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Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

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Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#191

Post by simonw »

thefaux wrote: post #90
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.

You are creating a false dichotomy. Very few people are saying there are no benefits, but many have reasonable concerns both about the current efficacy of these tools as well as the expectation of continued exponential growth which is driving much of the current hype. What if we have already passed the inflection point where the exponential growth transitions to an s-curve? That would mean that this technology on its…

I've been generally staying away from the whole "imagine what this stuff could do next!" side of the discourse.

My personal opinion there is that if all research froze today it would still take us years to figure out all of the potential use-cases and applications for the models we have access to right now, and how best to apply them.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#192

Post by collyw »

leptons wrote: post #50
amanzi wrote: post #43

I feel like this bit is important for this discussion: "...I do not use Copilot for my day job. I use it for my own projects only..." My guess is the people that don't use Copilot because they don't trust it, or don't like the code it produces, are probably trying to use it in a professional scenario where they have strict coding standards. For hobbyist use or side-projects, Copilot is an incredible time saver. I use…

I only use Copilot for my day job, because they paid for it. When I'm coding my personal projects on nights and weekends I find myself missing Copilot and I'm contemplating paying for it myself. I don't really trust it for everything, but sometimes it surprises me with how much it gets right. I just can't justify paying $19/month personally for the "Business" plan so they don't use my proprietary code to train their…

I used ChatGPT 4 while doing some freelance projects, and considering the time it has saved me, it's easily worth the 20 bucks a month. It is by no means perfect, but I look at it more like a super powered stack overflow.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#193

Post by nurumaik »

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…

>It gets things wrong enough that I have to manually check everything it does and correct it

Thing is, reading code is way faster than writing code

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#194

Post by viraptor »

LandR wrote: post #169
aayjaychan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

navigation properties are not loaded automatically, because they can be expensive. you need to use `.Include(foo => foo.Bars)` to tell EF to retrieve them. EF tries to be smart and will fix up the property in memory if the referenced entities are returned in separate queries. but if those queries don't return all records in `Foo.Bar`, `Foo.Bar` will only be partially populated. this can be confusing and is one of the…

We have those, and when I say inconsistent I mean inconsistent on the same query / exact same line of code on the same database. e.g. stick a breakpoint, step over, see in the debugger that it was not populating everything it should. Then run it again, do the same and see different results. Exact same code, exact same db, different results. 5000 results back from the db, anything between 5000 and a handful were only…

If that happens with the correct `.Include()`, you really should raise an issue with EF, trying to reproduce it. If it's not a random mistake in your code, that's a really big deal.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#195

Post by LaGrange »

noduerme wrote: post #112
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.

adding an off the shelf ORM layer creates so much more opacity and tech debt than writing queries I don't understand why anyone would willingly put one into their stack. Sure, they're neat although I don't even know if they save time. There's something very satisfying about well-crafted queries. And is it ever really well crafted if you can't tweak them to improve their their execution plan? I've never had a client o…

> adding an off the shelf ORM layer creates so much more opacity and tech debt than writing queries I don't understand why anyone would willingly put one into their stack.

Simple: because if I don't, I'm going to spend the rest of my career explaining why I didn't to people extremely skeptical of that decision. Meanwhile even people like me tend to just shrug and quietly go "oh, an ORM? Well, that's the price of doing the job."

Also, ORMs are an endless source of well-paid jobs for people who actually learned relational algebra at some point in their lives, and that's not a compliment to ORMs.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#196

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

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…

Even more important than the question of productivity is that this turns a joyous activity into a depressing probabilistic shitshow where you describe what you're trying to do and hope for the best. Instead of feeling engaged and challenged, you're just annoyed and frustrated. No thanks!

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#197

Post by sgarland »

kaba0 wrote: post #124
noduerme wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adding an off the shelf ORM layer creates so much more opacity and tech debt than writing queries I don't understand why anyone would willingly put one into their stack. Sure, they're neat although I don't even know if they save time. There's something very satisfying about well-crafted queries. And is it ever really well crafted if you can't tweak them to improve their their execution plan? I've never had a client o…

How do you map rows to objects? How do you insert into/update rows in your databases? These are the basic problems ORMs solve splendidly. They are for OLTP workloads, and have deliberate escape hatches to SQL (or some abstraction over it, like JPQL in java-land). I just fail to see what else would you do, besides implementing a bug-ridden, half-ORM yourself.

Every RDBMS has multiple connector libraries that solve this for you, without requiring the overhead of a full ORM.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#198

Post by kqr »

devjab wrote: post #164
klauserc wrote: post #148

I find GitHub Copilot close to useless for production code. The worst, most obscure bugs I've had to debug in the last year were all in Copilot-written code. It _looks_ plausible, but it makes extremely subtle mistakes. Occasionally, you have repetitive sections of code where it can copy&adapt lines from the context, but that's about it. It's a different story for test code. Test code is often formulaic and "standard…

I think automated tests are the one area that LLMs will truly improve productivity (and overall code quality). It’ll likely also lead to a lot of tests that actually tests nothing, but as a whole, it’ll hopefully be capable of both generating and updating tests if you give it some good inputs to do it on. Documentation is another area where I have high hopes. In the ideal world people update it as they change things.…

> It’ll likely also lead to a lot of tests that actually tests nothing

So pair it with mutation testing!

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#199

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

fortyseven wrote: post #178
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not show me? Why is getting AI 'art' advocates to actually post something they think is good and explain why so hard? Where are these talented imaginative people and what are they doing?

You're just making shit up. Plenty of people enjoying AI art tools are posting their stuff online. Stop fabricating drama where none exists.

And yet you didn't make an attempt to name a single one. If there are it shouldn't be this hard to provide an example. Could it be that they're all so forgettable that they're completely gone from your mind five seconds after you scroll past them?

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#200

Post by aeonik »

Seb-C wrote: post #42
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shorter, you're working directly with the code base you're already thinking about, and it's plugged into it rather than having to start a new mental task when you're looking at a pull request.

When I write code, I usually get a complete understanding of the problem and constraints. I have a picture in my mind of all the edge cases and branching that can happen, which most of the time allows me to write correct code without bugs. When I review code, I am completely unable to get this mental picture, and I usually miss a lot of issues that I would otherwise have avoided. Which is why I don't see the point of…

For me to understand what you mean here, I'm going to need examples... for the stuff I work on, the things you are saying here are verifiably impossible.

There is no possible way to 1. get a complete picture 2. understand all the constraints

because we pull data from the real world, and the real world is constantly changing, and we still don't even have a single theory of everything in physics.

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