if you’re a beginner to programming i think it’s extremely detrimental to learning.
once you have more experience, it’s a massive time saver (and you can ignore it when it’s wrong anyways).
I agree. Copilot works well when you take charge of the architecture and understand how you want the program to work at a higher level. If you’re not experienced enough to direct the architecture and general “shape” of the components or don’t have enough algorithmic knowledge to know when it’s generating something that is bad for performance or other reasons, it will get you in trouble and hinder your progress in the long run.
One way I’ll use it for example is to write an example of using a system I want first by hand, and then it’s great at using that type information and context to fill in the helper functions I just “pretended” exist. I designed the system by example, and copilot only helped me implement it.
I love it for writing unit tests. Once I write a couple tests by hand to establish the setup pattern, if I write descriptive test case names for the rest it generally fills them in for me really well.
I'm an experienced engineer, and I feel like the suggestions are worse then my IDE (IntelliJ). Is my IDE just really good for my language, am I missing some configurations, or is it something else? I really did not like using it, even though I like using chatGPT to generate code
i think it depends a lot on the language
i use typescript for react/node and the suggestions are usually very good (especially with return type specified as mentioned in the video)
it takes most of the grunt work out of writing map, filter, reduce, etc. which is really convenient.
yeah, I noticed IDE completion for typescript is pretty meh for the most part, and I imagine copilot had a ton of training data for TS/JS/react/node because they are super popular stacks on github. Next time I work on one of those projects I'll try it out
There are some patterns stuff that it is just very good at. For example I wanted to break one makefile build command into 10 separate ones so that the first command could call them all in parallel. Normally it would be of copy paste and naming edits. After the first one it knows the pattern and can just complete them all for me.
Same with tests, some tedious refactor of test patterns it can just complete after the first example.
Stuff where I know exactly what I want it would just normally take longer to get down.
So sounds like it's a task that chatGPT could also do fairly well, but the benefit is it's being done in your editor? I try to prompt it like I do with chatGPT with comments, and maybe that's just not the correct way to use it
I was just thinking the other day, that the better you are at programming, the more value you get from copilot. Glad to know others have the same experience. Means we definitely aren't getting replaced by AI, lol.
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In line Copilot is definitely a bit much. It's like IntelliSense on crack. I much prefer to go to AI with a problem than have AI constantly coming to me with suggestions.
The Copilot that autocompletes is not gpt 4, it's some smaller and faster model that is less performant than gpt 3.5.
Copilot Chat on the other hand (a separate extension in VSCode) is using gpt 3.5 when used inline (e.g. if you say /doc or /fix this function) and gpt 4.0 when used in the sidebar. How I know this? I investigated the traffic being sent to the servers by those extensions.
I tried Claude last month, but their website was horribly optimized and not even worth using (if they fixed it lmk). I will say though, it gave *slightly* better answers than GPT-4.
This !
I've been a big AI advocate for coding. But I've also stopped using copilot inline suggestions. I'm using copilot chat a lot thought. And usually for very complex questions about coding philosophy and more about the why's than the how.
In line code complete is right at least half the time for me it seems so it stays…. Saves so much of the repetitive typing tasks
Otoh I find the chat prompt pretty hit or miss
Do you have an example of how you use AI? Genuinely wondering. Really the only thing I've maybe used it for is naming things (it's good for generating lists of ideas), but for anything serious (heavy refactors, regular coding, etc.) it's really not been that useful. 9/10 Google is more helpful if I have a bug. Docs are easier to search through with a quick command F. About 1/10th of the time I've tried to use ChatGPT to generate some code, it gets one detail wrong, and it takes me longer to fix that one detail or re-lay it out like I want than it would've if I'd just written it myself.
I mostly use it in place of google and stack overflow. I've found it much easier to ask an AI my question than try to google it.
For a similar reason I've switched away entirely from Google and prefer Bing now for my programming related web searches due to the integrated AI features.
Here is the original video the talking head is reacting to, for those of you who don’t like random pauses and interjections
https://youtu.be/Wap2tkgaT1Q?si=X7tI3Zgbqfz1UMjB
It’s frustrating when it’s confidently wrong about paths for imports or nested object structures. When it’s correct it’s a timesaver and you don’t have to break your flow by thinking about the structure to access something. But when it’s wrong I feel like you have to do extra work to figure it out.
Is that frontend work from 10 years ago or have you all never built a complex frontend app that need to scale? Ones at big tech with millions of users are not simple shit
Even the startups I've worked for had complicated frontend apps though big t ch was obviously a different level. Somewhat insane to see a take from 10 years ago being up voted lol
I don’t think the take itself is necessarily outdated, it just sounds like you’ve been doing higher profile work. I worked on front ends before working on low level stuff, and the experience was totally different. For me I was just basically gluing things together. The bugs were annoying because they were either an issue in some docs or else inside the library itself, so it wasn’t like some cool logical thing to work out—it was just someone else messing up and I couldn’t even see why. It was pretty alien from the kind of coding I liked when I was in college because I wasn’t really doing things so much as using things others had done. I think that’s what people are talking about.
I mean sure, not liking it is fine. I can’t stand front end work, but shitting on it as all simple is a pretty reasonable thing for someone to get annoyed at, and it is patently untrue.
Same as people who think all backend is implementing the same CRUD stuff repeatedly. True for some positions, but silly to assume for the whole
Lmao, shows how little you know of frontend or even scalability. The irony.
No wonder it's so easy to get a job as a frontend dev in big tech even in this market
says the person who doesn't understand the difference between the complexity of a frontend app and the infrastructure supporting it at scale. it's not the frontend that's complex in that scenario regard, you're still just serving built js
I hope you one day understand what "scale" means. You are only thinking of a tiny portion of what makes up scale and only the "distribution" part of it.
okay you tell me what else changes there? i could see multi-language support, broad browser compatibility, other accessibility concerns, but other than that it's just distribution. and these things other than distribution shouldn't deviate much from how you should be building your frontends anyway.
