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Is GitHub Copilot worth it to you? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 months ago by firelizzard@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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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.

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[–] Index@feddit.nl 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I primarily use it for C++ in Unreal Engine and use it almost exclusively to write log statements. The way to log something is done via a macro like so:

UE_LOG(LogCategory, Warning, TEXT("My variable: %s"), *SomeStringVar)

Writing that boilerplate soup gets tiresome after a while, so having Copilot autocomplete the log statement for me based on other statements in the same file and the context of the function is godsend.

It does of course happen that the text contents are wrong, but then I have that skeleton to work with. Just erase the text and type the correct contents I want. Saves so much time.

[–] firelizzard@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

I'd create my own macro or function for that. I have enough ADD that I cannot stand boring shit like that and I will almost immediately write a pile of code to avoid having to do boring crap like that, even with copilot.