My Copilot trial is expiring today, and I'm still wondering whether I should continue it.
It's ... ok. Most of the time it saves me some keystrokes. I needed a Levenshtein Distance function the other day and it was decent - only required a small tidy up. Only a few times have I been wondering what it's thinking. Much better than the early days with ChatGPT.
One annoying thing since installing it is when dealing with long method signatures, intellisense is no longer telling me which parameter I'm up to. Probably something in the configuration somewhere for that.
I was listening to a PodCast about the future of Copilot, and I think it's going to get far more interesting (useful) in the future.
They recognize that coding is a small minority of what we do. I know some people say they spend 40% coding, but for myself it's probably closer to 10%.
What they're working towards (i.e. are currently dog-fooding themselves), is being able to give it requirements. It will look through the code-base, and create "slots" with suggestions on how it would implement it, which you can accept/reject or change.
I'm currently working on a legacy ERP system with many years worth of "bandaids" (most of which were well before my time). And understanding the code-base takes more time than making the change itself. So this would actually move the needle on overall productivity.
Nathan.
Copilot definitely isn't a magic 'do my
job' button, and likely won't ever be, or that job would simply no
longer exist.
It does take care of a lot of the busy
work though, and isn't just for Intellisense like code suggestions
- you can happily converse with it in the chat window about high
level topics and refine the context incrementally, generate
boilerplate json/bicep/scripts from a few lines of prose, or
highlight a non-trivial block of existing code and ask it to
explain/summarise or find issues.
While it's not HAL 9000 I reckon it
comes pretty close, and quite importantly hasn't tried to murder
me (yet).
Before my trial I was skeptical about
how much value it would provide, but was pleasantly surprised
enough to hand over 15 dollarydoos each month. 😎
cheers,
Tony
On 30/07/2024 08:06, Greg Keogh via
ozdotnet wrote:
When I first saw the movie
2001: A Space
Odyssey in 1969 I was fascinated by HAL (I was clearly
destined to work in IT!), and now 55 years later I'd like to be
able to sit down with HAL and explain some complex business
requirement to him, converse like professionals and weigh-up the
pros and cons of different platforms and languages based upon
his world of experience and get him to code like a 1000x
developer and generate a complete working skeleton of the
required product. When will I see that? I'm a bit disappointed
so far.
Oh well, back to coding with my Copilot buddy.
Greg K
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