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I'm very curious to see some examples where Copilot autocompleted something truly useful and saved you time - and that also disproves my hypothesis that you are

• mistercow 4y ago
  I can give you an example of an entire (well, I still consider it alpha) library I wrote several months ago, using Copilot: https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate This is an implementation of a 1991 paper on polygon triangulation into Go. So the deepest thinking about how to solve the problem was obviously already done for me, but there were a number of edge cases that I had to invent my own solutions to, and the translation itself involved keeping a lot of context in my head. I can’t tell you in precise detail what Copilot did, and what I wrote by hand. I wasn’t taking notes or recording my screen. But there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of blocks in there where I forgot to comment anything, because my entire process for this was “type what I want to do in English, and see if Copilot will generate the next snippet, or something close”. I didn’t do this out of bloodyminded dedication to the AI cause, but because it continued to be an extremely effective way to get the code written quickly. I can give a few specifics: - My linear algebra is rusty, and Copilot was extremely helpful here. I would often just type the basic thing I was trying to do in pretty vague linear algebra terms, and it would generate the formula. - I wrote a lot of tests like this https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate/blob/main/internal/split_monotones_test.go https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate/blob/main/internal/sp.... This is a minor thing, but those aren’t copy-pasted. Instead, I would write the first test, and for the most part, I could just type something like `func TestConvertToMonotones_SquareWithHole`, and it would figure out how to adapt the previous test automatically. - It generates exactly the error strings I want based on context an enormous percentage of the time. I want to stress that I’m just giving a few examples of things that I specifically remember because I talked about them at the time, not characterizing the majority of the experience of using Copilot. The majority of the experience of using Copilot is that you write comments, and then the things you were about to type appear on the screen before you have to type them.
  • ilikehurdles 4y ago
    When I find myself writing comments of this style I see, I usually ask myself if this thing would be better extracted into a function. These comments are primarily stating the obvious. If I find myself writing a 200 line function with nested or repetitive loops I expect to hear from colleagues about how I should refactor it. I feel that the solution to writing boring, repetitive boilerplate shouldn’t be to automate writing more of it, but to reduce or remove it entirely. Seeing things like this just reinforces my preconception that Copilot acts in low quality code environments to produce fittingly low quality code, or with languages like Java where the language is married to boilerplate.
    • mistercow 4y ago
      This reply feels pretty bad-faith. But you know, feel free to open a PR if you have something concrete you feel can be improved.