4 ms·
Threads like these often feel like reading a lot of "Does anyone else feel like your Phillips screwdriver just isn't very good at hammering in nails? It kind of
by kromem 3y ago
Threads like these often feel like reading a lot of "Does anyone else feel like your Phillips screwdriver just isn't very good at hammering in nails? It kind of works, but I'd rather not use it for that."
I really have zero desire to ever be programming without Copilot again, and have been writing software for over a decade.
It just saves so much time on doing all the boring stuff I wanted to tear my hair out on wondering why I even bother doing this line of work at all.
Yeah, you're right, it's not as good as I am at the complex more abstracted things I actually enjoy solving.
So it does the grunt work like writing the I/O calls, logging statements, and the plethora of "nearly copy/paste but just different enough you need to write things out" parts of the code. And then I do the review of what it wrote and the key parts that I'm not going to entrust to a confabulation engine.
My favorite use is writing unit tests, where if my code is in another tab (and ideally a reference test file from the same package) it gets about 50% there with a full unit test and suddenly my work is no longer writing the boilerplate but just narrowing in the tailored scaffolding to what I actually want it to test.
It's not there to do your job, it's there to make it easier in very specific ways. Asking your screwdriver to be the entire toolbox is always going to be a bad time.
- pmx 3y ago100% agree with you. Copilot does the really boring stuff for me so I can work on actually solving the interesting problems. Copilot was down for a few hours the other week and I was so sick of typing out all the boilerplate stuff it usually does for me that I moved onto non-coding tasks until it was back online.
- saurik 3y agoSerious question: why is anyone writing "boilerplate" when we have tempting engines and macro systems or even simply higher-order functions? I feel like I haven't had to write any appreciable amount of boilerplate in at least 20 years as I can automate that garbage with better abstractions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gnatman 3y agoI'm a salesman, not a SWE. I use GPT-4 to write simple scripts and excel macros that would otherwise be impractical for me to figure out manually. At first I was trying to use GPT-4 to write emails, but I'm very picky on tonality and was rarely satisfied with the results.
- nicbou 3y agoInteresting! What do those scripts do?
- sumeruchat 3y agoYeah i am gonna even judge anyone who says copilot does not make them productive. Like what code could you possibly be writing that copilot is not autocompleting you properly? Yeah if you dont know what to write then copilot cant auto complete you.
- elicksaur 3y agoIt seems like you’re disinclined to believe people’s personal experience as being different from your own, so you judge them negatively. But have you thought about it in the reverse? What does it say about your work that it is so easily replaced/supplemented while others report that theirs is not?
- sumeruchat 3y agoNever said i am above judgement judge away. Its as basic a right as free speech. Co pilot is about auto complete. You write one word and it writes the 99 others because the rest is predictable. If its not working for you it means you dont know that first word in my opinion and instead of fighting back you should upskill
- elicksaur 3y agoNo need to fight anything. When it is actually useful, I’ll be happy to use it. Is “upskill to prompt ai” the new “learn to code”?
- sumeruchat 3y agoLmao could very well be.