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Microsoft's Pricey AI Assistant Copilot Leaves Early Adopters Feeling Cheated
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Copilot isn't actually bad for developers, it's just that you need to be careful with it and recognize its limitations.
Writing a bunch of REST endpoints for an API and need to implement all the typical http verbs, and you already have all the matching methods for reading, updating, and deleting values in a complex SQL database for each endpoint to call? Copilot can turn a ten minute chore into a ten second one. Very handy.
Writing those complex SQL methods in the first place? Yeah... Copilot will probably make a ton of mistakes and its work will need to be triple-checked. You'll save time just doing it yourself if you know how. (And if you don't, you have no business calling yourself a developer.)
Copilot is best for easy boilerplate and repetitive code. Problems arise as soon as you ask it to get "creative."
This is about the other copilot.
microsoft and its names... like the VS editor and the other VS editor.
Google is following their lead with Gemini, it seems. What is wrong with them?
Does Microsoft own GitHub?
Yes.
Yes
And linked in
where is windows 9
where is xbox two
And Xbox three to Xbox 359?
Do you mean a revision or a different "copilot". If the latter then this confusion is brought upon by Microsoft, the company that names a successor to a gaming console "Xbox One".
Yeah, I figured that out eventually, but also figure the same probably applies to the other Copilot. Same underlying technology.
Wish Microsoft would use different names for different implementations.
One time I decided for shits and giggles to just keep pushing tab and see where it went. It didn't take long for it to enter a useless recursive loop, hallucinating a new iteration of the same thing on each line.
It definitely isn't gonna magically think up new algorithms for you. I don't know what everybody is scared of. It ain't even gonna replace my kid programming on Scratch.
I mean didn't we all do this when phones started autocompleting sentences like a decade ago? (Or however long it was, time perception is fickle)
It will if employeers only want ai code
Is it me or is this a weird statement for what's supposed to be an exact science?
Imagine working in construction and using a level and you're told "it's not that it's a bad level, you just gotta be careful with it".
How much margin for error should we allow for getting our code right? Is it now acceptable if we only get 80% right?
It's more like you get some kind of weird construction multitool that promises to be a level, a drill, a hammer, and a dozen other things, and it turns out to be a really good, innovative, and helpful level... and a really bad everything else.
I use copilot a bit for my work - and I treat it like copy-paste from StackOverflow - sure that codeat look right, but you've gotta double check it and test it a few times before you commit and push.
As a software developer I promise you that software development is very much not an exact science.
Programs are complex and there are so many different ways of achieving the same thing that all code has problems and gets a bit messy in places. You can test, but it's not easy to ensure that everything works the way it should.
The best code you're going to get will probably be in the space industry, but even that will have bugs. The best you can do is make the code robust even when bugs make things go wrong.
In many cases copilot will do just as well as a junior developer. It's very good at repetitive tasks and filling gaps in your existing code.
Always ask it to write tests for the code it generates. Of course, then you have to validate that the code works AND that the tests work.
Or just write the damn thing yourself and save a bunch of headaches and wondering if you got the tests right it if there’s some screwy corner case lurking because of its implementation.