How does Copilot help you code faster? I've watched some coworkers use it but it appears to be more distraction than help, as they accept CoPilot suggestions and then have to rewrite it all anyway.
You're completely missing the point of copilot. It speeds up typing by 10% or more in highly organized codebases. Strong codebases synergize with copilot, they don't compete.
10%+ speedup is a huge, obvious win. Anything that increases my productivity is good.
I can definitely write better code with copilot due to faster iterations and much better code coverage. I believe we are a paper away before this can start improve of existing code itcluding the code of itself.
Yeah Copilot has been pretty useless for me. I'm not really sure what this is indicative of. Maybe my coding style is not that common? I'm unsure. Mostly used it with Go and configuration files.
For me copilot is mildly helpful 10% of the time when coding, but writing code take up such a small amount of my time that it doesn't make a measurable difference overall.
I agree with you on Copilot’s clunky integration in VS Code, but I never really thought of it as slow, maybe because I have no other code assistant AI to compare it to. Are others faster?
Maybe don't use it for huge chunks > 10 lines? The point of copilot to me is avg typing speed is 40wpm and read is 250wpm. A 5.25x speedup considering even after I type code I still read it over. There will be errors in copilots code sometimes so even if you said its only 50% accurate thats still a 2.5x speedup on the boilerplate it's used for.
Do you use it for writing tests? It’s really helpful there. And in my experience it’s bad with non-standard algo heavy code. What language and domain are you using it for?
IMO it’s a nice 10-15% speed boost for web dev. And much more than that for unit tests. I expect you can measure a massive jump in test coverage by engineers that use copilot because it takes work that most people hate and speeds it up significantly.
May I ask if you have tried using Copilot? Because this sounds exactly like the kind of response I would have had half a year ago. It makes many mistakes and can by no means write code by itself. But that doesn't change the fact that it's orders of magnitude better at it than I thought possible.
Maybe I'm one of the hangers on who refuses to use it, not out of IP concerns but because I'd hate for it to cause my skills to rot or for me to become too dependent on it. I do sometimes have GPT-4 write code for me, but somehow I feel like it's different reading and reviewing its code than to punch a few characters into my IDE and have code magically appear.
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