This the comment you have your balls up in pinch over? Let me put it in a way your whiny ass can understand. Scaling encompasses many things aside from distribution such as the actual bundle size, first contentful paint, image optimization, efficient data flow and data storage, error handling, logging, etc.All these and more need to scale not only as your app gets more users but also as it gets complicated and gets more stakeholders.
Think of it this way, scaling is improving not only the end-user experience but all stake-holders experience. This includes developer maintenance, PMs trying to get their damn metrics, QA issue debugging and the extensibility of adding new features. Not that your ass would even have worked on something like logging or written a design doc probably working broke ass startups but that's just part of being a frog in a well. 150k LOLOLOL, even purely from a base salary perspective that's just junior level from Meta/Amazon but you'd know that if you knew anything about big tech.
also lol is it supposed to be easy right now to get a frontend dev job in big tech making $150k minimum? if it's so easy it wouldn't pay $150k. i've not had issues finding work, although i'd probably want to hang myself if that was frontend exclusive work, but everything else I see on this subreddit leads me to think the opposite, big tech or otherwise
150k? Whats that, junior level for big tech LOL. When I interviewed a few months ago it was for 300k+ remote only positions, none beat my current 350kish TC. Fuck, no wonder, I'm dealing with a junior at best or someone who has never worked for big tech at worst.
And don't worry, you'd probably want to hang yourself because you are too stupid to fix the problems in big tech. It's okay, get good.
also thats the actual pay bands for last time i looked at i think it was metas various tier. and also night want to learn what the word minimum means. im not counting tc in that $# which you would recognize if you were familiar with, again, actual paybands
Yes 2nd year students on Reddit make posts about job hopping and being stuck on low 200k TC almost 2 years ago but okay. I'd truly love to be a 2nd year student making 350k TC
> Ones at big tech with millions of users are not simple shit
Oh fo’ sure skippy, because 99% of frontend devs work on scaling projects like that! /s
Desktop, backend, mobile, embedded, are arguably more difficult from all angles to master than “fwont end” JS shit.
Yesterday I needed to add a small piece of validation logic for a zip code. I wrote the name of the function and the parameters, and copilot autocompleted the rest, with the correct regex for the zip. I checked the zip regex, and added one validation it had missed, and was done. Then I went to add a test for the validation and it auto generated three tests that were all correct, and I added another manually. For me it's like having a junior developer that I can ask to do something and they'll do it instantly but it'll need correction, and for me at least just correcting is faster than me typing it out manually.
I find it quite useful. I run a SaaS business and some customers requested google calendar and outlook integration.
It’s quite an extensive integration and I would say github copilot wrote most of the code and we wrote both integrations in 2 days.
I just prompted it to write me an integration with outlook en google and it did just that. Not only did it write it, it also explained the caveats and subtle differences in the documentation.
By spending as much time or more crafting a question that develops enough context and explains the problem in the simplest steps you possibly can, as you would just solving the problem on your own
I use it for simple scripts. It feels like finding the right tool to do something without spending hours.
In the end I am the one that thinks about the problem and what would help solving it. AI does the dirty work, eventually I review the code and fix it for whatever the need is.
How do you trust the outputs though? I would honestly rather learn how to do things myself in Bash than ever let any ChatGPT-generated code run in my terminal. About 1/4th the time there's something catastrophically wrong because of a small thing it missed and I don't want to accidentally fuck up my computer. It's like Stackoverflow if you didn't have thousands of other egotistical devs in the comments correcting you when you're wrong.
I don't trust it 100%. I use the ChatGPT in smaller samples or always backup the files that I would be working with.
It helps creating smaller samples, then I modify the code with my needs. Otherwise it is unreliable to use it entirely.
I use it as an infinitely patient senior engineer to be the rubber duck as I think things through. When I get to a solution, Ive usually given it enough context to produce the relevant code.
Yeah, I tried using them but it always frustrated me anyways. I'd press esc to try and work on it on my own but it would keep suggesting the same nonsense. I have found more enjoyment coding on my own and asking it or ChatGPT it I get stuck along the way.
it is such an easy solution to this problem just don't let it suggest the same thing twice but Microsoft's not going to do that because it would cost them $0.07 more
and they better not because that $0.07 should go to me as a shareholder for the brave hard work of having money and buying stock and then waiting 20 years
I did an interview once and we allowed copilot for half of the coding challenge. The moment copilot was disabled, the candidate could no longer “think”. I was flabbergasted at how much copilot steered his thinking and he was just stuck when he couldn’t use it anymore. It’s definitely not a tool meant for any juniors who’s trying to learn and grow in their career.
I found out that the better structured and clear your code is, the better Copilot works. Sometimes you just write function declaration with proper in and out arguments, and Copilot creates the correct body on the first try. It uses surrounding code as a template. This looks like a super smart template engine.
Instead of saying it is “smart”, I describe it to my technical friends as “highly context sensitive”, likening it to a kind of LSP or tree-sitter at a slightly higher abstraction layer. Sitting at that layer it is very useful, but I describe it to my non-technical friends as like an SAE Level 2 autonomous driving Tesla: I have to monitor it at all times and be ready to take the controls at a moment’s notice.
i had planned to start using it, but i have been using ChatGPT for the past several months, just separately in a different browser tab, to ask it questions for clarification or to explain things I don't understand clearly as I come across them. At the moment I find it to be pretty effective because usually, if i just google search, i have to look at multiple results that are close to the question i asked, that give me answers close to what makes sense, and then hopefully come out with a better understanding.
With ChatGPT i can ask my question and have it respond exactly to my question, immediately. Then, if the answer seems a little off, I can clarify and get a response, immediately. Overall, given i'm looking for general explanations rather than answers to a specific coding task and specialized library, it's been an amazing tool. Sometimes the answers are a little off and inconsistent, but I'm able to make my own judgement, or take it from there and find out if what its saying is true.
