Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

For me, Copilot is like a smart snippets library. But like a snippets library, don't ever expect it to do something novel. It's great for boilerplate, documentation, obvious blocks of code, etc., but if there's any nuance or novelty, I've found I do best turning it off for a while.

Like others said, it also leads to a lot of code if you're lazy. Keep refactoring!

View on HN

What I love is how good it is at picking up my boilerplate. It learns very quickly my own patterns and saves me a lot of typing because of that.

This is low-key the best part. Mostly because it knows your code base, so it's like a Jr coder like "hey is this what you want?"

Sometimes it's not but it is enough to be very valuable.

Thats exactly how I described it to coworkers recently. Its like having a junior developer at your disposal that does all the boring and monotonous stuff. It's not doing anything crazy and new, that's why you still have a job.

I'll admit I don't leverage this savings into any massive productivity benefits that my CTO is going to notice, but it does significantly reduce my fatigue throughout the day which keeps me sharper, happier, and more energetic later into the day.

Yeah exactly. It's not a 10x thing but it decreases me mental load by maybe half. Let's me worry about bigger things.

It keeps suggesting code that doesn't work, like when I call three different setters it will suggest a setter that looks like it might fit but when I complete the suggestion it's a setter that doesn't exist. I find it very distracting and so far am unimpressed.

It's pretty good at writing tests, which makes sense really, as it can read the code and interpret what you want based other code and for a statically typed language, know what a function should return and it should asset for.

That's all I use it for, hashing out tests, and auto-completion of structs where is seems to figure out what I need quite well. For my main code , it's more of a case of 'go home co-pilot, you're drunk'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com