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Copilot is a verbose savant heavily afflicted by Dunning-Kruger... but an extremely useful one. Do you remember how Googling was a skill? Learning to Copilot,
by fny 4y ago
Copilot is a verbose savant heavily afflicted by Dunning-Kruger... but an extremely useful one.
Do you remember how Googling was a skill?
Learning to Copilot, Stable Diffusion, GPT are exactly the same thing.
Copilot's full power (at this time) does not exist in generating reams of code. Here are a few things it excels at:
- Snippet search: Say you can't remember how to see if a variable is empty in a bash conditional, ask.
- Template population: Say I have a series of functions I need to write in a language without good meta programming facilities. I can write a list of the (all combinations), write one example, the ai will pick up on the rest.
- Rust: If I get trapped because of some weird borrow checker issue with `fn doit(...`, I begin rewriting the function `fn fixed_doit(...`, and 9/10 times Copilot fixes the bug.
- viraptor 4y ago> I begin rewriting the function `fn fixed_doit(...`, and 9/10 times Copilot fixes the bug. This blew my mind. Thank you for sharing, I never thought of approaching it that way.
- PontifexMinimus 4y ago> Say I have a series of functions I need to write in a language without good meta programming facilities. I can write a list of the (all combinations), write one example, the ai will pick up on the rest. If you are coding in a language that requires tons of boilerplate, the solution is to use a different language that require less boilerplate.
- richk449 4y agoWhy isn’t “have an AI write the boilerplate” an equally good solution? Asking earnestly.
- PontifexMinimus 4y agoBecause you still have the boilerplate. When code has lots of boilerplate it's harder to find the important stuff.
- ivalm 4y agoNot everyone choses the language they code in and boilerplate amount is not the only consideration when selecting a language...