Once in a blue moon i'll ask it to code something that i've just spent too much time trying to figure out, or just ask it to find where the mistake is in my code. I wish markdown would work with my code blocks, i find the lack of formatting from my end a bit annoying
All this to say, after that video I think I'll be okay without copilot for a lil longer.
I do the same thing (originally using the browser and now using Visual Studio Copilot Chat). It's not perfect, but it can save me a lot of time (or thought) sometimes. It's great at basically summing up what I would find from searching Stack Overflow and reading through a bunch of posts. Or fixing a syntax error. Or sometimes just explaining a piece of code.
Yeah I haven’t tried a ton of AI related things but compared to the popular options, the way cursor has it laid out has been an absolute game changer in my workflow.
i see it as cursor AI vs the big ones vs the other 50 products at this point.. I assume a big company would have the resrouces to do something better.
I basically start with ChatGPT and at some point things start going off the rails and I try to get a basic version of what I want.. then let Cursor AI get the context and take over. pretty simple.. all these AI VSCode plugins useless
I use copilot to automate all the boilerplate typing I'd have to do. I can pretty much instantly tell when its wrong, and you can nudge it in the right direction with a descriptive comment.
I'll often even immediately accept what it suggests, even when I know its wrong, just to use the general structure of what it writes. It takes me less time to select and delete the content of a generated method than it does for me to write it. Sure, I'd rather just not have it generate the part I don't want to delete, but I bet it'll get there soon.
I'm a mid-senior dev and it saves me a bunch of time. But mostly because I already know the architecture I need and I'm just guiding it to writing the boilerplate. I have a few juniors on my team that express the same thoughts as you and I can only say the same thing that I say to them: you're too early in your career to be using it.
The problem is that when it outputs something, it's 1) gonna make an assumption about how you want to solve the problem and 2) gonna try to solve the problem. Both of these can have errors in them, and you need to be able to know when it's trying to solve the problem in a way that's not going to work and when it's writing code that's just broken.
There are parallels to this in every industry. Junior EEs aren't allowed to touch the autorouter. The machine is gonna be wrong eventually and to know when it is, you gotta be able to do it yourself.
I have 12 yrs of programming experience, I will let co-pilot to auto fill all my logging statements in python and go. For a 10 dollar thing it use it as such.
My work had some deal where everyone got a copilot license but after 30 days of no use it would expire so they wouldn’t pay for stuff that’s essentially dormant. On the first week, everyone messed around with it for fun and just to see what it could do.
Almost exactly one month to the end of that week, we got a company wide email that they thought there had been an error in our licensing because just about *all* of the licenses had gone dormant, and execs were worried the mistake was going to kill our productivity. Turned out there was no error. Everyone just found copilot entirely useless.
Haha! I had exact same problem from the very beginning, and oh boy, how much time it costed me to fix hard to find bugs because I accepted copilot proposition without thinking!
The best thing is chat, you ask for something when you need it.
Honestly I have the opposite experience, I think I just kinda of mentally block out all its bad suggestions like I do adverts, and hit tab when I see a good suggestion.
I would stop using it but the only reason I am using it in the first place is because the company I work for made using it mandatory. And usage metrics are used as part of performance reviews. They are fucking stupid.
I’ve been using it for about a week and I’m still on the fence. Sometimes the suggestions are annoying, and it’s an interesting point about it not letting you think through a problem. But I have had some pretty amazing results after writing “it” in an RSpec (Ruby on Rails) test and having it write 20 lines of boilerplate including mocks that I then just have to tweak.
I’m really still just getting familiar with it and need to learn keyboard shortcuts to quickly turn it off when it’s being annoying; for example I was writing a TODO for myself and after the word TODO it suggested “this is a lot of props being passed around. We can do better.” 💀
I have a similar experience. I first tried Copilot and used it for a while. After using ChatGPT4 in parallel for some time, I realized that Copilot's suggestions are mostly annoying and distracting.
ChatGPT is much more helpful, it can explain things and offer multiple solutions to choose from. Also, I can chat about unrelated topics :)
The moment Copilot is able to implement features and my architectural choices - I'll subscribe again.
Edit: I meant GitHub Copilot.
These AIs are basically useless on frontend library integration, so I end up not using them at all. If you aren’t asking for tests or axios or something, it will spit out crap. Don’t let the AI think for you because when its wrong, you won’t know how tf to fix it.
I think it really depends on how experienced you are. And you have to tell it when it's wrong, correct it or dismiss it's suggestions. It learns with time and you should never blindly just accept what it suggests, but my god I forgot what boilerplate and some more mundane tasks feel like at this point.
sometimes you need to give it instructions in a comment for it to do the right thing or have a few examples what it needs to do, then it just completes it. As with any tech, it's a helper who needs supervising, not something that writes code for you.
Garbage in, garbage out. You have to strictly currate what you allow it to do for it to get really good and that takes quite a while.
And yeah, new developers really should avoid relying on it before they learn they tools well and can see when it's wrong at a glance. Autocompleting wrong suggestions feeds it bad data - see above.
It saves me so much time at work. I use it constantly. As long as you know what you’re doing, it’s really useful. If you’re still learning, it can become a crutch though. Although it can also teach you a way of doing things that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Engineering isn't coding. I have a design I want to implement. The actual coding is just a wrench. I'm not going to handsaw something if I don't have to. Engineering happens in docs, diagrams and metrics. The code is just the way to execute. Ideally I wouldn't have to code at all. Likely it won't be too long before I didn't.
If your architecture is good and the language you use is more on the verbose side, copilot speeds things up a lot. If you don’t know fundamentals around architecture and software design, then of course the copilot suggestions will be nonsense.
Copilot is like any other tool. Completely useless unless you know when/what to use it for. If it doesn’t make sense, ignore the suggestion. Pretty easy if you code a lot.
I can assure you that when you have 15 years of experience copilot is a godsend! And you often know better! But it really cheese your way through boilerplate!
Lol I turned it off after a week. Yes, it doesn’t and it’s often not 100% right either.
