I recently had this conversation about GitHub CoPilot on Bluesky.
Super curious if you’ve used it. Have you had a similar experience? What did you make of it? How did it benefit your testing efforts?
Yes, it’s super easy to write code . Felt like copilot knew what I am about to write so reducing my efforts in writing the code manually. Very intuitive.
Yes I’ve used it, and I’d echo what Joel says, its like working with a person who is more knowledgable than you, who is there to help you along with your task - it’s certainly time-saving for keystrokes etc, but it also opens your mind to new approaches or new ways of coding things, as the suggestions sometimes make you go… “oooo”
Yes I have been using it since they announced the concepts of co-pilot X.
I have found it to give mixed results, it is great at re-writing code I might of already written as well as some new stuff I need but usually needs some editing to make it work for my situation.
That said I have had a co-worker use it and get very bad code from it.
I have also tried providing it with test data in one format and got it to convert it in to a different format which in small batches it did well but fell over on larger data sets.
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One of the clients I work with has provided me with a Copilot subscription. It’s been much better than I expected. It’s helping me save a ton of time writing boilerplate code or looking up things within the context of the codebase (for example, the order of a function’s parameters).
For coming up with writing new blocks of code, though, I haven’t found it very useful. The suggestions it offers are often way off the mark, or it gives you deprecated code, or uses a coding style that doesn’t remotely match what the team uses. It might serve as a good starting point, but you still need to give it a lot of attention when using it this way.
I’ve seen more junior developers trust Copilot’s output blindly, which is a bit of a concern. But for someone who has enough coding experience, it’s really great. I’ll definitely consider subscribing to it personally once I wrap up my existing project with the client since I’ve seen how it can help me speed things up.
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