[deleted] t1_j14a51r wrote on December 21, 2022 at 3:49 PM

I use GitHub Copilot constantly.

Producing code that is 30% worse but takes 85% less time to produce is worth it to me.

It also helps you solve bugs faster.. sometimes I legit just write a comment saying "The reason this returns 'Xyz' instead of 'Abc' is because..." and then it finishes it or "The way to make it do XYZ is:".

Oh and don't get me started on tests... for projects where I'm not forced to write tests, but would still significantly benefit from them they are a big game-changer.

They take a tiny fraction of the time, which means that I just bang them out instead of putting them off, and then can catch a ton of bugs before they arise.

Bugs are unavoidable, everyone has a backlog of bugs you burn through, usually people allocate X% of your time to new stuff and X% of your time to fixing broken stuff.

The net value-add of Copilot even after bugs etc. is enormous

And that's only today.... I remember playing with GPT 3 and similar models 2-3 years ago before they could code and they blew my mind at the time...

Seeing where Copilot is today (being able to solve virtually every algorithm problem I throw at it) is bananas... in 18 months this study will be meaningless.

At this point it's like self-driving cars -- they make mistakes every 10 miles or whatever, but humans also make similar mistakes every XXXX miles, so now it's just about closing the gap.

overzealous_dentist t1_j14chak wrote on December 21, 2022 at 4:05 PM

It's been astounding to me, it's like the mid level dev I can order around I've never had. I will probably never go back to writing all the code myself.

[deleted] t1_j14hb26 wrote on December 21, 2022 at 4:36 PM

Yeah it's amazing... being able to guide the process but not having to keep every little thing straight is excellent.

Programming literally feels like a different activity, like I'm kind of riding a higher-level wave of development.

Alberiman t1_j17143l wrote on December 22, 2022 at 3:16 AM

well, shit, so is copilot worth the 10 dollars a month?

[deleted] t1_j172s1v wrote on December 22, 2022 at 3:30 AM

I would personally pay $40 to $50 a month for it, yes.

wheat_beer t1_j14u10v wrote on December 21, 2022 at 5:57 PM

Which language are you using? I'm been trying to use it with C++ and I've found the suggestions are terrible. It will call functions with the wrong number of arguments, return values of the wrong type, or call functions/methods that don't exist.

As a source code completion aid I also find that it suggests too much code. I just want to auto complete this line but instead it will suggest several lines of code that I'd have to delete if all I want is to complete the current line.

[deleted] t1_j14ywv9 wrote on December 21, 2022 at 6:28 PM

Python, Node.js, React, HTML, vanilla JS.

My job is mainly Python back-end, my personal business is the JS stack.

For my job for example I had to write a program to do an exponential back-off retry for a flaky 3rd party API, and it nailed it instantly with just a description of what I wanted.

I definitely believe that it might be good at some languages and bad at others (e.g. I think C++ is used a lot in coding competitions and lowkey wonder if something about that may have lead to degraded quality of code).

I like the multi-line thing, tbh I wish it did it more.

It's definitely not perfect but intuitively I'd say I'm at ~40% faster (even after correcting for bugs etc.).