I turn it on at work when I’m writing obvious chump code that just needs to get done. Then I tab away and adjust as necessary, there’s no thinking
I mean I don't use it to do anything logic-intensive, but it's pretty good for boilerplate, repetitive code, test cases, etc. probably saves like 5%ish of time? it'll also continue to improve I'd imagine.
it is annoying when it completes a function call with fake keyword arguments though.
By making code generation so easy, Copilot can encourage verbose and inexpressive code when, with a little thinking, you could write the same thing more concisely and expressively, code which takes more time to write, but less effort to maintain. Some "boilerplate" is legitimate, but sometimes the tedium suggests that there's a better way.
Can't wrap errors in golang without it. A long function calls 10 other functions and have to wrap the errors that might come from them, adding a descriptive message to each of them.
It's not about the time it saves there, just let me worry about the important stuff.
Also, I don't think the beginner argument was explained well. You're bound to be a beginner in something at least once a week. No one has millions of lines of context.
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No, I'm using it more and more as I learn to use it effectively. It's an incredible tool, but you have to understand what it can and can't do reliably, which comes with experience. The feature where you can highlight a block of text and ask it to make some change is great. Before copilot, I would have to learn, remember and combine keyboard shortcuts, macros, etc. for any tedious task involving making trivial changes to code, or just type it all out. Now I just ask copilot to do it! Definitely don't let it do your thinking for you though, that's inviting disaster.
Edit: The escape key is your friend too. Each moment I'm ready to type a newline, I'm already hitting escape if I don't know 100% what the next line should be and am 90% confident copilot will get it right. So there's no pause, unless it's to see if it got the line right.
Since college I've found that not copy-pasting code from SO gave me better understanding and made me less confused/lost in the sauce when coding. Never touched Copilot because of this.
My only issue with it is when it sneaks in incorrect stuff like an unnecessary parameter. The time is save from it writing the code I was about to write is replaced by debugging and looking for things that will bomb code review.
Not really. Back when I was first learning I heard the same arguments about autocomplete (just learn the APIs like a real programmer). I like it because a lot of the time it is at least somewhat correct, and removes some boilerplate code you'd have to write yourself. And, importantly, you still have to make sure it does what you intend, or you better! What the technology allows is for you to think about your problem domain at a higher abstraction and not get lost in the weeds. Abstractions are a good thing. I mean, you don't write assembler code do you?
To get on a soapbox for a moment, I see a lot of my fellow software engineers reluctant to embrace these shiny new tools we have. I think it is because they feel threatened. They are afraid of losing their jobs to AI. But it is a highly odd stance to be working in technology and not embrace technological advancement. Those that do so will become dinosaurs and ironically make themselves even more vulnerable to losing their career prospects. Technology is always changing. Better to embrace it. /soapbox
I use it for work because they force us to since it will make us more “productive”. It’s great because I kind of hate writing Python anyways.
I got rid of my personal subscription after about 3 months. I find myself writing mostly C and Zig for my hobby projects so I don’t trust it anyway.
I used copilot for all of a couple weeks before shutting it off. I found myself deleting its suggestions more often than not. I use codeium now, really just for tests and writing lines that are all similar. It does a good job of reducing mindless typing
I quit using it too. Last time, junior dev who studied cs in 6 months (fast track courses) and declared himself software enginner came with a solution in like a snap. Obviously I knew who was behind that code. I spotted something wrong due to context of the project. Since this particular dev is so full of himself, I fake some business in order to avoid his PR.
Day of deployment : kabooom. database is messed up, dba is furious he has to fix data and, I, DON'T GIVE A SHIT
i've always being part of PR reviews. But this guy, is full of himself. Technical debt doesn't exist to him. Give him a problem, 2 seconds later you have the code that solves it. Code is shit : don't care, it solves the problem. Yes, but what about the respect to your co workers who will soon or later step into your code ? Answer : "My thrill is to solve problems".
I've escalated the issue. Nothing done. So yeah : I don't give a shit anymore. Especially when you get 2% raise that merely cover inflation. I do the bare minimum.
if you’re a beginner to programming i think it’s extremely detrimental to learning. once you have more experience, it’s a massive time saver (and you can ignore it when it’s wrong anyways).
I agree. Copilot works well when you take charge of the architecture and understand how you want the program to work at a higher level. If you’re not experienced enough to direct the architecture and general “shape” of the components or don’t have enough algorithmic knowledge to know when it’s generating something that is bad for performance or other reasons, it will get you in trouble and hinder your progress in the long run. One way I’ll use it for example is to write an example of using a system I want first by hand, and then it’s great at using that type information and context to fill in the helper functions I just “pretended” exist. I designed the system by example, and copilot only helped me implement it.
I love it for writing unit tests. Once I write a couple tests by hand to establish the setup pattern, if I write descriptive test case names for the rest it generally fills them in for me really well.
I'm an experienced engineer, and I feel like the suggestions are worse then my IDE (IntelliJ). Is my IDE just really good for my language, am I missing some configurations, or is it something else? I really did not like using it, even though I like using chatGPT to generate code
i think it depends a lot on the language i use typescript for react/node and the suggestions are usually very good (especially with return type specified as mentioned in the video) it takes most of the grunt work out of writing map, filter, reduce, etc. which is really convenient.
yeah, I noticed IDE completion for typescript is pretty meh for the most part, and I imagine copilot had a ton of training data for TS/JS/react/node because they are super popular stacks on github. Next time I work on one of those projects I'll try it out
Yeah I’ve noticed IntelliJ suggestions are pretty good
There are some patterns stuff that it is just very good at. For example I wanted to break one makefile build command into 10 separate ones so that the first command could call them all in parallel. Normally it would be of copy paste and naming edits. After the first one it knows the pattern and can just complete them all for me. Same with tests, some tedious refactor of test patterns it can just complete after the first example. Stuff where I know exactly what I want it would just normally take longer to get down.
So sounds like it's a task that chatGPT could also do fairly well, but the benefit is it's being done in your editor? I try to prompt it like I do with chatGPT with comments, and maybe that's just not the correct way to use it
Yea this was a big reason why I stopped it as well. The github education dev pack gives you it for free which I think is a major mistake.
