[ShamelessC]

> We're all focusing on the weaknesses of co-pilot (the comments can be longer than the code produced; you need to understand code to know when to elaborate your comment, etc).

See, this tells me you may not have even used copilot. Because while tutorials such as this (and the OpenAI codex tools) have you use comments explicitly to code, the reality is that you're not hammering out plain english requirements for copilot to work. You just code - and sometimes it finishes your thought, sometimes it doesn't. You hit tab to accept autocomplete, just like you would for any other autocomplete. So you are generally reading and evaluating what copilot thinks is a good output and choosing whether it goes in the program or not with the TAB key.

[ImprobableTruth]

Copilot is great as a 'smart auto-complete' or when you need to do pattern based drudge work... but that's not what this article is about. It's trying to sell people on copilot as a no-code tool.

The leading question is this:

>But as helpful as it is for coders, what if it enabled non-engineers to program too – by merely talking to an AI about their goals?

and it answers this in my opinion deceptively by presenting what amounts to a parlor trick. Whether copilot in general is any good or not is in my mind totally separate to this.

[ShamelessC]

Yeah, I agree Copilot is absolutely not a no-code tool.

[frozencell]

Less no-code, more low-code high-tongue tool.

[chockchocschoir]

It doesn't actually say that at all, because you can use Copilot in different ways. One way is the way you mention, by writing code and letting Copilot finish those off. Another way is the way GP describes it (and, the technique that the article uses) where you write comments and let Copilot fill out the code.

Just because one uses one of the ways doesn't mean they are not aware of the other way too.

[ShamelessC]

Not logically, no. But it is implied because you actually get both such experiences on-demand in VS Code/vim/emacs. It's a fascinating experience and you find yourself writing more descriptive function names and variable names rather than using handwritten instructions. You quickly realize that comments are just one of many prompt engineering tricks available once you have access to this - and simply generating snippets as the linked article does is quite restricting sometimes.

Basically, the concern that e.g. comment length gets too long is a weird one, because you don't tend to actually use copilot that way if you have access to it through tab-complete.

Perhaps what I really mean is - people should try using copilot for an actual coding project. Its benefits aren't really obvious in contrived examples.