[recursive]

I've been using copilot for several months. If I could figure out a way to measure its impact on my productivity, I'd probably see a single digit percentage boost in "productivity". This is not life-changing for me. And for some tasks, it's actually worse than nothing. As in, I spend time feeding it a task, and it just completely fails to do anything useful.

[jimmaswell]

I've been using it for over a year I think. I don't often feed it tasks with comments so much as go about things the same as usual and let it autocomplete. The time and cognitive load saved adds up massively. I've had to go without it for a bit while my workplace gets its license in order for the corporate version and the personal version has an issue with the proxy, and it's been agonizing going without it again. I almost forgot how much it sucks having to jump to google every other minute, and it was easy to start to take for granted how much context copilot was letting me not have to hold onto in my head. It really lets me work on the problem as opposed to being mired in immaterial details. It feels like I'm at least 2x slower overall without it.

[atq2119]

> I almost forgot how much it sucks having to jump to google every other minute

Even allowing for some hyperbole, your programming experience is extremely different from mine. Looking anything up outside the IDE, let alone via Google, is by far the exception for me rather than the rule.

I've long suspected that this kind of difference explains a lot of the difference in how Copilot is perceived.

[namaria]

Claiming LLMs are a massive boost for coding productivity is becoming a red flag that the claimant has a tenuous grasp on the skills necessary. Yeah if you have to look up everything all the time and you can't tell the AI slop isn't very good, you can put out code quite fast.

[jimmaswell]

At the risk of sounding like an inflated ego: I'm very good at what I do, the rest of my team frequently looks to me for guidance, my boss and boss's boss etc. have repeatedly said I'm among the most valuable people around, and I'm the one turned to in emergencies, for difficult architectural decisions, and to lead projects. I conceptually understand the ecosystem I work in very well at every layer.

What I'm not good at is memorizing API's and libraries that all use different verbs and nouns for the same thing, and other such things that are immaterial to the actual work. How do you use a mutation observer again? Hell if I remember the syntax but I know the concept, and copilot will probably spit out what I want, and I'll easily verify the output. Or how do you copy an array in JS? Or print a stack trace? Or do a node walk? You can either wade through google and stackoverflow, or copilot can tell you instantly. And I can very quickly tell if the code copilot gave me is sensible or not.

[williamcotton]

I know plenty of fantastic engineers that use LLM tools as code assistants.

I’m not sure when and why reading documentation and man pages became a sign of a lack of skill. Watch a presentation by someone like Brian Kernighan and you’ll see him joke about looking up certain compiler flags for the thousandth time!

Personally I work in C, C#, F#, Java, Kotlin, Swift, R, Ruby, Python, Postgres SQL, MySQL SQL, TypeScript, node, and whatever hundreds of libraries and DSLs are built on top. Yes, I have to look up documentation and with regularity.

[fragmede]

Add Golang and rust and JavaScript and next.js and react to the list for me. ;) If you live and work and breathe in the same kernel, operating system, and user space, and don't end up memorizing the various bits of minutiae, I'd judge you (and me) too, but it's not the 2000's, or the 90's or even the 80's anymore, and some of us don't have the luxury, or have chosen not to, live in one small niche for our entire career. At the end of the day, the client doesn't care what language you use, or the framework, or even the code quality, as long as it works. What they don't want to pay for is overage, and taking the previous developer's work and refactoring it and rewriting it in your preferred language isn't high value work, so you pick up whatever they used and run with it. Yeah that makes me less fluent in that one particular thing, not having done the same thing for 20+ years, but that's not where I deliver value. Some people do, and that's great for them and their employers, but my expertise lies elsewhere. I got real good at MFC, back in the day, and then WX and Qt and I'm working on getting good at react and such.

[FpUser]

Same opinion here. I work with way too many things to keep everything in my head. I'd rather use my head for design than to remember every function and parameter of say STL

[specialist]

For me, thus far, LLMs help me forage docs. I know what I want and it helps me narrow my search faster. Watching adepts like Simon Willison wield LLMs is on my to do list.

[datavirtue]

Nope, just want it to write tests and other low value work so I can get shit done. Some of it depends on the stakes of your job. Are you floating along day by day in big corp or are you grinding it out at a startup? Those working at the startup have to use coding assistants, period.

[h_tbob]

Hey, we were all beginners once!

On another note, even if you are experienced it helps when doing new stuff and you don’t know the proper syntax for what you want. For example let’s say your using flutter, you can just type

// bold

And it will help put the proper bold stuff in there.

[soulofmischief]

Comments like this are a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Your comment is actually an indication that you don't have the mastery required to get useful, productive output from a high quality LLM.