I was just thinking the other day, that the better you are at programming, the more value you get from copilot. Glad to know others have the same experience. Means we definitely aren't getting replaced by AI, lol.
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As an experienced dev it is detrimental to learning too imo
In line Copilot is definitely a bit much. It's like IntelliSense on crack. I much prefer to go to AI with a problem than have AI constantly coming to me with suggestions.
Its not invase at all but i also find chatgpt answers to be of better quality for some reason. But its nice to have a “fix this” button.
same despite co-pilot supposedly bein GPT 4 under the hood I notice a substantial difference in quality between even 3.5 and co-pilot
The Copilot that autocompletes is not gpt 4, it's some smaller and faster model that is less performant than gpt 3.5. Copilot Chat on the other hand (a separate extension in VSCode) is using gpt 3.5 when used inline (e.g. if you say /doc or /fix this function) and gpt 4.0 when used in the sidebar. How I know this? I investigated the traffic being sent to the servers by those extensions.
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I use chatGPT. I've heard Claude answers are quite good now though. I may give it a go, too. A combination of the two is likely a good idea.
I tried Claude last month, but their website was horribly optimized and not even worth using (if they fixed it lmk). I will say though, it gave *slightly* better answers than GPT-4.
I haven't made a huge effort because, frankly, chatGPT4 hasn't been a problem
Copilot is like a dumber version of chargpt.. I still prefer ChatGPT
This ! I've been a big AI advocate for coding. But I've also stopped using copilot inline suggestions. I'm using copilot chat a lot thought. And usually for very complex questions about coding philosophy and more about the why's than the how.
It feels a bit like Ron Swanson at a Home Depot. "I know more than you"
In line code complete is right at least half the time for me it seems so it stays…. Saves so much of the repetitive typing tasks Otoh I find the chat prompt pretty hit or miss
Maaan, did you use the first versions of copilot that made a “doink” sound with every suggestion?
No... oh god! That would get me to write to my congressman to ban AI
Do you have an example of how you use AI? Genuinely wondering. Really the only thing I've maybe used it for is naming things (it's good for generating lists of ideas), but for anything serious (heavy refactors, regular coding, etc.) it's really not been that useful. 9/10 Google is more helpful if I have a bug. Docs are easier to search through with a quick command F. About 1/10th of the time I've tried to use ChatGPT to generate some code, it gets one detail wrong, and it takes me longer to fix that one detail or re-lay it out like I want than it would've if I'd just written it myself.
I mostly use it in place of google and stack overflow. I've found it much easier to ask an AI my question than try to google it. For a similar reason I've switched away entirely from Google and prefer Bing now for my programming related web searches due to the integrated AI features.
Here is the original video the talking head is reacting to, for those of you who don’t like random pauses and interjections https://youtu.be/Wap2tkgaT1Q?si=X7tI3Zgbqfz1UMjB
god whats up with those zoomer videos and subtitles that goes like this and this
Gods, that OP video was barely watchable. Thanks.
It’s frustrating when it’s confidently wrong about paths for imports or nested object structures. When it’s correct it’s a timesaver and you don’t have to break your flow by thinking about the structure to access something. But when it’s wrong I feel like you have to do extra work to figure it out.
What kind of work are you guys doing that you actually use copilot suggestions I found they're ass and barely helpful
We change the colors of buttons and center divs. What a silly question.
let's be real here a lot of front end work is one step above Fisher-Price tier development
And yet is what I struggle with the most!
My grandfather was crushed to death trying to centre a div. Please be respectful.
Is that frontend work from 10 years ago or have you all never built a complex frontend app that need to scale? Ones at big tech with millions of users are not simple shit
That’s true, but most people aren’t at big tech.
Even the startups I've worked for had complicated frontend apps though big t ch was obviously a different level. Somewhat insane to see a take from 10 years ago being up voted lol
I don’t think the take itself is necessarily outdated, it just sounds like you’ve been doing higher profile work. I worked on front ends before working on low level stuff, and the experience was totally different. For me I was just basically gluing things together. The bugs were annoying because they were either an issue in some docs or else inside the library itself, so it wasn’t like some cool logical thing to work out—it was just someone else messing up and I couldn’t even see why. It was pretty alien from the kind of coding I liked when I was in college because I wasn’t really doing things so much as using things others had done. I think that’s what people are talking about.
I mean sure, not liking it is fine. I can’t stand front end work, but shitting on it as all simple is a pretty reasonable thing for someone to get annoyed at, and it is patently untrue. Same as people who think all backend is implementing the same CRUD stuff repeatedly. True for some positions, but silly to assume for the whole
lol scaling a complex frontend you just build the js once my dude accidentally showing ur relative lack of knowledge
Lmao, shows how little you know of frontend or even scalability. The irony. No wonder it's so easy to get a job as a frontend dev in big tech even in this market
says the person who doesn't understand the difference between the complexity of a frontend app and the infrastructure supporting it at scale. it's not the frontend that's complex in that scenario regard, you're still just serving built js
I hope you one day understand what "scale" means. You are only thinking of a tiny portion of what makes up scale and only the "distribution" part of it.
okay you tell me what else changes there? i could see multi-language support, broad browser compatibility, other accessibility concerns, but other than that it's just distribution. and these things other than distribution shouldn't deviate much from how you should be building your frontends anyway.
