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Personally I can't see the point of paying for Copilot, I'd rather spend the money on resources to expand my knowledge of the areas I'm working in - if you like

Personally I can't see the point of paying for Copilot, I'd rather spend the money on resources to expand my knowledge of the areas I'm working in - if you like I'm training my own neural net to help with coding :)

bastardoperator 4y ago
Copilot isn't designed for people that aren't knowledgeable, it's designed for people that are knowledgeable but want to write code faster. When it comes to boilerplate or unit testing, I've found copilot to be invaluable given the price. From my limited perspective if I can save 15 minutes a month with copilot, the tool has paid for itself.
- morelisp 4y ago
  Nobody truly knowledgeable would dare to suggest we should write code faster.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Spot on! If you find yourself writing the same boilerplate multiple times there's a problem in your language or tooling or the abstractions you are using.
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      I rather write things twice instead of wasting time on a cheesy abstraction that no one will enjoy reading later on. When its 3 times, I can start to think about it but it's not always worth it.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    You're missing the obvious point, not writing code is faster than writing code. Should you default to every tab complete copilot suggests? Never. Does copilot suggest meaningful completions? Yes it does, and it's pretty good at it. No one said you should write code faster, that's just the side effect.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      > You're missing the obvious point, not writing code is faster than writing code. No, if you think this is a some reductive refutation of my position, I think you're missing the obvious point.
- shagie 4y ago
  > From my limited perspective if I can save 15 minutes a month with copilot, the tool has paid for itself. The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code. For an experienced programmer, even one unfamiliar with the language I believe that its time costs will be more than writing the code themselves after anything beyond the first pass is taken into consideration. For the inexperienced programmer, this can significantly hinder the progress of learning how to program well and while it may save 15 minutes a month, if it delays onboarding or software development skill accusation by a month or two then it is by far a net negative. Yes, it can write boilerplate code quickly - but I've found that using the IDE that I do (Jetbrains family) between live code templates and macros and current language structures, I haven't needed to write boilerplate code in a while. Additionally, what boilerplate-ish code I have written, tends to be only on the first pass through the code. The updating and maintaining and bug fixes for an existing code base, I haven't seen Copilot or other tools able to integrate into an a large project correctly. If you're doing rapid prototyping... maybe it would be more useful, but writing new code all the time is a small fraction of what most developers do.
  - culi 4y ago
    > The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code. Have you actually used it? It's really easy to avoid any multi-line suggestions. In the past year+ of using it I've run into an issue that was due to generated code twice. Maybe a total of 30 minutes debugging? Compare that to the fact that it's probably saved me a couple hours of typing. And that's not even counting the "ugh what's the name of this again, lemme look it up" stuff which imo is where it really shines. That probably triples how much time its saved me
- JadoJodo 4y ago
  I think a good corollary here are the intellisense functions of an IDE (e.g., JetBrains, NetBeans, etc.): With an IDE, I know that when it auto-generates class methods/properties or auto-completes a method chain (i.e., boilerplate), it will pop out the same thing every time. With something like CoPilot, it's a mystery bag whose result changes based on what you put into it. I am all for saving time, but we can't pretend these are the same thing. I won't try to speak for GP, but if they're anything like me, the goal is to make the things _I know I want to write_ faster (not bring in random code and hope it works). CoPilot seems like a faster Stack Overflow, but people seem to be treating it like intellisense.

bastardoperator 4y ago

Copilot isn't designed for people that aren't knowledgeable, it's designed for people that are knowledgeable but want to write code faster. When it comes to boilerplate or unit testing, I've found copilot to be invaluable given the price. From my limited perspective if I can save 15 minutes a month with copilot, the tool has paid for itself.

morelisp 4y ago
Nobody truly knowledgeable would dare to suggest we should write code faster.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Spot on! If you find yourself writing the same boilerplate multiple times there's a problem in your language or tooling or the abstractions you are using.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    I rather write things twice instead of wasting time on a cheesy abstraction that no one will enjoy reading later on. When its 3 times, I can start to think about it but it's not always worth it.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  You're missing the obvious point, not writing code is faster than writing code. Should you default to every tab complete copilot suggests? Never. Does copilot suggest meaningful completions? Yes it does, and it's pretty good at it. No one said you should write code faster, that's just the side effect.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    > You're missing the obvious point, not writing code is faster than writing code. No, if you think this is a some reductive refutation of my position, I think you're missing the obvious point.
shagie 4y ago
> From my limited perspective if I can save 15 minutes a month with copilot, the tool has paid for itself. The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code. For an experienced programmer, even one unfamiliar with the language I believe that its time costs will be more than writing the code themselves after anything beyond the first pass is taken into consideration. For the inexperienced programmer, this can significantly hinder the progress of learning how to program well and while it may save 15 minutes a month, if it delays onboarding or software development skill accusation by a month or two then it is by far a net negative. Yes, it can write boilerplate code quickly - but I've found that using the IDE that I do (Jetbrains family) between live code templates and macros and current language structures, I haven't needed to write boilerplate code in a while. Additionally, what boilerplate-ish code I have written, tends to be only on the first pass through the code. The updating and maintaining and bug fixes for an existing code base, I haven't seen Copilot or other tools able to integrate into an a large project correctly. If you're doing rapid prototyping... maybe it would be more useful, but writing new code all the time is a small fraction of what most developers do.
- culi 4y ago
  > The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code. Have you actually used it? It's really easy to avoid any multi-line suggestions. In the past year+ of using it I've run into an issue that was due to generated code twice. Maybe a total of 30 minutes debugging? Compare that to the fact that it's probably saved me a couple hours of typing. And that's not even counting the "ugh what's the name of this again, lemme look it up" stuff which imo is where it really shines. That probably triples how much time its saved me
JadoJodo 4y ago
I think a good corollary here are the intellisense functions of an IDE (e.g., JetBrains, NetBeans, etc.): With an IDE, I know that when it auto-generates class methods/properties or auto-completes a method chain (i.e., boilerplate), it will pop out the same thing every time. With something like CoPilot, it's a mystery bag whose result changes based on what you put into it. I am all for saving time, but we can't pretend these are the same thing. I won't try to speak for GP, but if they're anything like me, the goal is to make the things _I know I want to write_ faster (not bring in random code and hope it works). CoPilot seems like a faster Stack Overflow, but people seem to be treating it like intellisense.