I’ve been using copilot for advent of code as well, as well as in regular day to day coding. I have less luck with comment-based coding than the author, but in my usage it’s been handy for normal autocomplete.
There’s been a number of instances where I would write a comment describing a simple operation and it would struggle or generate a lot of noise, but if I just start writing an implementation it would give me a good suggestion pretty quickly. I guess the extra context helped.
I was disappointed that it wasn’t more useful as a discovery tool- when I’m not knowledgeable about a language or framework, it can be hard to judge whether its suggestions are subtly wrong. After a while, I started getting a sense for when suggestions are likely to be valuable, which is generally when I have a concrete idea of what I want and what it should look like. When i’m doing more exploratory development I often just ignore the completion. Using ChatGPT instead for learning new stuff is a great idea and i’ll definitely be trying that.
Something I wasn't expecting about copilot is that it actually has been giving me pretty good completions for emacs lisp. I think it’s going to be a very valuable tool in the long run and I recommend giving it a second thought if you’ve dismissed its utility.
Comments
I’ve been using copilot for advent of code as well, as well as in regular day to day coding. I have less luck with comment-based coding than the author, but in my usage it’s been handy for normal autocomplete.
There’s been a number of instances where I would write a comment describing a simple operation and it would struggle or generate a lot of noise, but if I just start writing an implementation it would give me a good suggestion pretty quickly. I guess the extra context helped.
I was disappointed that it wasn’t more useful as a discovery tool- when I’m not knowledgeable about a language or framework, it can be hard to judge whether its suggestions are subtly wrong. After a while, I started getting a sense for when suggestions are likely to be valuable, which is generally when I have a concrete idea of what I want and what it should look like. When i’m doing more exploratory development I often just ignore the completion. Using ChatGPT instead for learning new stuff is a great idea and i’ll definitely be trying that.
Something I wasn't expecting about copilot is that it actually has been giving me pretty good completions for emacs lisp. I think it’s going to be a very valuable tool in the long run and I recommend giving it a second thought if you’ve dismissed its utility.