I use copilot to do things that I would’ve hired people for. I create tests and put comments in my code and copilot comes up with pages of dreary boring shit that would take me 0 pleasure or brainpower but would take a lot of work to just go through.
A real good example is mapping objects: let’s say you have a deep nested object from an ERP and you need to map that to another system(s). This is horrible work and copilot just generates almost everything for it if it knows the input and output objects; it ‘knows’ that address = street and if it is not it will deduct it from the models or comments or both; if there is a separate house number and stuff, it’ll generate code to translate that. I used to hire people for that; no longer; it just pops, I run the tests and fix some thing here and there.
I have to be honest I've not used it but it truly sounds incredible that it can do things as well as you say.
So you write tests and copilot generates code you shove into production with little overhead ?
Do you read the code thoroughly (kind of negating having it generated for you?), or just have blind faith in it because tests are green and just YOLO it into production ?
I'd feel pretty uneasy deploying code that:
* I, or a trusted peer has not written.
* Hasn't been reviewed by my peers.
* Code I, or my peers don't understand fairly well.
That's not to say I think me or my colleagues write code that doesn't have problems, but I like to think we at least understand the code we work with and I believe this has benefits beyond just getting stuff done quickly and cheaply.
In other words, I have no problem using code generated by co-pilot, but I'd feel the need to read and review it quite thoroughly and then I sort of feel that negates the purpose, and it also means it pulls my back into the role of doing work I'd hire someone else to do.
But I do review and test it and it is mostly 80% ok. It even learns your style of coding. Like said; it works best for stuff that is heavy on code but low on thought.
Do you enjoy working like this? Having CP generate things correctly 80% of the time and then having to scrutinize whatever is generated and look for problems?
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