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by BiteCode_dev 1277 days ago
On menial task, it's way more than 50%. For quick scripting, dirty parsing, PoC and plumping, this is about 300% for me.

However, for anything that requires me to think, it's 5% at best.

Don't take up the 50% figure as anything serious, I think it's just a way to state "if it is a such a meaningful boost in productivity".

Which it is, for a lot of tasks, because the vast majority of programming jobs are boring stuff outside of the HN bubble.

It's amazing how much of the world economy runs on csv uploaded to ftp servers.

3 comments

Agreed with this. If the main bottleneck is typing, then Copilot can dramatically speed up the process. If the bottleneck is thinking, it doesn't help out nearly as much unfortunately.
I'd add that for me at least it's quite good at some small specific subsets of "requires me to think". For example, I do a lot of 3d rotations & transformations, and it's very good at figuring out the math of that based on the function name I chose etc. Most of those would take me a piece of paper and 5-10 mins, but it usually gets it in 1 or 2 tries.

But yes, mundane work it is best at. Some things I have found it made particularly easy:

- scraping websites

- file i/o

- "mirroring" things (I write a bunch of code for doing something on x axis, it automatically replicates it for y and z etc with the right adjustments, or cardinal directions, or arrow keys, etc etc etc)

It is indeed a cheap script boy for me as well

It does mundane work exceptionally well