I’ve been using Github Copliot since beta. In general I find it an extremely nifty tool, and definitely recommend it to developers of any skill level to try out.
There’s a lot of complaints about Copilot, that IMO are somewhat valid, but also negated. For instance, Copilot is undeniably laundering FOSS code… But it’s also laundering proprietary code. Specific licensing aside, everything Copilot is doing here is lowkey making software much more collaborative and closer to at least some ideas open source stands for.
Another thing people bring up is Copilot would make you forget how to code. After almost a year of using it, I have to disagree. Things like setting up the environment, making architectural decisions, and integrations are always the hardest part about coding, and regrettably Copilot doesn’t help with that. Even if Copilot makes you “lazy”, so does any good tool.
The real problem is I don’t know what my code is doing anymore. It’s not that I don’t read what Copilot spits out, but when you don’t have to put in the effort writing it, you forget the details much more quickly. The obvious side effect is you spend much more time debugging your code, trying to figure out how it works, when you only wrote it a week ago.
I’ve used copilot for more than a single line of code about twice in the past year. IMO people are just using it wrong and I can never relate to these posts. For me, it’s an advanced auto-complete and saves me a ton of time. I couldn’t imagine allowing it to generate a whole function for you. Using just one line at a time allows you to make sure you fully understand everything it has generated. I’ve never “forgotten how my code works”
Still though, would definitely like to see an open-source effort towards cracking this nut. There’s some longstanding projects that are Python-specific, but nothing like CoPilot
To be clear, hypersmart autocomplete is my main my use for Copliot as well, but when it’s still so mindless.