In terms of difficulty, writing code is maybe on average a two out of ten.
On average, maintaining code you wrote recently is probably a three out of ten in terms of difficulty, and maintaining code somebody else wrote or code from a long time ago probably rises to around a five out of ten.
Debugging misbehaving code is probably a seven out of ten or higher.
GitHub Copilot is optimising the part of the process that was already the easiest, and makes the other parts harder because it moves you from the “I wrote this” path to the “somebody else wrote this” path.
Even during the initial write, it changes the writing process from programming (which is easy) to understanding somebody else’s code to ensure that it’s right before accepting the suggestion (which is much less easy). I just don’t understand how this is a net time/energy savings?
It's night and day if you have it enabled or not. There's just no question about the value proposition once you start using it.
I mean, you can tell comments here from people who have actually been using it, and people who have not tried it.
And yet apart from making this very inaccurate comparison you haven't made any argument for why such a thing as Copilot would be useful to anyone. How do you personally find Copilot useful? And why do you think someone whose job demands more than copy/pasting boilerplate code should try Copilot? The onus is on you to convince the skeptics.
Is it?
Look, I don't care at all if you use copilot; you can use notepad to write your code if that floats your boat; do whatever you want.
What the parent post said is: Copilot is useful; it helps you write code with autocomplete suggestions.
If you think that you don't get productivity gains from an IDE or you're in the 'no IDE makes you more hardcore and better programmer so never program with an IDE' camp, we just have to agree to disagree.
So, I have no interest in that conversation.
...
However, there is a more interesting conversation here we can have:
Given that you have an IDE and use autocomplete:
1) Does Copilot give suggestions are meaningfully useful?
Yes. I honestly can't give you a better answer than that. Yes, it does, it's quite good.
If you don't believe me, try it.
2) Is it better than regular autocomplete?
Look, forget the 'Look, I typed 'process user form and display on UI' and it autocompleted a whole application for me!!' hype.
That's stupid and that's not how it works.
It's an autocomplete. It can autocomplete large chunks, but they're generally rubbish. ...but it does two very interesting things:
- It suggests things that are contextually correct.
For example: even though its rubbish at C++ syntax, it generates valid UPROPERTY and UFUNCTION blocks for unreal code. If I write a `for (y = 0;...` on an array, it generates the associated `for (x = 0;...` when I'm iterating over a 2D array.
If I have a function which takes a pointer like:
> UFvContainerWidget* UFvContainerWidget::ForEquipmentDef(UFvEquipmentDef* EquipmentDef, bool& IsValid)
I press enter and it pops up:
if (!EquipmentDef) {
IsValid = false; <--- WTF!
return nullptr;
}
Sometimes the suggestions don't make sense, and the larger the chunk, the less sense they make.
...but the suggestions that do make sense, make you regret not having it when you don't have it.
Like... regular autocomplete.
It's just a tool; it works very well at small scale autocomplete tasks.
- It can suggest comments from code as well as code from comments.
Literally, I can go above a function and type "/*" and it'll suggest a comment.
These don't always make sense, but often they're pretty close, and it saves me 20 seconds typing.
You have to carefully read these comments, because they tend to get random crap in them, but once again, for short comments its not bad.
Again... it's surprisingly good. Not perfect. It doesn't write your comments for you... but, it's easy to get into the habit of getting it to autocomplete "Returns null if the object is invalid" for you instead of typing it out.
3) Should I use it?
Look, I literally do not care if you do or don't.
What I take issue with is people saying 'it has no value'.
Does autocomplete have a value? Then this has a value.
Saying it has no value is just trolling.
Is it worth the cost?
Well, it's free to use right now.... so, well, you can't beat free right? :)
Longer term, would I pay for it?
Probably (** Personal opinion only: Maybe... you should try it and decide for yourself?)
From copilot "additional telemetry"
> If you use GitHub Copilot, the GitHub Copilot extension/plugin will collect usage information about events generated by interacting with the integrated development environment (IDE). These events include GitHub Copilot performance, features used, and suggestions accepted, modified and accepted, or dismissed. This information may include personal data, including your User Personal Information
So, not really free is it?
> Look, I literally do not care if you do or don't.
> What I take issue with is people saying 'it has no value'.