this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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[–] bmovement 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Copilot is pretty amazing for day to day coding, although I wonder if a junior dev might get led astray with some of its bad ideas, or too dependent on it in general.

Edit: shit, maybe I’m too dependent on it.

[–] JimmyMcGill 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m also having a good time with copilot

Considering asking my company to pay for the subscription as I can justify that it’s worth it.

Yes many times it is wrong but even if it it’s only 80% correct at least I get a suggestion on how to solve an issue. Many times it suggest a function and the code snippet has something missing but I can easily fix it or improve it. Without I would probably not know about that function at all.

I also want to start using it for documentation and unit tests. I think there it’s where it will really be useful.

Btw if you aren’t in the chat beta I really recommend it

[–] Jerkface 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just started using it for documentation, really impressed so far. Produced better docstrings for my functions than I ever do in a fraction of the time. So far all valid, thorough and on point. I'm looking forward to asking it to help write unit tests.

[–] JimmyMcGill 3 points 1 year ago

it honestly seems better suited for those tasks because it really doesn't need to know anything that you'd have to tell it otherwise.

The code is already there, so it can get literally all the info that it needs, and it is quite good at grasping what the function does, even if sometimes it lacks the context of the why. But that's not relevant for unit tests, and for documentation that's where the user comes in. It's also why it's called copilot, you still make the decisions.