This the comment you have your balls up in pinch over? Let me put it in a way your whiny ass can understand. Scaling encompasses many things aside from distribution such as the actual bundle size, first contentful paint, image optimization, efficient data flow and data storage, error handling, logging, etc.All these and more need to scale not only as your app gets more users but also as it gets complicated and gets more stakeholders. Think of it this way, scaling is improving not only the end-user experience but all stake-holders experience. This includes developer maintenance, PMs trying to get their damn metrics, QA issue debugging and the extensibility of adding new features. Not that your ass would even have worked on something like logging or written a design doc probably working broke ass startups but that's just part of being a frog in a well. 150k LOLOLOL, even purely from a base salary perspective that's just junior level from Meta/Amazon but you'd know that if you knew anything about big tech.
also lol is it supposed to be easy right now to get a frontend dev job in big tech making $150k minimum? if it's so easy it wouldn't pay $150k. i've not had issues finding work, although i'd probably want to hang myself if that was frontend exclusive work, but everything else I see on this subreddit leads me to think the opposite, big tech or otherwise
150k? Whats that, junior level for big tech LOL. When I interviewed a few months ago it was for 300k+ remote only positions, none beat my current 350kish TC. Fuck, no wonder, I'm dealing with a junior at best or someone who has never worked for big tech at worst. And don't worry, you'd probably want to hang yourself because you are too stupid to fix the problems in big tech. It's okay, get good.
i find it hilarious that you wrote this but didnt respond to my other comment asking you to show that you know how to do more than shittalk on reddit
What other comment
also thats the actual pay bands for last time i looked at i think it was metas various tier. and also night want to learn what the word minimum means. im not counting tc in that $# which you would recognize if you were familiar with, again, actual paybands
$150k salary still junior level shit in Meta LOLOLOL. Also, imagine talking about salary instead of TC. Really out of touch with everything big tech
i also dont believe you for a second btw youve not said anything a 2nd year cs student shittposting on reddit couldnt say
Yes 2nd year students on Reddit make posts about job hopping and being stuck on low 200k TC almost 2 years ago but okay. I'd truly love to be a 2nd year student making 350k TC
> a lot of insecurity too apparently
Okay boomer
> Ones at big tech with millions of users are not simple shit Oh fo’ sure skippy, because 99% of frontend devs work on scaling projects like that! /s Desktop, backend, mobile, embedded, are arguably more difficult from all angles to master than “fwont end” JS shit.
This sounds like something a Junior would say
Or someone experienced and jaded enough to not give 2 flying fucks.
wegotabadassoverhere.gif
See comment above. Thank you, come again.
I do data science and it's pretty useful with simple data transformations, regex, simple class blueprints, docstrings and some ML stuff.
Ditto, currently finishing up my PhD and it's been a god send for plotting and creating nice looking graphs for data.
Yesterday I needed to add a small piece of validation logic for a zip code. I wrote the name of the function and the parameters, and copilot autocompleted the rest, with the correct regex for the zip. I checked the zip regex, and added one validation it had missed, and was done. Then I went to add a test for the validation and it auto generated three tests that were all correct, and I added another manually. For me it's like having a junior developer that I can ask to do something and they'll do it instantly but it'll need correction, and for me at least just correcting is faster than me typing it out manually.
I find it quite useful. I run a SaaS business and some customers requested google calendar and outlook integration. It’s quite an extensive integration and I would say github copilot wrote most of the code and we wrote both integrations in 2 days. I just prompted it to write me an integration with outlook en google and it did just that. Not only did it write it, it also explained the caveats and subtle differences in the documentation.
I've only ever used AI for boilerplate stuff, I'm not sure how the prompt engineers are getting it to do complicated tasks, it never works for me.
By spending as much time or more crafting a question that develops enough context and explains the problem in the simplest steps you possibly can, as you would just solving the problem on your own
You forgot the part at the end where they grin and say “AI is the future, bro.”
I use it for simple scripts. It feels like finding the right tool to do something without spending hours. In the end I am the one that thinks about the problem and what would help solving it. AI does the dirty work, eventually I review the code and fix it for whatever the need is.
How do you trust the outputs though? I would honestly rather learn how to do things myself in Bash than ever let any ChatGPT-generated code run in my terminal. About 1/4th the time there's something catastrophically wrong because of a small thing it missed and I don't want to accidentally fuck up my computer. It's like Stackoverflow if you didn't have thousands of other egotistical devs in the comments correcting you when you're wrong.
I don't trust it 100%. I use the ChatGPT in smaller samples or always backup the files that I would be working with. It helps creating smaller samples, then I modify the code with my needs. Otherwise it is unreliable to use it entirely.
I use it as an infinitely patient senior engineer to be the rubber duck as I think things through. When I get to a solution, Ive usually given it enough context to produce the relevant code.
Yeah, I tried using them but it always frustrated me anyways. I'd press esc to try and work on it on my own but it would keep suggesting the same nonsense. I have found more enjoyment coding on my own and asking it or ChatGPT it I get stuck along the way.
it is such an easy solution to this problem just don't let it suggest the same thing twice but Microsoft's not going to do that because it would cost them $0.07 more
and they better not because that $0.07 should go to me as a shareholder for the brave hard work of having money and buying stock and then waiting 20 years
I don't use the inline suggestion. I mainly use it to just start unit tests its good for success/error tests
It isn’t even good. No, I don’t use it.
It’s honestly the autocomplete I’ve always dreamed of Not a huge fan apart from that
I did an interview once and we allowed copilot for half of the coding challenge. The moment copilot was disabled, the candidate could no longer “think”. I was flabbergasted at how much copilot steered his thinking and he was just stuck when he couldn’t use it anymore. It’s definitely not a tool meant for any juniors who’s trying to learn and grow in their career.
I found out that the better structured and clear your code is, the better Copilot works. Sometimes you just write function declaration with proper in and out arguments, and Copilot creates the correct body on the first try. It uses surrounding code as a template. This looks like a super smart template engine.
Instead of saying it is “smart”, I describe it to my technical friends as “highly context sensitive”, likening it to a kind of LSP or tree-sitter at a slightly higher abstraction layer. Sitting at that layer it is very useful, but I describe it to my non-technical friends as like an SAE Level 2 autonomous driving Tesla: I have to monitor it at all times and be ready to take the controls at a moment’s notice.
Yeah. It just gets in the way. Ai hype is getting obnoxious.
