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It is absolutely amazing for writing boilerplate code that is also context aware. It saves me hours of typing. It's hard to explain if you've never tried it bec

It is absolutely amazing for writing boilerplate code that is also context aware. It saves me hours of typing. It's hard to explain if you've never tried it because you're ideologically opposed to it, but stop being close minded and try it out, I promise it's a great tool to assist your programming.

danogentili 4y ago
Good codebases don't need boilerplate to do basic stuff: in this sense, copilot is a patch over the real problem, which can be solved with better frameworks and more code reuse. I tried copilot during the beta, and apart from the obvious legal licensing issues, I simply could not find a valid usecase for any of the codebases I usually work with. At my day job, I spend more time thinking of better ways to do X, rather than writing boilerplate code :)
- netr0ute 4y ago
  What are some examples of code without boilerplate?
- williamcotton 4y ago
  I have found Copilot useful while writing compilers and virtual machines all the way up the chain to CSS grids and media queries. Are you telling me there isn’t a fair bit of boilerplate in bog standard implementations of OP_ADD or in a grid layout with a sidebar and a footer? The irony here is that the level of abstraction necessary to remove all boilerplate means that you’re removing the descriptive nature of the boilerplate and making your code difficult to understand. Boilerplate isn’t necessarily a bad thing but sometimes it can be rather verbose and it is very nice to offload that typing to a tool.
  - williamscales 4y ago
    Whenever I have boilerplate in a codebase I try to make a tool to create it for me. So copilot does seem like an extension of that. I think the thing that weirds me out about copilot is that I can't peer inside it. I guess I like knowing something will always work?
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      If it doesn't work, you don't have to accept its recommendation. You just keep coding.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  I disagree. Some amount of boilerplate is preferred versus abstracting everything. Boilerplate can be frustrating to write, and fiddly boilerplate absolutely should be abstracted, but in general it should makes the flow of logic easier to follow. > At my day job, I spend more time thinking of better ways to do X, rather than writing boilerplate code :) Not that you are suggesting otherwise, and I am being somewhat facetious, but oftentimes boilerplate is preferred to boiling the ocean.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jackson1442 4y ago
    A million times yes. If a codebase is magically adding _all_ of the boilerplate, it's almost always harder to understand what's actually happening.
- pleas4nt0ne 4y ago
  At your job the boilerplate was probably written already and you can avoid it. Not all jobs are on mature projects. I get tired of highly subjective anecdotes being used as concrete truths. You are not the center of reality as we don’t know there is one. So good on you for having a job where the boring work was already in place. Look how far you have come on your own leveraging past effort. So proud of you.
- antihero 4y ago
  This way lies hellish amounts of indirection.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  You're completely missing the point of copilot. It speeds up typing by 10% or more in highly organized codebases. Strong codebases synergize with copilot, they don't compete. 10%+ speedup is a huge, obvious win. Anything that increases my productivity is good.
workingon 4y ago
- Nanana909 4y ago
  I was against copilot until I tried it. It’s not always on target, but it’s usually pretty close and the suggestions are good. No, it doesn’t write all of the code for me. But it does rapidly construct even quite complicated if/else statements that I was going to write anyways, just from knowing where I’m typing. Quite a great tool.
  - adammarples 4y ago
    I was just revisiting an api call which it turns out needed pagination. I put a note in the docstring before I began and copilot just... rewrote the function to include pagination. Except for a couple of corrections to the json returned by the api (copilot could only guess), it just worked! I'm amazing by copilot and it frequently writes chunks of my code, especially shell scripts and docker files. A little worried that my job might be on the way out at some point!
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      I prefer to think that I'm learning $x much faster because I don't have to go hunting documentation nearly as often.
    - Nanana909 4y ago
      I love it but it’s nowhere near the level of replacing anything but the lowest skill developers. The actual real skills involved with deciding what problems to solve, architecting and developing complex software would require general AI level AI, and at that point a *lot* of people are going to be out of jobs.
- nindalf 4y ago
  Calling fellow commenters stupid or ignorant isn’t right. Please reconsider.
JeremyNT 4y ago
I am curious about the hours of typing thing. I don't normally need much boilerplate, so I normally just type things. If I do need boilerplate, I yank the boilerplate into a buffer and put it into the file I am working on. Yet I feel like the overall time spent doing this is incredibly slight. I feel like it's possible some time could be shaved off somewhere there, but this all happens very quickly and it's not an area where optimization would improve things much overall. For this to amount to literal hours of typing, I think I would need to be either very much slower at typing, writing an immensely large volume of boilerplate, or working over many many years. Typing stuff is essentially never a bottleneck for me.

