• abhibeckert@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Are these competent developers

    Here’s an example - a few minutes ago I wrote this line of code:

    // date
    

    … and a split second later copilot auto completed exactly the seven lines of code that I would have typed. I read the code, tested it, and moved on to the next block of code.

    Yes, I could have written those seven lines. They were pretty basic - read a value from the database, transform it to a string human form, and send that the user. CoPilot types a lot faster than me (words per second, instead of per minute) and it makes fewer typos.

    It’s also more familiar than I am with all the major libraries. I find I’m spending a lot less time reading documentation or searching the web these days.

    But the real kicker… I work on a small team. My project is full of code that I didn’t write and it isn’t as well documented as I’d like it to be. It’s also not publicly documented, so I can’t use Google or Stack Overflow to find answers. CoPilot has indexed the project, and it knows how to read the date from the database. It also knows what human readable date string format has been used elsewhere in the user interface.