[tomtheelder]

This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.

[lelag]

I guess that makes sense. It's mostly useful when working on mundane tasks on popular stacks. Experts working on non-trivial use-cases won't see much benefits.

Personally, I'm not a in a coding position anymore and only code occasionally on stacks I'm mostly unfamiliar with: copilot is a godsend as it saves me from googling every other lines of code to figure out which api calls I'm suppose to do to accomplish the task at end.

I see it as a stackoverflow on steroids.

Even if I don't use it much, I guess I'll have to pony up the 10 usd because I would not want to go back to googling basic syntax for everything when I'm coding something.

[sirsinsalot]

Do you think you learn as well or deeply?

Is the act of finding a help for learning?

Do you retain as much? Do you need to? Is that important?

I hope this whole thing ends up like a space saving tool like Google did. I don't need to memorise that API because I can Google the docs. Now maybe that goes a level higher.

[sirsinsalot]

Is copilot then not teaching you bad habits that you can't see due to lack of familiarity? Is that a good thing?

The idea of learning via copilot, producing poor code and having copilot learn from that code ... the whole feedback loop ... Is worrisome.

[morelisp]

> far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in... but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language

Ignorance is bliss.

[naniwaduni]

This smells a lot like a Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

[tomtheelder]

Ha I don't think it's totally that, but it may well be part of it!

I think the biggest thing is that when working in tech I'm unfamiliar with it's extremely helpful to get some sort of skeleton in place, even if it's wrong in some way. I'm going to have to go slowly and evaluate it either way, so doesn't really matter if it's got problems or is less than ideal. What I would do otherwise is just go copy something from StackOveflow and then comb over it to adapt to my needs. Copilot is more or less just doing the same thing, but faster.

When I'm working in a stack I know well, I can quickly put down the code I need and it will generally be pretty good. Copilot can do it faster, but it gets things wrong a lot more often than I do. Since fixing something wrong is a LOT slower than me getting it right the first time, it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.