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Maybe they can replace you with copilot and an unexperienced cheaper user.
Honestly, that’s the hope. Putting together well-solved combinations of computer functionality ought to become less-skilled work as technology progresses.
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Weird that it prints the error to stdout. I mean not that surprising really, I'd just expect error->stderr to be a pretty low-hanging association
I've seen many many scripts that ignore STDERR and just print everything normally.
A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.
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I've seen many many scripts that ignore STDERR and just print everything normally.
Yes, but that's a perfect illustration for one of copilot's essential flaws: "a lot of flies eat poop" (side note: is that actually a saying? Asking because in German it is, and it fits perfectly here). A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.
Some code is like a giant pile of dirt; you need someone to pile it up and then you can go in and clean up the edges and make it "good" whereas other code is entirely delicate all the way through.
The big question is how much is each one and can it help. I suspect it helps for many, but those who know enough to recognize where it can flaw will have an advantage.
But newer programmers may never really "learn" the code the way the older ones do, as they'll just let the computer do the basics.
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Someone else running copilot in a different workspace wouldn’t see those recommendations, you can try it yourself in a new workspace.
This isn't the first time it's done this. If I recall it regurgitated the doom source, along with the swearing.
Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it.
Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder.
And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes.
But overall? It's been great! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :insert shut up and take my money gif:
It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test cases; it's great as an autocomplete on steroids that completes entire lines + fills in all arguments, instead of just a single identifier; it's great for quickly writing nice contextual error messages (especially useful for Go developers and the constant errors.Wrap, Copilot is really good at writing meaningful error messages there); and it's also great for technical documentation, as it's able to autocomplete markdown (and it does it surprisingly well).
Overall, I definitely wouldn't want to go back to writing code without it. It just takes care of most of the mundane and obvious code for you, so you can take care of the interesting bits. It's like having the stereotypical "intern" as an associate built-in to your editor.
And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just surprising how good of a suggestion it can make.
It's also ridiculously flexible. When I start writing graphs in ASCII (cause I'm just quickly writing something down in a scratch file) it'll actually understand what I'm doing and start autocompleting textual nodes in that ASCII graph.
I cannot share the code here, but to explain in simple terms I was able to write around 100 lines of code in say 10 seconds. I had a switch statement, around 7 variables with around 5 if conditions inside each case. I retrieve data from end point. Do JSON serialization. Convert JSON to a data class. Use the data . Loop over the data and then work with the elements.
Copilot, understood the first two conditions of what I was doing and just completed the rest for me. Replaced it with right variables, type annotations, etc.
I would definitely recommend this to any one at this price point. Sure, I was so happy using it for free since the launch of the product and did not expect it to be coming so soon out of waitlist. But it is ok to pay for it.
I use it on both VSCode and Neovim and it works beautifully with both editors.
PS: I was early adopter of TabNine too, have used it for quite some time, however Copilot would be my preference.
My mind is blown by the people saying $10/month is too much. $10 a month for this is an unbelievably good deal! If you value your time, this is a ridiculously good deal.
Maybe people who used it didn't find enough value in it? Is that their fault?
I haven't used it, but it's certainly not immediately clear to me that there is enough value there to justify $10/mo.
This is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month. The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.
Copilot clearly cost money to run, so it couldn't be given away forever. By putting a business model on it, it means it's less likely to be rugpulled in the future.