this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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[–] oatz@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago

Every developer (~400) has a Copilot license of which about 50% are actively using it (we'll start pruning licenses next month).

My experience so far is that it's biggest benefit is writing tests and refactoring code. The major downside is that it has a habit of introducing very subtle bugs that are easy to miss even with human review.

[–] CodeMonkey@programming.dev 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not at all in my org, as far as I know. We are a team of senior engineers somewhat set in our ways and I am not sure how good Copilot plugin for Emacs is.

We are part of a large company and we had a mandate from up top to come up with ways to incorporate AI into our product. We prototyped a few, but could never get it batter than "almost good enough to be useful". Other teams have presented promising prototypes of inhouse AI assistants that we can incorporate into products.

My team pivoted to the inverse: seeing if we can make our product more useful to ML developers.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 4 points 2 years ago

seeing if we can make our product more useful to ML developers.

Nice. I've heard the folks selling gold digging supplies were the biggest winners in the gold rush.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Probably 60% where those not using it have just been too lazy to set it up. I have a mostly senior crew so I’m not concerned about code reviews or poorly optimized generated code. For most things, the boilerplate that code gen can add is a continuation of things like Intellisense and linting.

What you have to watch out for is complicated logic being built by code gen and not knowing enough about the code generated. For example, I’m very comfortable with fixing the weird ass Rust iterators Copilot will make because I understand Rust iterators. If I had to move to, say, C#, I’d have no fucking clue whether or not the generated code is idiomatic, solves problems in the way a C# would solve problems, or even compiles until I run it.

I work in web and I came from an SRE background. Those industries lend themselves to this quick code gen. If you managed a Terraform codebase for any appreciable cloud presence pre-code gen, you’d understand how much of a boon it is for certain areas. I don’t know how useful it would be in languages or areas that don’t glue a bunch of boilerplate together. HPC, for example, cares a ton about every instruction. At the same time, code gen can give you a pretty good assembly template to improve.

[–] ruckblack@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 years ago

Not at all, by any engineers I know anyway.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Don't know a single person who uses it, neither privately nor professionally. We don't do much boilerplate and write a bunch of stuff that would take longer to describe in a prompt than write itself.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

why do some people post this link at the end of their comments?

[–] choccymalk@piefed.social 1 points 11 months ago

To state that their content as posted is covered by that license.

[–] min_fapper@iusearchlinux.fyi 3 points 2 years ago

Pretty close to hundred percent. Though, I work for Microsoft which is a bit biased.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago

There's around 10 developers and most use it now.

We have bing enterprise.

I've found that anything that used to be a Google followed by skimming a few blogs or docs is now a question to it.

It summarizes the articles that I was going to read, extracts the specific information I was after and sources each sentence so I can read it if I want to. Also allows follow up questions, which is big.

It has essentially replaced googling for me.

I also use it for refactoring and other tasks like that as well.

The speed at which I can get productive in a new language or framework has greatly increased.

I've also noticed our juniors can get up to speed very fast with minimal input.

[–] newtraditionalists@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

No one uses "ai" assistants. Everyone is aware that they are terrible at most things.

[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Not at all, officially speaking; giant corporation BTW. Biggest reason is that security and data governance is still figuring out which ones they can run on-prem to prevent any data from being copied to a non-EU server (preferrably no external server at all). Github Copilot is giant no-no, MS Copilot may be an option. We'll see.

AI is the future BTW, providing massive worth. It's a great tool to increase your abilities and skill , to be able to provide a fuckton of value within a short time, instead of having to wait for people to grow into their job. Especially if you are junior.