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

submitted 3 months ago by firelizzard to c/experienced_devs

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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.

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[–] lysdexic 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don’t use chat, it’s usually useless.

I think Chat is the most useful feature of Copilot. Prompts like /docs work impeccably, but /explain and /optimize is also pretty good. /tests is hit-and-miss if you have zero tests and require too much context if you already have them. More often than not /fix is a waste of time.

Where I found Copilot to be quite useful is something unexpected: naming things. You can prompt it to give suggestions, you can ask it to refactor things for you. Quite nice.

I think that Claude is far better at generating code, and explore new stuff, but Claude is also down and broken extremely often,not to mention it's annoying limit of 10 questions per half a day.