Article questioning the usefulness and legality of “the AI pair programmer”
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Meh. You can literally just use Copilot as an enhanced autocomplete, not using it in place of your creativity and design, but merely letting it finish your sentences the way you were planning to write them anyway. This is basically how I use it, and it’s a pretty good tool for that purpose.
How would you even use it as a design tool? The ways it can actually help you I’d doing menial stuff but you already more or less have to know what you want. It certainly isn’t doing any of the “hard” work for you.
You can write comments for the needed design/flow of giving blocks. It’ll do its best to fill in something that’ll mirror your description. Then you get to fix what it generated.
I find it more successful as a really advanced autocomplete.
I’ve actually had decent luck with it for big-picture questions. Like, “How do I go about accomplishing this, with this, given this?” It might list a few options, so when before I didn’t have a clue, now I have some ideas and can ask/Google the questions that I didn’t even know I didn’t have before. Of course, you’ve gotta use due diligence, don’t just take its word for it.
Sometimes even when I don’t get a good answer from it, it still breaks me out of the mind block I’m in, so I guess it’s helped me indirectly that way.
Oh yeah, absolutely, it’s great to get pointers in (usually) the right direction. But you’d still be hard pressed to execute on that fully including all the intermediary steps and (more importantly) solving for all edge cases and whatnot.
As a tool it’s definitely invaluable.
I don’t use copilot, but I use ChatGPT a lot. Not to write my code, but to talk things through and find solutions to strange behavior or errors. It has been a great resource and I feel it has improved my code overall. It’s just another tool.
One thing I wish there was were more plugins (and maybe I just don’t know of them) for like Kagi’s assistant, or other vendors than just OpenAI for something like CoPilot.
