I fixed 109 years of open issues with 5 hours of guiding GitHub Copilot

A while ago GitHub informed me that they would sponsor Copilot for our open source project AlaSQL (a JavaScript SQL database for the client).

I had never really thought much about it. I actively try to ignore the industry push to shove AI into everything. But a few days ago, I somewhat accidentally assigned Copilot to an issue. To my surprise, a nice PR was created shortly after with a spot-on solution and a test file. A one-shot fix!

Impressed, I went to our oldest issue (11 years old). Click. Assigned. Let's see.

After 48 minutes, I was asked to review the PR. It had one-shot fixed an age-old problem with `ORDER BY` across 3+ `UNION` clauses. This involved updating the grammar for the lexical analysis and inserting the right controls to ensure the ordering executed at the right time. Nice.

I immediately went slightly rampant on old (and well-described) issues, and after a combined engagement of 5 hours across 2 days "herding" the AI, the next version of the AlaSQL library was released - fixing issues with a combined age of 109 years, 1 month, and 28 days.

Not bad for guiding an agent for a few hours.