this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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"Copilot is really good at things which I already know" and that is perfectly fine
Exactly.
It's to speed up boilerplate and save you having to look up function names or language specific syntax for that one feature you want to use, not to entirely do your job for you
If I've been working in the same language for at least a year or two, I don't have to look up any of that. Copilot might be actually helpful if I'm working in a language I'm not used to, but it's been a long time since I've had to look up syntax or functions (excluding 3rd party packages) for the language I work in.
Of course but presumably on occasion you do work in other languages? I work in all kinds of languages and so jumping between them it's pretty handy to bridge the gap
I think you could definitely still get value out of generating simple stuff though, at least for me it really helps get projects done quickly without burning myself out
For small one off scripts it makes them actually save more time than they take to write (for example colleague had to write the permissions of a bunch of files recursively into an excel doc, chatgpt did 90% of that I did 9 and he did 1 lol)
If I were jumping languages a lot, I definitely think it would be helpful. But pretty much 100% of what I've done for the last 3-4 years is Go (mostly) or JavaScript (occasionally). I have used chatgpt the few times I needed to work in some other language, but that has been pretty rare.
If simple stuff == for loops and basic boilerplate, the kind of stuff that copilot can autocomplete, I write that on autopilot and it doesn't really register. So it doesn't contribute to my burnout. If simple stuff == boring, boilerplate tests, I'll admit that I don't do nearly enough of that. But doing the 'prompt engineering' to get copilot to write that wasn't any less painful that writing it myself.
The other day I wrote a duplicate image detector for my sister (files recovered from a dying drive). In hindsight I could have asked chatgpt to do it. But it was something I've never done before and an interesting problem so it was more fun to do it myself. And most of the one off stuff I'm asked to do by coworkers is tied to our code and our system and not the kind of thing chatgpt would know how to do.