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Comment by urthor | Hacker News Reader

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urthor

It's interesting, the ones I've spoken to are extremely suspicious.

"GitHub Copilot blocks your ability to learn." Is a common refrain.

I don't see ANY industry-wide consensus on whether GitHub Copilot truly helps developers right now.

The only scenario I can get anyone to agree on is generating templates. Aka, JSON or CSS files that you then edit.

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It doesn't block your ability to learn any more than any auto suggestion systems. But I guess it depends on what you value in terms of learning, for me, copilot allows me to focus on the larger architectural problems while not having to worry about the exact syntax of certain things (DSL query language, middleware express, typescript def annotations, etc).

Every time I don't have to context switch to look up some technical errata in my browser is a complete win for me.

I observed one guy become very resistant to reading the docs as they believed copilot obsoleted them. Programming in Ruby, the copilot suggestions will run but since you didn't read the docs you won't know that the output doesn't actually work or doesn't do what you think it does since it was intended for a different situation.

I use it. It's good for boilerplate code or basically anything where you can avoid looking at the docs. For example, I was writing an ML training loop and it correctly filled in the rest of the function after I wrote the first few lines. The code is basically what's in the pytorch docs, just fit to my model and scenario.

I’ve spoken to no one who hasn’t agreed that copilot aids in discovery when:

- learning a new code base

- learning a new (popular) library

- learning a new language

You could compare it to, say, eslint but for other languages .

What is an idiomatic way of X with Y?

Well, copilot will give you the answer in 10-30 seconds less time than opening a browser and searching.

Im not going to argue it’s legal merits, but as a learning tool, it’s very much like having a smart linter.

The larger scale code generation is less obviously useful and usually wrong, I agree.

> "GitHub Copilot blocks your ability to learn." Is a common refrain.

On the contrary, it frequently suggests code that adhere to better practices.

A coworker of mine uses it, it almost seems like an unfair advantage but I can also use it too if I want to. Specifically writing hard to decipher code eg. functional composition but Copilot will spit it out.

I haven't wanted to use it personally. I'm also not a senior dev or anything so my opinion is not worth much.

The Internet blocks your ability to learn...

Everyone I've spoken to who has actually used it thinks it works extremely well. This includes pretty experienced developers.

I've never heard anyone claim it blocks the ability to learn - if anything it's the opposite. Many people like how it shows you APIs you weren't aware of.

I think copilot works very well.

But I did find that I need to turn it off at certain stages when learning (or re-learning) a programming language. It's seemed counterproductive until you have a good grasp on the basic syntax of the language. But the "showing you new APIs" does seem to be a thing that actually helps.

In general, you should not be accepting code completions that you don't understand. I'm usually stricter, in that I only typically accept completions that line up with what I was planning to type anyway.

That's been my experience.

It's good for learning new packages in Python.

It's quite poor for learning a totally new set of programming language grammar.

If you're a Javascript developer of 5+ years of experience, it's probably absolutely fantastic. Not so great if you're learning a new programming language.

I used it for about two weeks total, over two different periods. Mostly Kotlin, Java, Typescript, small amounts of Groovy. I ended up turning it off. In my experience, it has moments of utility, but most of time it felt like it was getting in the way. The kinds of things it completed well were not the kinds of things that cost a lot of time or mental energy. I found wasting more time trying to fix things that when it got close but not quite there, than it saved in spitting out boilerplate.

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