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I feel like this bit is important for this discussion: "...I do not use Copilot for my day job. I use it for my own projects only..." My guess is the people th
by amanzi 2y ago
I feel like this bit is important for this discussion: "...I do not use Copilot for my day job. I use it for my own projects only..."
My guess is the people that don't use Copilot because they don't trust it, or don't like the code it produces, are probably trying to use it in a professional scenario where they have strict coding standards. For hobbyist use or side-projects, Copilot is an incredible time saver. I use it with my Python side-projects, and it's truly amazing how much time it saves me. Some of the most common use-cases where it saves me time:
- Adding docstrings. Just type `"""` after a method name, pause for a second, and Copilot will generate a pretty decent docstring. And usually it will mimic the style you've used to write other docstrings in the file.
- Writing tests. This one can be a bit hit-and-miss, but I mostly get good a good starting point, and in the best case it will suggest test scenarios that I might not have thought about.
- Creating basic functions/methods. I have terrible memory and usually need to refer to the docs for even fundamental Python code, e.g. reading or writing CSV files, looping over and modifying dictionaries, etc... But with Copilot, I get great results, often just by typing `def open_csv_file` and then pausing for a second to get the method code. If that doesn't work, adding a comment with what you want the function to do before writing the function name will help a lot.
- Adding type hints to existing code. Just type ":" and pause for a second, and Copilot will almost always provide the correct type hint. And pressing a space after the closing parentheses in a function, will almost always return the correct return type hint.
- leptons 2y agoI only use Copilot for my day job, because they paid for it. When I'm coding my personal projects on nights and weekends I find myself missing Copilot and I'm contemplating paying for it myself. I don't really trust it for everything, but sometimes it surprises me with how much it gets right. I just can't justify paying $19/month personally for the "Business" plan so they don't use my proprietary code to train their AI.
- eru 2y ago> I just can't justify paying $19/month personally [...] Why not? Is it a significant fraction of your income? I find that the cost of hardware deprecation, electricity and internet access probably amounts to a lot more than that per month for me already. (Not to mention the opportunity cost of my time.) It's fine to be frugal, but it's also useful to compare your actual costs. (Though that's not always appreciated. I got into some minor trouble at an employer when I pointed out that the 15 GiB of storage space they 'graciously' gave us should cost them less than the company toilet paper we use every day. And I said 'should' because that's internal storage space, and I used numbers from AWS. But if they are paying significantly more for storage than what AWS charges (with enormous margins for Amazon), we also have a big problem.)
- collyw 2y agoI used ChatGPT 4 while doing some freelance projects, and considering the time it has saved me, it's easily worth the 20 bucks a month. It is by no means perfect, but I look at it more like a super powered stack overflow.
- leptons 2y agoAbout all I really use Copilot for is auto-completing console.log statements. That's most of what I like it to do. I don't need an AI to write code for me. I already know the code I'm writing better than the AI does. Sometimes the AI guesses what I'm about to write and fills it in, and sometimes I let it, but I don't trust based on my experience with it, and then I have to read a paragraphs length of code to make sure it's right before I allow it, and it's usually wrong so I've just wasted some time thanks to the AI. It gets it wrong more often than it gets anything complicated right, and often suggests buggy code. I can't really see paying for that for myself. I don't think auto-completing console.log statements is worth $20/month.
- yshui 2y agoAuthor here. I probably should have stated this more explicitly in the article, but my main concern with using it for day job is copyright. I don't want to accidentally commit copyrighted code into the codebase, and I work for an open source project.