danogentili 4y ago

Good codebases don't need boilerplate to do basic stuff: in this sense, copilot is a patch over the real problem, which can be solved with better frameworks and more code reuse. I tried copilot during the beta, and apart from the obvious legal licensing issues, I simply could not find a valid usecase for any of the codebases I usually work with. At my day job, I spend more time thinking of better ways to do X, rather than writing boilerplate code :)

netr0ute 4y ago
What are some examples of code without boilerplate?
williamcotton 4y ago
I have found Copilot useful while writing compilers and virtual machines all the way up the chain to CSS grids and media queries. Are you telling me there isn’t a fair bit of boilerplate in bog standard implementations of OP_ADD or in a grid layout with a sidebar and a footer? The irony here is that the level of abstraction necessary to remove all boilerplate means that you’re removing the descriptive nature of the boilerplate and making your code difficult to understand. Boilerplate isn’t necessarily a bad thing but sometimes it can be rather verbose and it is very nice to offload that typing to a tool.
- williamscales 4y ago
  Whenever I have boilerplate in a codebase I try to make a tool to create it for me. So copilot does seem like an extension of that. I think the thing that weirds me out about copilot is that I can't peer inside it. I guess I like knowing something will always work?
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    If it doesn't work, you don't have to accept its recommendation. You just keep coding.
xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
I disagree. Some amount of boilerplate is preferred versus abstracting everything. Boilerplate can be frustrating to write, and fiddly boilerplate absolutely should be abstracted, but in general it should makes the flow of logic easier to follow. > At my day job, I spend more time thinking of better ways to do X, rather than writing boilerplate code :) Not that you are suggesting otherwise, and I am being somewhat facetious, but oftentimes boilerplate is preferred to boiling the ocean.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jackson1442 4y ago
  A million times yes. If a codebase is magically adding _all_ of the boilerplate, it's almost always harder to understand what's actually happening.
pleas4nt0ne 4y ago
At your job the boilerplate was probably written already and you can avoid it. Not all jobs are on mature projects. I get tired of highly subjective anecdotes being used as concrete truths. You are not the center of reality as we don’t know there is one. So good on you for having a job where the boring work was already in place. Look how far you have come on your own leveraging past effort. So proud of you.
antihero 4y ago
This way lies hellish amounts of indirection.
soulofmischief 4y ago
You're completely missing the point of copilot. It speeds up typing by 10% or more in highly organized codebases. Strong codebases synergize with copilot, they don't compete. 10%+ speedup is a huge, obvious win. Anything that increases my productivity is good.

workingon 4y ago

Nanana909 4y ago
I was against copilot until I tried it. It’s not always on target, but it’s usually pretty close and the suggestions are good. No, it doesn’t write all of the code for me. But it does rapidly construct even quite complicated if/else statements that I was going to write anyways, just from knowing where I’m typing. Quite a great tool.
- adammarples 4y ago
  I was just revisiting an api call which it turns out needed pagination. I put a note in the docstring before I began and copilot just... rewrote the function to include pagination. Except for a couple of corrections to the json returned by the api (copilot could only guess), it just worked! I'm amazing by copilot and it frequently writes chunks of my code, especially shell scripts and docker files. A little worried that my job might be on the way out at some point!
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    I prefer to think that I'm learning $x much faster because I don't have to go hunting documentation nearly as often.
  - Nanana909 4y ago
    I love it but it’s nowhere near the level of replacing anything but the lowest skill developers. The actual real skills involved with deciding what problems to solve, architecting and developing complex software would require general AI level AI, and at that point a *lot* of people are going to be out of jobs.
nindalf 4y ago
Calling fellow commenters stupid or ignorant isn’t right. Please reconsider.

JeremyNT 4y ago

I am curious about the hours of typing thing. I don't normally need much boilerplate, so I normally just type things. If I do need boilerplate, I yank the boilerplate into a buffer and put it into the file I am working on. Yet I feel like the overall time spent doing this is incredibly slight. I feel like it's possible some time could be shaved off somewhere there, but this all happens very quickly and it's not an area where optimization would improve things much overall. For this to amount to literal hours of typing, I think I would need to be either very much slower at typing, writing an immensely large volume of boilerplate, or working over many many years. Typing stuff is essentially never a bottleneck for me.