Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools?

- Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code?

- Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much about the process of creating code, but mainly about the output (i.e., does the running program solves the issue at hand?)

- Senior developers who don't like to write boilerplate code?

I don't see myself as the target audience of Copilot or Ghostwriter. I do work as an employee, but I'm not a "feature machine". Usually the hardest part about my job is solving problems while communicating with other people. I don't need to write code "fast", and by the time I hit the keyboard to start coding, I don't really need that much help (granted, I'm not working on code that goes into space rockets... just normal e-commerce stuff)

I like to work on side projects and learn new technologies. When I was starting with programming, as part of the learning I liked to write boilerplate code (actually, that's how I learnt programming. I remember writing C boilerplate code by reading "The C Programming Language". Skipping the "boring" parts wouldn't have helped me in my learning).

If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code (because, when I work on side projects, 50% of the satisfaction comes from actually writing code for the sake of writing code. The other 50% comes from the ability to solve a problem). So, yeah, maybe for the people like me who does find the act of writing code for the sake of writing code (you know like painting or taking photographs), Copilot seems like an unneeded tool?

> If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code

I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe.

If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happens in my head, putting it into an editor is just process. I still also have to check it's work whenever I use it, so I'm still deeply embedded in the coding process.

I believe it's akin to an easel vs Krita/Photoshop. Some people enjoy interacting with the physical medium, others enjoy the creative process.

I would strongly recommend trying it out in anger (i.e. a reasonably real codebase), at least for 30 minutes. Form a better opinion after that (which may well be the same as yours right now).

For reference: I've been coding since I was 8 (almost 30 years).

Interesting to read (see my other comment in the thread). It sounds like I should try it

I've used it for a long time and my favorite thing it can do is write documentation and code comments.

I'd guess it'd be really great for seeing examples and learning.

For me, not a senior dev, Copilot is useful for: discovering API, generating parts of docstrings, and generating bits of code that don't require too much thinking but go beyond simple copy and paste. It is really quite useful and helps to keep my RSI in check.

My primary UX issue with copilot is that it is trying too hard to be helpful, often suggesting code that I don't need. You also can't trust it with more complex cases but that's actually pretty reassuring : - )

I would like to give some context, still not onboard with these tools but we have a lot of chore like work of adding some very similar things but with some changes, complicated or otherwise.

So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It's gotten very annoying and our pace is far slower than what we would like, here something like this makes quite a lot of sense.

Though the problem with such specific tools is they can't generate any customized code for our codebase, we can finetune other codegen models and that's what we plan to do down the line, but this specific tool just not really useful if it can't specialized for our codebase.

So, does your team then spend considerable amount of time writing boilerplate/chore code? Isn't that a sign of: "Hey, we actually need to improve our code base guys!". I don't know, if your solution to "I don't want to write chore code" is "let's use Copilot to do the boring stuff"... well, I have bad news for you: "chore code" needs to be maintained and/or fixed, and I don't think Copilot maintains code (for now... :D)

yeah we work on linters, tooling and the like highly specific single page, highly similar code.

you can't get around it. We have pretty low boilerplate in all the codebases I happen to manage but the sad part is there is no getting around porting of specific rules, setting up better metric analysis and reporting systems and such.

If you have been involved in programming professionally for a while, you would know you just can't get around the chore like works sometimes. Ofc it's not a long term goal to keep going this way but we needed a solution to simplify our challenges as we move on.

I admit I haven't used it (I have used IDE autocomplete features and don't like them)

For me, same as writing actually, the thinking of what I want to do is everything, and the doing it is nearly trivial. I don't picture having copilot write nontrivial code for me and then reviewing it would be different than writing it, even if I didn't know the exact syntax and had to look it up. So I agree, it feels like a solution to a problem I don't have, like is solves something that I don't spend time on.

Cynically, like GPT-3 probably help write content farm stuff, copilot probably helps write some junk code for something, but there are probably domain specific low code tools that do that better as well

I love writing code, but I don't love searching the docs for the sixtieth time to find the correct combination of brackets, .groupBy's and .agg calls that gets the baroque horrorshow that is python's Pandas lib to wrangle some data for me.

See it as a better autocomplete for people who don't want to or can't learn by diligently doing the boring parts.

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