I don't use the autocomplete option of Copilot as that's too annoying and distracting, BUT I do use the chat from time to time instead of googling for stuff. Once I'm done I hide the panel in Rider/VSCode/Zed/Visual Studio etc. until I need it again. As I've written in comments before, I think using Copilot is good when you're working on something new or you know exactly what you want, but perhaps maybe the approach you've used before can be improved (or you think it can be improved). In those cases Copilot can be a powerful exploratory tool.
The default autocomplete behavior of Copilot is such noisy, hot garbage.
The sidebar is a useful tool sometimes, akin to pair programming with a junior programmer who's terminally online and brimming with random ideas.
Where I think they've really hit a sweet spot is with the new Inline Chat feature, I can select a chunk of code, hit CTRL + I, and tell Copilot I want to refactor this code to do XYZ. Suppose you need to extend a function with an extra parameter, the logic to handle that, and some appropriate error handling. You can select your function, type that in one sentence, and Copilot's inline chat will mostly just get it right and propose an amended function for you to accept. This has been a big time saver for me lately.
Notably Copilot is NOT doing much, if any, thinking for me. You really don't have to push it far into unknown territory to turn it into a gibbering lunatic. So in the sidebar it's essentially doing a (mostly) better version of a web search than Google. In CTRL + I it's kind of a macro on steroids. But these are both great tools and very easily justify the subscription fee.
> So much of it, too much! You might want to use another LLM to understand the code that you’ve written.
Humans write too much code at times too. The difference is when I tell a developer they need to be more concise it’s a learning process and takes days per feature to complete and months for the developer to improve significantly. With copilot you can literally just tell it to be more concise and it will do it, straight away, no fussy behavior, no denial, no blaming coworkers, no need to adjust, it just does it.
The author would know this if they tried using the tools. But this is just a grump being grumpy like people still claiming that IDE’s cause brain rot and that assembly is the only “true way to program”.
Copilot is just a tool, but it’s an incredibly performance boosting tool, and it doesn’t really have any significant learning code. People should just adopt it and move on with their lives.
> Humans write too much code at times too. The difference is when I tell a developer they need to be more concise it’s a learning process and takes days per feature to complete and months for the developer to improve significantly. With copilot you can literally just tell it to be more concise and it will do it, straight away, no fussy behavior, no denial, no blaming coworkers, no need to adjust, it just does it.
Where do you think copilot learned all that behavior, exactly? Like it's funny you sit at the tail end of it and claim it's not a learning process, but literally the core of any LLM is learning from other human behavior. It cannot exist without that learning process.
> The author would know this if they tried using the tools. But this is just a grump being grumpy like people still claiming that IDE’s cause brain rot and that assembly is the only “true way to program”. Copilot is just a tool, but it’s an incredibly performance boosting tool, and it doesn’t really have any significant learning code. People should just adopt it and move on with their lives.
No it's not. I've used the various LLM tools, I've had coworkers use the various LLM tools. When you start to tally up the time spent micromanaging, sifting through jank code and tuning it to get what you want the end result is in my opinion more effort for less. The idea that people should just 'adopt it and move on' seems like you can't actually convince people of its value proposition.
If you want to just shit out some code that barely works for a basic SPA then you can maybe work faster. But you're paying the cost in a larger amount of technical debt that will hit you later [1], with no one actually knowing what the codebase is doing.
I stopped using GitHub copilot. I really didn’t like my train of thought being interrupted.
I have heard more comprehensive “leave the thinking to us” tools like cursor give better results.
Personally I think if your tools or projects are so dull that you require an AI to use them, perhaps you need sharper tools or more interesting projects.
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