Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacarvalho | Hacker News Reader

I haven't played around with copilot for real yet. Though I did notice one my junior developers using it and he seems to find it helpful. My biggest question is: Does it overall (medium/long term) benefit the developer using it? Or does it create an over-reliance of a piece of software that may be very biased (given it was trained on open source projects which tend to look different than closed source repos)?

View on HN

I used the beta for a while and I have to say, I honestly think my code quality went down when I used it. I started not even questioning the suggestions I was given and I'd end up writing spaghetti code that forced me to rely on Copilot to even understand what I was developing. Now that I've stopped using it, I feel like my code quality and maintainability has gone up now that I am actually thinking about everything I write.

I think I must be living in a parallel reality where-in everything innovative is shutdown for one reason or the other.

From the short-time I've used it, it's clear that Github Co-Pilot is just a fancy Google Search in that it helps with remembering syntax and keywords which is already helpful, in speeding-up the boiler-plate writing and so is really a big help.

No one is supposed to mindlessly follow the Github Co-Pilot suggestions and of course if judged by that metric it won't help with code quality; but if used properly to quickly type-out boiler-plate code then that is when it becomes useful.

How many times does anyone want to write a for-loop or remember the syntax of how to declare something, especially when juggling multiple programming languages? It's these kinds of things that Co-pilot is good at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com