But I don't want to make the claim lightly, so I did an experiment.
I signed up for copilot pro, and have been using their 'edit' feature. This is more than just their auto complete.
I set myself a goal to create a playable web game of classic frogger.
It took 4 hours with copilot "edit" and my full attention.
I didn't write a single line of code, but I did ask it to refactor and gave it a project description.
I suspect this would have taken me 4 days full time to get to this level.
Try it out:
Question, how familiar are you with the used technologies? My experience on where Ai have been useful so far is things I don't have a good understanding on but, when I do, its a different ball game, mostly because coding it directly seems faster since I know exactly the behaviour I am looking for and I am not having to deal with unintended consequences.
I see it as the Alice cat thing, when you don't know where you going, any road will take you there. So its been great for exploratory work and prototyping.
I tried doing a warcraft 1 clone, but that felt too complex for the model being used (openai 4.1). That model was just the default setting in copilot.
I dug a little deeper this morning, and it turns out I hadn't actually enabled my copilot 'pro' mode, which has granted access to some more current or dev focused models. So I'll take them for a spin to see what they're capable of.
My goal here is to roughly get a sense for when a task is too complex for an "agent" to handle.
I also want to try adding custom tools to suit certain project needs. For example, Unreal Engine has a python editor interface, so I'd like to have an agent drive the editor to build something. I have my doubts.
Once I have a feeling for what level of complexity can be handled, I'll see if I can manage the tools better using this understanding, by breaking large and complex projects into appropriate chunks of work / complexity.
/endBrainDump