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Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

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Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#101

Post by nercury »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #87

Years ago, over a decade ago now, I was a .Net developer. Microsoft introduced Entity Framework, their new way of handling data in .Net applications. Promises made, promises believed, we all used it. I was especially glad of Lazy Loading, where I didn't have to load data from the database into my memory structures; the system would do that automatically. I could write my code as if all my memory structures were popul…

Pardon me for the tangent (just a general comment not directed to OP).

What I have learned over the years is that the only way to properly use ORM is as a fancy query tool. Build the query, fetch/update data, MOVE THE DATA to separate business objects. Don't leave ORM entities shared across the sea of objects!

Phew, thanks, I got that off my chest.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#102

Post by bmitc »

jdlyga wrote: post #7

From my experience, Github Copilot is useful for its seamless autocompletes. But Github Copilot chat, a new feature, noticeably lags behind GPT-4. I get far better performance copying and pasting code into ChatGPT (GPT-4) than using Github Copilot. Both definitely help productivity, especially when generating code using an unfamiliar framework or library. It's great for generating skeleton code for small programs usi…

This has been exactly my experience. It is great at autocomplete and boilerplate stuff. It's very hit and miss for StackOverflow type of stuff. And it's usually a complete miss when you ask it something where it needs to understand even basic things of what you're actually trying to do. It can also get very confused and circular when it hits those edges as well. I've found myself fighting with it, and so part of my use of it has been learning when to let it go.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#103

Post by rafaelmn »

nercury wrote: post #101
marcus_holmes wrote: post #87

Years ago, over a decade ago now, I was a .Net developer. Microsoft introduced Entity Framework, their new way of handling data in .Net applications. Promises made, promises believed, we all used it. I was especially glad of Lazy Loading, where I didn't have to load data from the database into my memory structures; the system would do that automatically. I could write my code as if all my memory structures were popul…

Pardon me for the tangent (just a general comment not directed to OP). What I have learned over the years is that the only way to properly use ORM is as a fancy query tool. Build the query, fetch/update data, MOVE THE DATA to separate business objects. Don't leave ORM entities shared across the sea of objects! Phew, thanks, I got that off my chest.

That doesn't really help you with EF because there's plenty of stuff shared at context level. So depending on the order of queries in the context the same query can return different data.

I hate EF and everything it stands for. :)

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#104

Post by noduerme »

eru wrote: post #61
noduerme wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be writing from a lost world when people enjoyed coding because they enjoyed learning new things with every project. I think that's sadly something only enjoyed at work by a very small minority these days.

I don't think those 'good old days' ever existed. Or rather, the situation hasn't really gotten worse.

I probably wasn't clear I still live in that world, both professionally and in personal projects. But my perception is that the vast majority of devs and engineers do not.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#105

Post by erhaetherth »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #40
12907835202 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This last sentence is the most important. You can describe your dB schema in words and get laravel migration, models, controllers and if you wanted policies, form requests etc all near perfect. You can get a V1 in 10-20 minutes then go about handling all the actual logic

Yeah the copilot doesn’t need to be integrated into every keystroke, just able to analyze the context and kickstart the code. Getting up to speed with new libraries is so much easier with AI instead of the bad old days of trial-and-error-and-marked-as-duplicate

I especially like when I'm looking for a particular method on a class I've never used before and it just makes one up for me as though it exists.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#106

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

echelon wrote: post #22
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #2

Local maxima go BRRRRRRR AI will get there eventually, but this current paradigm seems increasingly only useful for spam and shitty clip art. Even so, everyone is throwing absurd amounts of investment capital at it in the hopes that something useful will happen. It's a pretty clear depiction of the investor class being so detached from the technical reality of what they're investing in that they just sit around light…

> shitty clip art AI art is better than most humans, including most artists. You can take the outputs and immediately turn them into animation. Suddenly I, as a single individual, can easily make film content without figuring out set and lighting logistics or roping in dozens of people. This stuff is magic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The fact that you didn't think to include an example is telling. If you think AI 'art' is good, show me, and tell me why you think it's good.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#107

Post by nercury »

rafaelmn wrote: post #103
nercury wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon me for the tangent (just a general comment not directed to OP). What I have learned over the years is that the only way to properly use ORM is as a fancy query tool. Build the query, fetch/update data, MOVE THE DATA to separate business objects. Don't leave ORM entities shared across the sea of objects! Phew, thanks, I got that off my chest.

That doesn't really help you with EF because there's plenty of stuff shared at context level. So depending on the order of queries in the context the same query can return different data. I hate EF and everything it stands for. :)

Yeah, in a web app, one context per request. In desktop app... I have never used EF there.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#108

Post by erhaetherth »

aimazon wrote: post #16
simonw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been finding this stuff genuinely useful for two years now, across Copilot and ChatGPT and Claude 3 Opus and similar tools. Either I'm a dimwit, easily conned by hype and shiny tools to the point that I can imagine benefits for two years that simply aren't there... or there's something to them.

I don’t think you’re a dimwit but I read your post[1] with an example and I am curious to whether you feel you’re losing something by telling the LLM it’s wrong and to try again, rather than going through the exploratory/iterative learning process yourself. For example, would you have known to ask about GeoJSON if you had not come across and learned about it pre-LLM? More succinctly: do you feel you’re learning more…

I was trying to fetch key-value pairs out of a database using PHP+PDO the other day and I knew there was a nice easy to do it but I couldn't remember how. Something about fetchAll, maybe PDO::FETCH_GROUP|PDO::FETCH_COLUMN.... what was it?

So I asked a couple LLMs. They wrote out loops for me to format the data how I wanted. I could have copy-and-pasted that in and it would probably have worked. But I felt there was something better yet, so back to Google I go.

It's `PDO::FETCH_KEY_PAIR`. It's built-in. But oddly kind of hard to find unless you know the right thing to search for, and "key pair" was not springing to my mind.

Point is, if you just let the LLMs do your work you won't even find these better ways of doing things. And I'm quite afraid of what the LLMs are going to do to Google, Stackoverflow and documentation in general. In a couple users it'll be ungoogleable too.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#109

Post by thomashop »

noobermin wrote: post #91
muglug wrote: post #29

GitHub touts a 55% improvement in coding speed based on a study conducted in-house that tested the participants’ ability to paste a pre-written prompt and then check the output: https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-c... The effectiveness of a Copilot-like tool trialed at FB showed that 8% of code contributed by participants was sourced from suggestions, but the latter study made no promise about…

So I am a scientist and I've generally resisted using llms for my work. My general critique reading others' experience is this sounds like what is needed is better abstractions if all it helps people with is doing boilerplate that needs to be checked. Also no need for "better abstractions" to be some ethereal thing, this just means better standardised libraries and frameworks. May be if the word "abstractions" sounds…

It takes literally 10 minutes to try it out. I'd suggest trying it instead of recycling other people's opinions.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#110

Post by Kiro »

yreg wrote: post #46
muglug wrote: post #29

GitHub touts a 55% improvement in coding speed based on a study conducted in-house that tested the participants’ ability to paste a pre-written prompt and then check the output: https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-c... The effectiveness of a Copilot-like tool trialed at FB showed that 8% of code contributed by participants was sourced from suggestions, but the latter study made no promise about…

My personal feeling is that utilising LLM assistance often isn't faster, but it can take less "stamina", tiring me less.

That's a great point. I'm definitely procrastinating less.
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