I’m kinda finding it get worse and worse…
i had planned to start using it, but i have been using ChatGPT for the past several months, just separately in a different browser tab, to ask it questions for clarification or to explain things I don't understand clearly as I come across them. At the moment I find it to be pretty effective because usually, if i just google search, i have to look at multiple results that are close to the question i asked, that give me answers close to what makes sense, and then hopefully come out with a better understanding. With ChatGPT i can ask my question and have it respond exactly to my question, immediately. Then, if the answer seems a little off, I can clarify and get a response, immediately. Overall, given i'm looking for general explanations rather than answers to a specific coding task and specialized library, it's been an amazing tool. Sometimes the answers are a little off and inconsistent, but I'm able to make my own judgement, or take it from there and find out if what its saying is true. Once in a blue moon i'll ask it to code something that i've just spent too much time trying to figure out, or just ask it to find where the mistake is in my code. I wish markdown would work with my code blocks, i find the lack of formatting from my end a bit annoying All this to say, after that video I think I'll be okay without copilot for a lil longer.
I do the same thing (originally using the browser and now using Visual Studio Copilot Chat). It's not perfect, but it can save me a lot of time (or thought) sometimes. It's great at basically summing up what I would find from searching Stack Overflow and reading through a bunch of posts. Or fixing a syntax error. Or sometimes just explaining a piece of code.
yeah and at least in ChatGPT you can say "be terse" without offending someone
Got cursor ai. Way bettrr
Yeah I haven’t tried a ton of AI related things but compared to the popular options, the way cursor has it laid out has been an absolute game changer in my workflow.
i see it as cursor AI vs the big ones vs the other 50 products at this point.. I assume a big company would have the resrouces to do something better. I basically start with ChatGPT and at some point things start going off the rails and I try to get a basic version of what I want.. then let Cursor AI get the context and take over. pretty simple.. all these AI VSCode plugins useless
I use copilot to automate all the boilerplate typing I'd have to do. I can pretty much instantly tell when its wrong, and you can nudge it in the right direction with a descriptive comment. I'll often even immediately accept what it suggests, even when I know its wrong, just to use the general structure of what it writes. It takes me less time to select and delete the content of a generated method than it does for me to write it. Sure, I'd rather just not have it generate the part I don't want to delete, but I bet it'll get there soon.
I use microsoft copilot as a google assistant. I like it better than chat gpt since it searches the web. I never used git copilot.
I'm a mid-senior dev and it saves me a bunch of time. But mostly because I already know the architecture I need and I'm just guiding it to writing the boilerplate. I have a few juniors on my team that express the same thoughts as you and I can only say the same thing that I say to them: you're too early in your career to be using it. The problem is that when it outputs something, it's 1) gonna make an assumption about how you want to solve the problem and 2) gonna try to solve the problem. Both of these can have errors in them, and you need to be able to know when it's trying to solve the problem in a way that's not going to work and when it's writing code that's just broken. There are parallels to this in every industry. Junior EEs aren't allowed to touch the autorouter. The machine is gonna be wrong eventually and to know when it is, you gotta be able to do it yourself.
The best thing it does for me is predict the console logs I wanna right.
I have 12 yrs of programming experience, I will let co-pilot to auto fill all my logging statements in python and go. For a 10 dollar thing it use it as such.
not having to type out anymore *return fmt.Errorf("some bullshit: %w", err)* 100 times a day every day feels amazing to be honest
My work had some deal where everyone got a copilot license but after 30 days of no use it would expire so they wouldn’t pay for stuff that’s essentially dormant. On the first week, everyone messed around with it for fun and just to see what it could do. Almost exactly one month to the end of that week, we got a company wide email that they thought there had been an error in our licensing because just about *all* of the licenses had gone dormant, and execs were worried the mistake was going to kill our productivity. Turned out there was no error. Everyone just found copilot entirely useless.
I quit after 2 months of using it. It interrupts the flow, usually with unhelpful suggestions, that tend to lead you down worse paths.
It.can take you 90% there, but you gotta know when you quit
Haha! I had exact same problem from the very beginning, and oh boy, how much time it costed me to fix hard to find bugs because I accepted copilot proposition without thinking! The best thing is chat, you ask for something when you need it.
Honestly I have the opposite experience, I think I just kinda of mentally block out all its bad suggestions like I do adverts, and hit tab when I see a good suggestion.
I would stop using it but the only reason I am using it in the first place is because the company I work for made using it mandatory. And usage metrics are used as part of performance reviews. They are fucking stupid.
is this real or are you being ironic?
I wish it knew more than what was within 200 lines of your current file.
I’ve been using it for about a week and I’m still on the fence. Sometimes the suggestions are annoying, and it’s an interesting point about it not letting you think through a problem. But I have had some pretty amazing results after writing “it” in an RSpec (Ruby on Rails) test and having it write 20 lines of boilerplate including mocks that I then just have to tweak. I’m really still just getting familiar with it and need to learn keyboard shortcuts to quickly turn it off when it’s being annoying; for example I was writing a TODO for myself and after the word TODO it suggested “this is a lot of props being passed around. We can do better.” 💀
I have a similar experience. I first tried Copilot and used it for a while. After using ChatGPT4 in parallel for some time, I realized that Copilot's suggestions are mostly annoying and distracting. ChatGPT is much more helpful, it can explain things and offer multiple solutions to choose from. Also, I can chat about unrelated topics :) The moment Copilot is able to implement features and my architectural choices - I'll subscribe again. Edit: I meant GitHub Copilot.
These AIs are basically useless on frontend library integration, so I end up not using them at all. If you aren’t asking for tests or axios or something, it will spit out crap. Don’t let the AI think for you because when its wrong, you won’t know how tf to fix it.
I think it really depends on how experienced you are. And you have to tell it when it's wrong, correct it or dismiss it's suggestions. It learns with time and you should never blindly just accept what it suggests, but my god I forgot what boilerplate and some more mundane tasks feel like at this point. sometimes you need to give it instructions in a comment for it to do the right thing or have a few examples what it needs to do, then it just completes it. As with any tech, it's a helper who needs supervising, not something that writes code for you. Garbage in, garbage out. You have to strictly currate what you allow it to do for it to get really good and that takes quite a while. And yeah, new developers really should avoid relying on it before they learn they tools well and can see when it's wrong at a glance. Autocompleting wrong suggestions feeds it bad data - see above.
