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If you already knew how to do the thing, then you wouldn't need co-pilot. The whole purpose of this tool is to suggest a way to do the thing, and the biggest va
by simonh 5y ago
If you already knew how to do the thing, then you wouldn't need co-pilot. The whole purpose of this tool is to suggest a way to do the thing, and the biggest value is when you don't know how to do it and need help. In that case, if you can't trust the help what use is it?
As others have pointed out, at last Stack Overflow comes with context, the ability to rate and comment on suggestions, or even have a discussion about an approach. With this you take it or leave it. Saying you should already know what you need to do and what the tradeoffs are and how to evaluate the quality of the suggestion is basically saying this should have no value to you, and any consequences are all your fault if it does.
- emodendroket 5y agoI think there's a pretty wide continuum of "knowing how to do it" and in a lot of cases you have a pretty good idea what's going on by seeing the code, once it is presented. I'd further suggest that a lot of examples the give on the page are just finishing tedious series where the problem is mostly just typing it all out.
- corobo 5y agoI only ever picture myself using it to speed up side projects to be honest. It is a glorified tab complete. A quite glorious one don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. If you're using it to create something you don't know how to do then yeah you're in for a world of disappointment. HN seems to be of the hivemind that random Joe Nocodes will be firing up VSCode and asking it for a custom version of Uber which.. yeah is laughable and honestly seems pretty obvious that that wont work.
- marcosdumay 5y ago> It is a glorified tab complete. Interesting metaphor. Notice how the Bash tab completion is a great tool, that increases people's productivity by a large amount, and receives only complements from anybody you ask. At the same time, the newish Windows cmd tab completion is a great productivity destroyer that gets mostly only criticism and you will find way too many people blaming it for losing data. Do you know what is the difference? The bash tab completion is always correct. If it can't be correct, it gives you as much of a correct answer as it can, and leaves the rest up to you. The cmd tab completion doesn't care at all about being correct, it will always give an answer, no matter what you ask for.
- emodendroket 5y agoLots of people on Unix systems prefer the much more permissive guessing zsh offers.
- marcosdumay 5y agoHum... I can see how people would like zsh. It doesn't just guess at the first tab press, and that extension that displays all the alternatives before looping is nice. It's permissive but it's disastrous interaction is opt-in. If autocomplete on IDEs were that respectful, I'd like them too.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- corobo 5y agoI use zsh as the sibling mentioned to be honest. Giving me options is the best option
- aeorgnoieang 5y agoEven when I _do_ know "how to do the thing", I've learned, thru painful (and repeated) experience, that I can't trust myself! (But I also have no interesting in using Copilot myself, tho maybe I should try it myself now, if only on some toy side project.)