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> Using GitHub Copilot feels like I’m pairing with a seasoned developer It feels like pairing with an extremely eager junior developer who constantly makes hor
by light_hue_1 4y ago
> Using GitHub Copilot feels like I’m pairing with a seasoned developer
It feels like pairing with an extremely eager junior developer who constantly makes horrific and subtle mistakes.
It's great at repeating the same pattern or generating boilerplate. But it has no idea how your code works at any scale. So it easily violates invariants, makes up fields, gets confused about variables, etc. Off by one errors are just an endless mess.
As a snippets library, it's awesome. As a pair programming buddy, it's like programming with a psychopath that wants your code to fail at all costs.
- anigbrowl 4y agoAs a pair programming buddy, it's like programming with a psychopath that wants your code to fail at all costs. A good summary though I have to say I find this sort of endearing. When I'm trying something completely new the most frustrating part is not knowing what my options are, eg due to unfamiliarity with a library's classes or (thinking back to when I was first learning a language) how nested data structures like lists of dicts worked, so that I couldn't guess how I was supposed to address them. While a code assistant usually crashes in more or less Wile E Coyote ways, watching it launch confidently is often helpful. It's sometimes easier to fix something that doesn't work than to know the first thing to try.