this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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As a senior developer, I don't find copilot particularly useful. Maybe it would have been more useful earlier in my career, but at this point writing a prompt to get copilot to regurgitate useful code and massaging the resulting output almost always takes as much or more time as it would for me just to write whatever it is I need to write. If I am able to give copilot a sufficiently specific prompt that it can 'solve' my problem for me, I already know how to solve the problem and how to write the code. So all I'm doing is using copilot as a ghost writer instead of writing it myself. And it doesn't seem to be any faster. The autocomplete features are net helpful because they're actually what I want often enough to offset the cost of reading the suggestion and deciding if it's useful. But it's not a huge difference (vs writing it myself) so that by itself is not sufficiently useful to justify paying the cost myself nor sufficient motivation to go to the effort of convincing my employer to pay for it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Like most have already said, the auto complete is top tier while the chat is hallucination-riddled and not always useful. I find that if I'm asking Chat a question, my problem is already so complex that the AI struggles to answer it without the entire context of the application. It will give me unrelated answers, fake answers, or extremely basic ones that miss the broader context. It's really a coin flip on whether it will help.

I have also had the autocorrect make a mistake once and that was extremely annoying. It was the type of mistake I would have made but took way longer to figure out because I trusted it too much