this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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don't get the negativity towards copilot in other comments.
it's a really smart autocomplete, and this is exactly what i wanted for the past 5 years.
(yeah it's not going to replace programmers or whatever people's exaggerated opinions of it are)
wanna quickly create a wgpu bind group?
let texture_bind_group = <tab> <tab>and it's smart enough to understand the context and pull in texture and texture sampler that are already defined as local variables.too lazy to type this obvious thing in?
(like of course the next opcode is
let op = self.fetch();) just press tab and move on with your life.wanna quickly refactor something?
select, ask CP Chat to "replace all if statements with match", check if it's correct and click confirm (it will even show git-style diffs, so it's hard for something unexpected to slip in)
it's not perfect, and it's suggestions do not match your intention like 50% of the time but when they do match or your intention is REALLY obvious (like you already wrote a clear and concise variable name and need to complete the value), you're a single keypress away from completing those 2 lines of code
It's not a total deal breaker but it's definitely very useful. (especially for me, because of my very short attention span. unless i can quickly complete a thing I'm currently working on in less than a minute i will forget about the next 10 things I was thinking of doing)
also i don't believe the price is justified, but it's free for students so of course I'm gonna use it.
(you just need to verify your student email and upload a photo of your student id on education.github.com, and you get a free gh copilot subscription, gh pro account, priority support and promos on loads of services like heroku etc while you're a student)
This has been the thing for me. I get really bored and lose focus when doing all the obvious repetitive stuff. And the obvious stuff is the stuff I find copilot does best. For anything that requires thought I'm engaged. Those are the fun parts of the job. It lets me do more of the fun part.
The one major downside that I've found is that sometimes I just want to tab complete a long variable/function name, and because of copilot i dont have "old style" tab completion anymore. (I could definitely still handle this myself, but i haven't)
edit: this all to say that I don't use copilot to write code that I don't know how to write, I use copilot to write code that I've written 1000 times before and don't want to write again. Copilot does a good job of looking through all the open files for context to help make sure the suggestions actually fit into the codebase's pre-existing style.
I ended up making copilots auto complete use ctrl+tab and its been amazing.