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We use copilot as fancy auto-complete. Our original hopes for it was more than that, but it's not been up to the task. Yes it solves leetcode as the article men
by Quothling 2y ago
We use copilot as fancy auto-complete. Our original hopes for it was more than that, but it's not been up to the task. Yes it solves leetcode as the article mentions, but that is next to useless for most of what our developers do, what isn't useless is how good it is at replacing code snippets. Especially because it's very transferable between developers, as they no longer build up an archive of personal snippets. Or at least not as many of them. So it's much easier to onboard new developers and get them to be more productive than it was before copilot.
I don't think anyone at our shop has high hopes for LLM's in programming beyond efficiency anymore. I'd like to see Github copilot head in a direction where it's capable of auto-updating documentation such as JSdoc when functionality changes, LLM's are already excellent at writing documentation on "good" code, but the real trick is keeping it up-to-date as things change. I know this is also a change-management issue, but in the world where I mainly work, the time to properly maintain things isn't always prioritized by the business at large. Which obviously costs the business down the line, often grievously so, but as long as "IT" has very little pull in many organisations it's also just the state of things. I'd personally love for them to get better at writing and updating tests, but so far we've been far less successful with it than the author has.
As far as efficiency and quality goes our in-house measurements point in two directions. For inexperienced developers quality has dropped with the use of LLM's, which in our house is completely down to how employees (and this is not just developers) tend trust LLM's more than they would trust search results. So much so that a lot of AI usage has basically been banned from the wider organisation by the upper decision makers because quality is important in what we do. Yes I know this is ironic when you look at how they prioritize IT in an organisation where 90% of our employees use a computer 100% of their working hours. Anyway, as far as efficiency goes there are two sides. When used as fancy auto-complete we see an increase in work output across every kind of developer, however, when used as a "sparring partner" we see a significant decrease. We don't have the resources to do a lot of pair-programming and a couple of developers might do direct sparring on computation challenges for 1-2 hours a week. They are free to do so more, and they aren't punished for it as we don't do any sort of hourly registration on work, but 1-2 hours is where it's at on average. Sometimes it'll increase if they are dealing with complex business processes or if we're on-boarding some one new.
> Copilot is very useful to scan existing code for any errors or missed edge cases
Aside from tests I think this is the one part of the article I really haven't seen in our very anecdotal testing. But maybe this is down to us still learning how to adopt it properly or a difference in coding style? Anyway, almost all of our errors aren't with the actual code but rather with a misrepresentation/misunderstanding/unreported-change-in of business logic, and this has been the area where LLM's have been the weakest for us.
- p0nce 2y agoWell this seems to highlight that modifying code is harder than creating it, and yet again LLM does the easy thing ok.
- ljm 2y agoI’ve only used Copilot with the option to use open source code disabled. It’s taken the boredom out of dealing with boilerplate heavy code and manual copy/paste - stuff you could already handle with templates snippets and keyboard macros of course - but as you say it’s not really much good for anything else, and I’ve seen plenty of code that is hard to review because an LLM created it. In terms of what the article calls skill atrophy, this is probably why I limit my usage to snippets on steroids. I tried GPT4 more directly a few times and while it was all impressive at the start, it’s all surface level and the hallucinations are bad but incredibly subtle.