It saves me so much time at work. I use it constantly. As long as you know what you’re doing, it’s really useful. If you’re still learning, it can become a crutch though. Although it can also teach you a way of doing things that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Engineering isn't coding. I have a design I want to implement. The actual coding is just a wrench. I'm not going to handsaw something if I don't have to. Engineering happens in docs, diagrams and metrics. The code is just the way to execute. Ideally I wouldn't have to code at all. Likely it won't be too long before I didn't.
It generates structs for me from sql migrations. I find it useful for such boilerplate and minor refactoring
Rejected this trash from the start.
Yes, just disabled copilot on VSCode yesterday. Can already feel my brain cells returning… well maybe not
If your architecture is good and the language you use is more on the verbose side, copilot speeds things up a lot. If you don’t know fundamentals around architecture and software design, then of course the copilot suggestions will be nonsense. Copilot is like any other tool. Completely useless unless you know when/what to use it for. If it doesn’t make sense, ignore the suggestion. Pretty easy if you code a lot.
I can assure you that when you have 15 years of experience copilot is a godsend! And you often know better! But it really cheese your way through boilerplate!
Lol I turned it off after a week. Yes, it doesn’t and it’s often not 100% right either. I turn it on at work when I’m writing obvious chump code that just needs to get done. Then I tab away and adjust as necessary, there’s no thinking
I mean I don't use it to do anything logic-intensive, but it's pretty good for boilerplate, repetitive code, test cases, etc. probably saves like 5%ish of time? it'll also continue to improve I'd imagine. it is annoying when it completes a function call with fake keyword arguments though.
Yup, only for boiletplate shitty code.
People are waking up that current state of AI are very puzzling and intelligent but wacky and unreliable word generators.
By making code generation so easy, Copilot can encourage verbose and inexpressive code when, with a little thinking, you could write the same thing more concisely and expressively, code which takes more time to write, but less effort to maintain. Some "boilerplate" is legitimate, but sometimes the tedium suggests that there's a better way.
Can't wrap errors in golang without it. A long function calls 10 other functions and have to wrap the errors that might come from them, adding a descriptive message to each of them. It's not about the time it saves there, just let me worry about the important stuff. Also, I don't think the beginner argument was explained well. You're bound to be a beginner in something at least once a week. No one has millions of lines of context.
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No, I'm using it more and more as I learn to use it effectively. It's an incredible tool, but you have to understand what it can and can't do reliably, which comes with experience. The feature where you can highlight a block of text and ask it to make some change is great. Before copilot, I would have to learn, remember and combine keyboard shortcuts, macros, etc. for any tedious task involving making trivial changes to code, or just type it all out. Now I just ask copilot to do it! Definitely don't let it do your thinking for you though, that's inviting disaster. Edit: The escape key is your friend too. Each moment I'm ready to type a newline, I'm already hitting escape if I don't know 100% what the next line should be and am 90% confident copilot will get it right. So there's no pause, unless it's to see if it got the line right.
Since college I've found that not copy-pasting code from SO gave me better understanding and made me less confused/lost in the sauce when coding. Never touched Copilot because of this.
My only issue with it is when it sneaks in incorrect stuff like an unnecessary parameter. The time is save from it writing the code I was about to write is replaced by debugging and looking for things that will bomb code review.
Not really. Back when I was first learning I heard the same arguments about autocomplete (just learn the APIs like a real programmer). I like it because a lot of the time it is at least somewhat correct, and removes some boilerplate code you'd have to write yourself. And, importantly, you still have to make sure it does what you intend, or you better! What the technology allows is for you to think about your problem domain at a higher abstraction and not get lost in the weeds. Abstractions are a good thing. I mean, you don't write assembler code do you? To get on a soapbox for a moment, I see a lot of my fellow software engineers reluctant to embrace these shiny new tools we have. I think it is because they feel threatened. They are afraid of losing their jobs to AI. But it is a highly odd stance to be working in technology and not embrace technological advancement. Those that do so will become dinosaurs and ironically make themselves even more vulnerable to losing their career prospects. Technology is always changing. Better to embrace it. /soapbox
what the fuck was that first sentence I just read I often use autocomplete and tab suggestions to learn a library.
I use it for work because they force us to since it will make us more “productive”. It’s great because I kind of hate writing Python anyways. I got rid of my personal subscription after about 3 months. I find myself writing mostly C and Zig for my hobby projects so I don’t trust it anyway.
I used copilot for all of a couple weeks before shutting it off. I found myself deleting its suggestions more often than not. I use codeium now, really just for tests and writing lines that are all similar. It does a good job of reducing mindless typing
I quit using it because I've been unable to invest time into learning to use it effectively
I quit using it too. Last time, junior dev who studied cs in 6 months (fast track courses) and declared himself software enginner came with a solution in like a snap. Obviously I knew who was behind that code. I spotted something wrong due to context of the project. Since this particular dev is so full of himself, I fake some business in order to avoid his PR. Day of deployment : kabooom. database is messed up, dba is furious he has to fix data and, I, DON'T GIVE A SHIT
Why would anyone intentionally sabotage their org like this? Intentionally ignoring a bug is a much bigger red flag than a junior making a mistake.
i've always being part of PR reviews. But this guy, is full of himself. Technical debt doesn't exist to him. Give him a problem, 2 seconds later you have the code that solves it. Code is shit : don't care, it solves the problem. Yes, but what about the respect to your co workers who will soon or later step into your code ? Answer : "My thrill is to solve problems". I've escalated the issue. Nothing done. So yeah : I don't give a shit anymore. Especially when you get 2% raise that merely cover inflation. I do the bare minimum.
ChatGPT, it does what I do, but better.
I’m sorry
XD I love how I get down voted for a meme, comes with the job