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> Who exactly are copilots for if not beginners? The thing is: in software engineering, you're very often "a beginner" when using new technology or operating o
by xpl 3y ago
> Who exactly are copilots for if not beginners?
The thing is: in software engineering, you're very often "a beginner" when using new technology or operating outside your familiar domain. In fact, you need to learn constantly just to stay in the business.
- wruza 3y agoThis is the essence of my experience with LLMs. I don't need their help to walk my talks. But they help me immensely with skipping phases like "let's climb this curve for 30min to create some config and forget most of what you did before, then load it back and forget what you learned". They broaden your knowledge, not deepen it. It's a vague-memories extension with everything in it.
- d12345m 3y agoThis is an important point. I’m not a beginner per se - I started writing Objective-C and Python more than a decade ago and I’ve written a depressingly large amount of SQL in that same period. But when my current employer decided I was going to be a web developer, I needed to start from the ground up with Django. Copilot has been a godsend for me. I still need books and Stack Overflow, but the conversations I’ve had with Copilot about architectural decisions, project structure, external library choices, syntax, etc., has saved me a ton of time that I would have otherwise spent reading ad-riddled Medium articles to learn. As a not-beginner beginner, it’s been a huge productivity boost for me. Agree with op though that it’s pretty bad with SQL. Other than reminders about basic syntax, conversions from T-SQL to Oracle SQL syntax, or mindless column aliasing, I don’t bother much with it.