this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
61 points (98.4% liked)

Experienced Devs

3956 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

As a senior developer, I don't find copilot particularly useful. Maybe it would have been more useful earlier in my career, but at this point writing a prompt to get copilot to regurgitate useful code and massaging the resulting output almost always takes as much or more time as it would for me just to write whatever it is I need to write. If I am able to give copilot a sufficiently specific prompt that it can 'solve' my problem for me, I already know how to solve the problem and how to write the code. So all I'm doing is using copilot as a ghost writer instead of writing it myself. And it doesn't seem to be any faster. The autocomplete features are net helpful because they're actually what I want often enough to offset the cost of reading the suggestion and deciding if it's useful. But it's not a huge difference (vs writing it myself) so that by itself is not sufficiently useful to justify paying the cost myself nor sufficient motivation to go to the effort of convincing my employer to pay for it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Copilot and that whole model is a bunch of shit

Get Claude.ai, do the thing of pasting the code you want it to modify into the chat window, and it’ll spit back out some modified sections of code you can put back into the file. It is more time consuming, but it actually works.

For intense operations you can make a project, upload the main headers and documentation, and it’ll absorb them into its sphere of awareness and start being able to take account of them when it does the above in chats within that project.

It is not perfect (as no LLM assist is) but it saves a lot of time and is not beset with the growing incompetence and failure with which OpenAI seems to be afflicted more and more with every passing month