3 ms·
Copilot is way more than scaffolding boilerplate, it catches bugs as you are writing them. For example you expect: x[i] But copilot suggests: x[i+1] …and yo
by zarzavat 4y ago
Copilot is way more than scaffolding boilerplate, it catches bugs as you are writing them.
For example you expect:
x[i]
But copilot suggests:
x[i+1]
…and you think, and you think, and then one of two things happens. Either you satisfy yourself that the answer is indeed x[i], or you accept x[i+1] and sheepishly thank Copilot for catching a bug today.
You could have copilot on in the background and never accept a suggestion, and it’s still a productivity enhancement.
- nathansherburn 4y agoI found during my preview months ago that it would often write bugs that took me longer to correct than if I had written it myself. Has it gotten better? Also in the situation where it suggests x[i+1] and it's wrong, doesn't that annoy you? In both cases I'm sure this is just temporary while LLMs get better. But my experience was they were _just_ a little too annoying last time I used them.
- bananapub 4y ago> Has it gotten better? yes
- markasoftware 4y agoIndeed, it introduces subtle bugs related to indexing pretty often. At one point I had it autocomplete maybe 15 lines of code, and I trusted it because the code was all pretty easy and I had written a descriptive comment, which tends to help out Copilot a lot. However, it introduced a very subtle bug where it used a loop counter `i` where it should have been indexing into an array like `arr[i]`, but it still typechecked and happened not to cause insane errors. Took a lot of time to track down later, and it's a bug I never would have written in myself.