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by scott_w 259 days ago
I'm biased as I've not been a beginner dev for nearly 20 years, however I have found Copilot is pretty helpful for is learning Rust. In combination with Intellisense, it helps ease some of the mental overhead of the syntax, letting me focus on learning the important bits of the language. It helped me go from opening up a book on Rust to having a working tool in about a week.

I won't pretend that it's turned me into a senior engineer, of course, but it's definitely gotten me over the 0 to 1 problem much quicker than I think I could have without it nudging my code in the right direction.

For what it's worth, I don't ask Copilot to write the code, I just use it as an advanced auto-complete, reading the suggestion to see if I agree with it before hitting tab.
2 comments
adlpz 259 days ago
I think it's become a running theme: senior devs who have been coding for a while now are able to extract value from these tools because, even if you don't know Rust, you know how to code.

BS code smells the same in any language.

Beginner devs don't even know what smelling means.

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alganet 259 days ago
Seniors being able to extract more from any new tool is a time proven constant. That hasn't changed.

What happened is that companies tried to push an idea that this new AI thing would be inhospitable to whoever is already an experienced programmer. The idea of "new land", fair and equal to all. Smelling woudn't matter, because all smells would be new and unfamiliar.

After insisting on this silly mistake for a while, they realized that experienced programmers were actually their only viable target audience, and attempted to change their approach accordingly. It's embarassing.

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adamddev1 259 days ago
Maybe this is the answer to the ageism problem people have complained about in tech.

In the land of vibe-coders, the old man is king.

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f311a 258 days ago
I thought the same until I tried coding things manually in Rust. It was so hard to write Rust without any assistance. I turned off AI to learn things properly. It was an illusion that I know what I'm doing until I disabled AI.
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