3 ms·
This seems like something obvious, but I didn't really appreciate it until I was actually using copilot day to day. When you're using it on a code base that it
by wokwokwok 4y ago
This seems like something obvious, but I didn't really appreciate it until I was actually using copilot day to day.
When you're using it on a code base that it's familiar with, it'll often suggestion quality of life suggestions that you may not know about.
For example, using unity, did you know
Mathf.RoundToInt
Was a thing?
I didn't, until I was using a normal way of doing it (eg. `(int) Math.Round(v);` and copilot popped this suggestion up.
I had similar experiences using opencv in python.
Maybe the suggestions aren't always perfect, but what it does do, is show you how other people have written code using the same engine/plugin/library you're using; and when you're learning a new API, that's extremely valuable.
The alternative (finding github projects using library X, browsing through the code) lets you do the same thing too, but its much much slower to pickup the same 'tips' about an API that way.
Specifically with regard to "give people a new task they haven't done before in language X with/without copilot", this kind of 'tip' for using an unfamiliar API seems high plausible for getting developers up to speed.
I wish it had support for doing this in a way that was 'favour suggestions like existing code base' to help on-board new developers.
That would be really really useful.