Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious to hear how others have found Copilot?

I've been using it the last few weeks and I find it kind of marginal in value.

It was quite helpful with filling out some kubernetes type details and it makes some decent guesses when declaring constants. I also had it rewrite a line of code to order keys in a string.

Otherwise I find you really have to keep an eye on what it's doing - even simple things like function invocations it can get wrong e.g. incorrect arguments being passed to a method (where argument types aren't even matching).

Also I guess results depend on the language - I tried to get it to write a simple golang http server with a handler and couldn't figure out how to prompt it to write one.

I'm actually looking forward to a better Gopilot. It seems like doomsdayers do well in getting publicity, but to me it feels more like a refactoring tool that can help to speed up the development process (and teach me a few things along the way).

I have a friend that's found ChatGPT helpful in a similar way... it's not quite right, but enough to get going in a direction. Dave's Garage on youtube did a decent walkthrough for working with ChatGPT, and was interresting.

It's definitely not at doomsayer levels, and don't think it will ever get there, you still have to understand enough to know if it's even right. Similar for general facts and writing things like research papers.

I'm using the davinci-3 model as a sort of programming macro. You need to know something about what you want to do and how you want to do it. Then you just poke the model so it gives you what you want. It's also very handy to have it mock test data and even write unit tests that aim to cover your cases as well. It's just fantastic.

It’s really good for rote stuff. In particular writing if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf(“helpful context: %w”, err) } in Go, or getting the structure for some YAML down so you can go off and edit it.

It’s also super helpful for languages whose ethe value building utility functions over importing them, like parsing environment variables into types in Python. So many people have written their own functions to do this that the training set is pretty good.

I can't seem to make copilot do very much. I can get davinci-3 to write all sorts of interesting functionality with a prompt, but copilot only wants to spit out a word or a line at a time rather than blocks of code. I signed up for code pilot thinking that's what I was going to get, and it has been really disappointing.

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