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by uwuemu 1464 days ago
Depends on your budget of course, but I don't think it's worth $10/month. I pay just a little bit more than that for an entire IDE. The problem with Copilot is that it's USEFUL for boilerplate code and when you need a lot of copypaste "coding" (think APIs, controllers, etc... basically shifting data around the place), but any time you need to actually code something with some actual algorithmic logic behind it, it's little more than a distraction, and often even a really problematic one, because if you let it, it will happily suggest things that look OK on the surface, but are almost always (and I really mean most of the time) wrong, buggy or otherwise incomplete. You can't realy on it. It's like a kid (I wanted to say a "junior programmer", but it's not anywhere near that level) you can offload some chores to, but you always have to check on it and what it actually does. Fine if all you need is to wash the dishes... more than that and you're asking for trouble.

When I'm in the flow, trying to solve some algorithmic problem, I always turn it off because the BS suggestions coming from its little "mind" actually slow me down and mess with my focus. Which all makes sense when you realize what it ultimately is - a philosopher, as opposed to a mathematician.

1 comments

I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some library, I'll let it write it for me, and then double check it to make sure it's doing what I want. That's still faster than me going to check the API and writing it all out by hand.

Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.

I used copilot yesterday because I wanted a random 10 character long string and was like. Ahh I don’t have the brain power right now to think of this. And remembered I had copilot. So I enabled it. Wrote a comment. And it generated ~10 lines that solved my problem. Tweaked a little bit and rolled with it.

It helps solve the boring simple shit so I can focus on the interesting bit.

> Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.

Yea, that makes sense, I agree with that. If your use case is skewed more towards "BS glue code" as you say, you'll find more use out Copilot. Then $10/month can be fair, cheap even.

This seems pretty reasonable to me / resonates w/ how I might use it.