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Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

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Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#241

Post by rspeele »

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…

Lazy loading was a mistake in EF. A lot of apps had awful performance due to lazy loading properties in a foreach loop creating N+1 queries to the database. It would be fine in dev with 50-100 rows and a localhost SQL and blow up in prod with 1000s of rows and a separate Azure SQL.

Also if you relied on lazy loading properties after the DbContext had been disposed (after the using() block) you were out of luck.

With old EF we would turn off lazy loading to make sure devs always got an exception if they hadn’t used .Include() to bring the related entities back in their initial query. Querying the database should always be explicit not lurking behind property getters.

Fortunately with EF core MS realized this and it’s off by default. EF with wise use of .Include and no lazy loading is a pretty good ORM!

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#242

Post by packetlost »

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've found Supermaven to be substantially better than Copilot. The latency is near instant and the results are mostly confined to a line or 2 where the success rate is higher. Meanwhile I agree that Copilot was less than useless for me. Actively hurt my workflow and made things harder.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#243

Post by arrowsmith »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #223
arrowsmith wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't have believed you until I moved from ActiveRecord (Rails's ORM) to Ecto (Elixir/Phoenix's data mapping library which is decidedly not an ORM.) It's a million times better and I'm never going back.

same, I wish more libraries would go the ecto design route. my ecto queries map pretty close to 1:1 with the sql counterpart. no guessing what the output is going to look like. I spend my time debugging the query and not trying to get the orm to output he query I want.

Yeah, I hear some people say that they find Ecto.Query confusing, and I think it's because they never learned SQL properly. That's understandable because it's possible to use something like ActiveRecord for years without ever learning to write even a simple SQL query. But if you have a good grasp of SQL then Ecto.Query is trivial to learn - it's basically just SQL in Elixir syntax.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#244

Post by anshumankmr »

spaceship__sun wrote: post #214
anshumankmr wrote: post #212

Though I have never used CoPIlot myself, I have used Chat GPT for writing emails, adding doc strings, helping with basic boilerplate part like reading a file, generating JSON in a certain structure that the business needs, I can say it has helped but I still don't really trust these models.

Average hackernews user.

here's the kicker: I work on creating solutions using Gen AI, mostly some something RAG, Chat with Databases and some other actually cool stuff

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#245

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> does exactly what it says it does, with no magic

I strongly believe that software we develop should feel like magic to the users

The tools that we use to build them should not

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#246

Post by bdcravens »

I don't use it to build a lot of "features" but it really is great for eliminating a lot of tedium: stuff like boilerplate, building up a hash using values already in my code, etc. That's the stuff that is soul-draining.

A couple of days ago I was building up a Dockerfile for a new Rails project and I literally just let Copilot build it for me instead of look it up. It was probably 95% correct.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#247

Post by wzdd »

chx wrote: post #182

Every time... https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650 > You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for havi…

This is exactly how I use it. It's interesting to see what the "expected" thing would be. Even if I don't use the generated code, the time spent reviewing it is not lost. I might learn about a new library, or convention, or way of expressing something syntactically which I wouldn't have thought of. Even when it gets things wrong, it can get things wrong in a way which lets me know that I've made an incorrect assumption elsewhere.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#248

Post by mring33621 »

I am a 20+ year polyglot developer. I just cancelled my Github Copilot sub.

Sometimes, it was magical, but more often it was mediocre and just got in the way.

I generally have better luck with a back-and-forth chat with an LLM on the web and then cutting/pasting the snippets into my IDE. I can do those for free.

Will try again in a year, probably.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#249

Post by sneak »

mring33621 wrote: post #248

I am a 20+ year polyglot developer. I just cancelled my Github Copilot sub. Sometimes, it was magical, but more often it was mediocre and just got in the way. I generally have better luck with a back-and-forth chat with an LLM on the web and then cutting/pasting the snippets into my IDE. I can do those for free. Will try again in a year, probably.

I find ChatGPT4 to be substantially better than Copilot at writing Go code. I wish it easily integrated into an editor and I didn’t have to copy paste so much.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#250

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

> this is where I think AI for coding is now. It gets things wrong enough that I have to manually check everything

The good way to do this is to write good unit tests for the code.

Which we should be doing anyway!

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