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. On Tue, 30 Jul 2024 at 13:57, Tony McGee via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
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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