Comment by datpuz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by datpuz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm weird, but I do not get the hype. I was using Copilot for a few weeks as a Go backend dev with occasional work in the React/TypeScript frontend, and I thought it actually reduced my productivity. A lot of times, the suggestions were totally wrong, but looked correct-ish, and I would have to pause and basically debug that code, which generally took longer and snapped me out of my flow.

Some of the autocomplete was okay in that it saved me some keystrokes at times, but in general, it felt like more of a distraction. I especially hated the suggested comments; these were almost never close to what I intended to write, and it would always give me a pause when they'd pop up, and often forget what I was about to write.

There were a few instances where it magically did autocomplete a surprising bit of code, and I enjoyed the novelty when it would happen, but that wore off quick.

You can keep it disabled and enable it with a hotkey when you think it can help. That's my strategy.

You need to recognize what it's good for, like generating code similar to what you've written but a little bit different.

For example : I had a project in Rust where I would print a sentence describing an error that occured. I had a big match block with my possible error variants. The error enum was declared in the same file.

And so, when I added a new error variant, I just had to place my cursor at the end of the match and watch copilot generate exactly or almost what I needed, a similar block of code that the other cases, but with a different message and using the fields of this varient intelligently.

I agree, I just disabled it today. I'd say 3 out of 10 times it produced a good result. Most of the time the structure looked ok but the variable names were wrong, or the types were wrong, or it had logic issues. Surprisingly, I thought it did great with autocompleting the comments. In Visual Studio, it would block function autocomplete which was really annoying also

I eventually turned it off too. It was good at certain things like filling out repetitive test data but overall I found it more distracting than helpful.

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