Experienced Devs

3981 readers

1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

jmk1ng

drewsiferr

Is GitHub Copilot worth it to you? (self.experienced_devs)

submitted 2 months ago by firelizzard to c/experienced_devs

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] notnotmike 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] lysdexic 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Like most have already said, the auto complete is top tier (...)

My experience is the exact opposite. Even though it has its moments, more often than not it just hallucinates and proposes a lot of stuff that neither matches definitions nor could possibly compile. I guess that this might reflect the impact of having classes with similar names in multiple namespaces but it's bad to the point I prefer to rely exclusively on plain old autocorrelation.

[–] notnotmike 1 points 2 months ago

It could also be the language choice, which one are you utilizing? I could see some languages having a worse experience than others.

I've found it is exceptionally smart with bash. It often knows what to do better than I can, because I'm no master at bash. I'm proficient enough to know when it's right though, and it's usually pretty on point.