Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

My gut feeling is that we're going to enter into a 'dark age' of coding where a lot of previously available resources are going to be ransacked and made hard to find in favor of big corporation owned LLMs. It's already having an extremely bad effect on search in general; we're potentially only a few fights away from sites like SO having users leave en masse. That's why I think having a strong network of engineers to talk with will become more important than ever, almost a return to the IRC days.

- Proper DB design first. You should be able to remove the ORM and DB should still function as intended. This means application-side cascade operations or application-side inheritance is banned.

- No entities with magical collections pointing to each other. In other words, no n to n relations handled by ORM layer. Create in-between table, for gods sake. Otherwise it becomes incredibly confusing and barely maintainable.

- Prefer fetching data in a way that does not populate collections. In other words, fetch the most fine-grained entity and join related data. Best if you craft special record entities to fetch data into (easy with EF or Doctrine).

- Most ORMs allow you to inspect what kind of queries you create. Use it as query building tool. Inspect queries often, don't do insane join chains and other silly stuff.

I would use ORM in one kind of app: where I would work with data that shares records that might need to be either inserted or updated, and there is several nesting levels of this kind of fun. You know, you need to either insert or update entity, if it exists, you should update, and then assign related entities to it, if it does not, then you should insert, and assign related entities to the newly created id. The ORM can easily deal with that, and on top of that it can do efficient batched queries, which would be really annoying and error-prone to hand-craft.

If the app does not require this kind of database with these kind of relations, I would not use ORM.

At first it was a massive pain because I didn't realise it wasn't a "proper" autocomplete(intellisense is probably the king in that regard), and get hit with a large number of hallucinated functions.

This was really hard for me, as I'm slightly dyslexic, which means spotting plausible but bullshit completions is very hard. (I suspect its hard for everyone else too). Worse still, at the time the linter/type inspector was/is very slow so only ran on save/execution.

However its both improved in the last year significantly, and I have got used to it. For me there are a few techniques that help me:

1) It has a recency bias. Which is great for when you're jumping about in code making changes

2) It rewards proper variable names

3) Your comments should say what, and why your doing what you are doing.

2 & 3 should be obvious and you should be doing it anyway. But it really re-enforces that.

However I would really like some UI changes so that I can make _better_ use of the LLM plugin.

1) a completely different colour to indicate that its an LLM suggestion (bonus points for giving a confidence as well)

2) a different keystroke to accept the suggestion. (bonus for partial selection)

Too little abstraction is just as bad as too much.

Maybe I'm dumb but these reasons aren't obvious to me. Why doesn't the author use copilot at his day job?