3 ms·

when i first used copilot i thought it wasn’t very useful. But as i’ve used it more i realize it helps a lot. A surprising amount of code is just boilerplate, e

when i first used copilot i thought it wasn’t very useful. But as i’ve used it more i realize it helps a lot. A surprising amount of code is just boilerplate, e.g. a single if-statement is 3 lines but you’re not going to abstract all your if statements, so you write similar if statements over and over again. It especially helps when i’m programming in a language or library i’m not familiar with, because i don’t quite understand the syntax but copilot does.

IanCal 5y ago
I've found the same. Particularly coming in nicely when I add some kind of parsing in and out of a data structure and it auto fills in all the parameters.
jimmaswell 5y ago
I've been finding it amazingly useful from the outset. It's like it reads my mind generating whole correct functions just from a small comment or example, and it's great at extrapolating repetitive increments/transformations. Write a small comment telling it what you want and it's uncanny what it can spit out.
- unbanned 5y ago
  What exactly are you asking it to do?
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I've had the opposite experience so far, though I've admittedly not used it that much yet. I've got this Python fiscal date library at work, and I wanted to add a something like a `strtftime()` method which would replace $P with the period, $Q with the quarter, etc, but treat $$ as a literal $ (so that e.g. $$P would result in $P). Simple enough, but I thought it would be cute to see if I could get copilot to do it for me. I spent at least a half hour trying to figure out what kind of prompt would result in a correct implementation. No matter how explicit I was it kept giving answers that failed to handle the $$P -> $P conversion correctly. Finally I was able to get it to spit out an answer that at least had the right idea, but it had an unrelated bug in it. The package also has some functions to determine holidays, and I was impressed that Copilot could generate code for new holidays that mimicked my style, docstrings and all. But disappointingly it failed for any slightly obscure holiday (say, Eid al-Fitr), generating code that was just wrong, even when I hinted that it would have to use an alternative calendar library. It kept trying to use the Hebrew calendar for Islamic and Hindu holidays, I guess because I'd already imported it for Hanukkah. It also seems useless for Spark ETL, having to be handheld to a degree that it would be easier just to write the code myself. My first attempt to play around with Copilot was to see if it could do a salted join (no luck, unless by "salted join" I meant something like "a join on a column called salt"). I'll keep playing around with it, maybe it's just a "me" problem.
  - sharperguy 5y ago
    I noticed that for very specific things like this, it doesn't always work. However, if you had several functions which needed slight variations of the same thing, then writing the first one manually would allow it to automatically guess the rest of them.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    Maybe it's better at Java and Javascript than Python at the moment. Have you tried it on test cases at all?
pydry 5y ago
This is exactly what concerns me about copilot. Reducing the barrier to writing boilerplate will make sure a lot more of it is written. Copilot will probably have a tendency to balloon SLOC as its autocomplete means adding an extra 35 lines is just a click away. Of course not everybody will use it this way and responsibly used it'll be fine yadda yadda yadda but it is going to shape developer behavior - most especially for developers being a bit lazy (which is all of us sometimes and some of us all of the time). Also, SLOC implies productivity, which will put a damper on people's reluctance to just add those 35 lines. Somebody is going to have to dig through all of that code one day looking for obscure bugs. I suspect difficulty in finding bugs is correlated to the square of SLOC (as opposed to writing which is probably closer to linear) so on the other end of the code lifecycle copilot could end up being a masssive false economy. This could be mitigated by extra vigilant code reviews but I've noticed that vigiliance in code reviews is inversely correlated to PR length (theres a cartoon about this somewhere), so I'm slightly pessimistic it'll stem the boilerplate tsunami.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I'm also worried about needing to review boilerplate. I find that it's tedious to go through and make mistakes harder to spot. As said by Yaron Minsky: > "You can’t pay people enough to carefully debug boring boilerplate code. I’ve tried."

IanCal 5y ago

I've found the same. Particularly coming in nicely when I add some kind of parsing in and out of a data structure and it auto fills in all the parameters.

jimmaswell 5y ago

I've been finding it amazingly useful from the outset. It's like it reads my mind generating whole correct functions just from a small comment or example, and it's great at extrapolating repetitive increments/transformations. Write a small comment telling it what you want and it's uncanny what it can spit out.

unbanned 5y ago
What exactly are you asking it to do?
mrtranscendence 5y ago
I've had the opposite experience so far, though I've admittedly not used it that much yet. I've got this Python fiscal date library at work, and I wanted to add a something like a `strtftime()` method which would replace $P with the period, $Q with the quarter, etc, but treat $$ as a literal $ (so that e.g. $$P would result in $P). Simple enough, but I thought it would be cute to see if I could get copilot to do it for me. I spent at least a half hour trying to figure out what kind of prompt would result in a correct implementation. No matter how explicit I was it kept giving answers that failed to handle the $$P -> $P conversion correctly. Finally I was able to get it to spit out an answer that at least had the right idea, but it had an unrelated bug in it. The package also has some functions to determine holidays, and I was impressed that Copilot could generate code for new holidays that mimicked my style, docstrings and all. But disappointingly it failed for any slightly obscure holiday (say, Eid al-Fitr), generating code that was just wrong, even when I hinted that it would have to use an alternative calendar library. It kept trying to use the Hebrew calendar for Islamic and Hindu holidays, I guess because I'd already imported it for Hanukkah. It also seems useless for Spark ETL, having to be handheld to a degree that it would be easier just to write the code myself. My first attempt to play around with Copilot was to see if it could do a salted join (no luck, unless by "salted join" I meant something like "a join on a column called salt"). I'll keep playing around with it, maybe it's just a "me" problem.
- sharperguy 5y ago
  I noticed that for very specific things like this, it doesn't always work. However, if you had several functions which needed slight variations of the same thing, then writing the first one manually would allow it to automatically guess the rest of them.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Maybe it's better at Java and Javascript than Python at the moment. Have you tried it on test cases at all?

pydry 5y ago

This is exactly what concerns me about copilot. Reducing the barrier to writing boilerplate will make sure a lot more of it is written. Copilot will probably have a tendency to balloon SLOC as its autocomplete means adding an extra 35 lines is just a click away. Of course not everybody will use it this way and responsibly used it'll be fine yadda yadda yadda but it is going to shape developer behavior - most especially for developers being a bit lazy (which is all of us sometimes and some of us all of the time). Also, SLOC implies productivity, which will put a damper on people's reluctance to just add those 35 lines. Somebody is going to have to dig through all of that code one day looking for obscure bugs. I suspect difficulty in finding bugs is correlated to the square of SLOC (as opposed to writing which is probably closer to linear) so on the other end of the code lifecycle copilot could end up being a masssive false economy. This could be mitigated by extra vigilant code reviews but I've noticed that vigiliance in code reviews is inversely correlated to PR length (theres a cartoon about this somewhere), so I'm slightly pessimistic it'll stem the boilerplate tsunami.

Zababa 5y ago
I'm also worried about needing to review boilerplate. I find that it's tedious to go through and make mistakes harder to spot. As said by Yaron Minsky: > "You can’t pay people enough to carefully debug boring boilerplate code. I’ve tried."