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by davewritescode 1458 days ago
The entire programmer ethos revolves around building deep understandings of the level abstraction you're working at and deep diving into the layers below when necessary or even just for fun!

I've watched people use co-pilot but and I'm not 100% convinced it's a good thing but I'm open to it. The problem I've seen is that in some cases it generates some really bad code, code that could've been replaced by usage of a standard library.

What I think it's really good at is helping to learn new languages. Getting idiomatic code generated, even if you throw it out eventually is a great way to get a feel for a new language without having to jump back and forth between the editor and the browser.

2 comments

I save tons of time having to write matplotlib code etc. because AI does it for me and I can spend more time thinking about the deep parts of research. I basically haven't had to write more than 1 or 2 keystrokes for a plot I've made in months now. If that's not useful I don't know what is.
that sounds amazing, I just spent 3 hours last night making mpl plots for ideas I already had. this sounds like a perfect use case for me
I see it differently. The entire ethos should revolve around product that works. Product the meets a market need. Product that brings joy (not friction) into the world.

Any tool that can meet that ends should be considered.

Put another way, users don't care what anyone (i.e., in engineering) does or does not know. They're not going to wake up and say "I only want to use products that don't use Copilot." Nobody cares about any ethos, etc.