This finding bewilders me, because my copilot (I use Sourcegraph’s Cody) has become an essential part of my dev productivity toolset. Being able to get answers to questions that would normally break me out of flow mode by simply Option + C’ing to open up a New Chat has been a productivity boost for me. Getting it to give me little snippets of code that I can use helps keep me in flow mode. Getting it to do a first pass on function comments, which I then edit, has made it much easier to get over the activation energy barrier that usually holds me back from doing full commenting.

I can’t say if the bug count is higher or not. Maybe it is higher in terms of total number of bugs I write throughout my coding session. But if bug count goes up 10% then the speed with which I fix those bugs and get to a final edit of my code is 30% or 40% faster, so the bug count is not the right metric.

Maybe the differentiator is that I am a solo-dev for all this work, and so the negative effects of the copilot are only experienced by me. If I were in a 10 person team, the bugs and the weird out of context code snippets would be magnified by the 9 other people, and the negative effects would be strong. But I don’t know.