy") in those videos, which I hadn't picked up on before you pointed it out.

IME the tests these tools write are complete shit and need to be rewritten by hand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com