Maybe you don't push your boundaries as an engineer and thus rarely need to know new things or at least learn new API surfaces. Maybe you don't know how to effectively prompt an LLM. Maybe you lack the mastery to analyze and refine the results. Maybe you just like doing things the slow way. I too remember a time as an early programmer where I eschewed even Intellisense and basic auto complete...

I'd recommend learning a bit more and practicing some humility and curiosity before condemning an entire class of engineers just because you don't understand their workflow. Just because you've had subpar experiences with a new tool doesn't mean it's not a useful tool in another engineer's toolkit.

[namaria]

Funny you should make claims about my skills when you have exactly zero data about my abilities or performance.

Evaluating my skills based on how I evaluated someone else's skills when they tell me about their abilities with and without a crutch, and throwing big academic sounding expressions with 'effect' in them might be intimidating to some but to me it just transparently sounds pretentious and way off mark, since, like I said, you have zero data about my abilities or output.

> I'd recommend learning a bit more and practicing some humility and curiosity before condemning an entire class of engineers

You're clearly coming from an emotional place because you feel slighted. There is no 'class of engineers' in my evaluation. I recommend reading comments more closely, thinking about their content, and not getting offended when someone points out signs of lacking skills, because you might just be advertising your own limitations.

[soulofmischief]

> Funny you should make claims about my skills when you have exactly zero data about my abilities or performance.

Didn't you just do that to an entire class of engineers:

> Claiming LLMs are a massive boost for coding productivity is becoming a red flag that the claimant has a tenuous grasp on the skills necessary

Anyway,

> Evaluating my skills based on how I evaluated someone else's skills when they tell me about their abilities with and without a crutch

Your argument rests on the assumption that LLMs are a "crutch", and you're going to have to prove that before the rest of your argument holds any water.

It sucks getting generalized, doesn't it? Feels ostracizing? That's the exact experience someone who productively and effectively uses LLMs will have upon encountering your premature judgement.

> You're clearly coming from an emotional place because you feel slighted.

You start off your post upset that I'm "making claims" about your skills (I used the word "maybe" intentionally, multiple times), and then turn around and make a pretty intense claim about me. I'm not "clearly" coming from an emotional place, you did not "trigger" me, I took a moment to educate you about being overly judgemental before fully understanding something, and pointed out the inherent hypocrisy.

> you might just be advertising your own limitations

But apparently my approach was ineffective, and you are still perceiving a world where people who approach their work differently than you are inferior. Your toxic attitude is unproductive, and while you're busy imagining yourself as some masterful engineer, people are out there getting massive productivity boosts with careful application of cutting-edge generative technologies. LLMs have been nothing short of transcendental to a curious but skilled mind.

[rockskon]

I don't know about you but LLMs spit out garbage nonsense frequent enough that I can't trust their output in any context I cannot personally verify the validity of.

[ab5tract]

Same here. The Cody autocomplete is so off base all the time that it’s deactivated.

I serve Cody a direct question about 1-3 times a week. Of that, it gets maybe 50% correct on the first try. I don’t bother with a second try because by then I’ve already spent the equivalent amount of time looking at the relevant library source code and/or docs would have taken.

[framapotari]

If you're already a competent developer, I think that's a reasonable expectation of impact on productivity. I think the 'life-changing' part comes in helping someone get to the point of building things with code where before they couldn't (or believed they couldn't). It does a lot better job of turning the enthusiasts and code-curious into amateurs vs. empowering professionals.

[jimmaswell]

> turning the enthusiasts and code-curious into amateurs vs. empowering professionals.

I'm firmly in #2. My other comment goes over how.

I'm intrigued to see how devs in #1 grow. One might be wary those devs would grow into bad habits and not thinking for themselves, but it might be a case of the ancient Greek rant against written books hindering memorization. Could be that they'll actually grow to be even better devs unburdened by time wasted on trivial details.

[datavirtue]

If you are in maintenance mode your visits to Copilot will be rare. If you are building greenfield, use goes through the roof. All those test cases, nevermind all the POC and framework scaffolding and other boilerplate that is now completely unacceptable as a use of developer time.

[recursive]

I'm building "greenfield". I still use it at least daily, but the benefit just struggles to outweigh the cost of invoking it. Maybe I don't understand how to use it.

[datavirtue]

It really depends on what you are doing and what tech you are using. I use it to teach me or build out ideas quickly or solve for complex issues. Mostly these days I use it as a memory aid or to bounce ideas off it. In my job I have to move quickly and stay focused as I'm driving improvements to a tech stack that reaches across four verticals, each having their own quirks and tech stacks. It's great for jogging my memory and helping to flush out ideas and approaches that I then bounce off the dev teams. Super helpful.