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I’m a professional software dev and I use GitHub Copilot.
It’s most useful for repetitive or boilerplate code where it has an existing pattern it can copy. It basically saves me some typing and little typo errors that can creep in when writing that type of code by hand.
It’s less useful for generating novel code. Occasionally it can help with known algorithms or obvious code constructs that can be inferred from the context. Prompting it with code comments can help although it still has a tendency to hallucinate about APIs that don’t exist.
I think it will improve with time. Both the models themselves and the tools integrating the models with IDEs etc.
I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was... both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like
path().unwrap().to_str().into()etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it'd be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn't want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that's on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn't need.
So whether it's helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I'm interested to see how it improves, but right now it's too much of a nuisance for me to justify.