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Microsoft's Pricey AI Assistant Copilot Leaves Early Adopters Feeling Cheated
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Copilot isn't actually bad for developers, it's just that you need to be careful with it and recognize its limitations.
Writing a bunch of REST endpoints for an API and need to implement all the typical http verbs, and you already have all the matching methods for reading, updating, and deleting values in a complex SQL database for each endpoint to call? Copilot can turn a ten minute chore into a ten second one. Very handy.
Writing those complex SQL methods in the first place? Yeah... Copilot will probably make a ton of mistakes and its work will need to be triple-checked. You'll save time just doing it yourself if you know how. (And if you don't, you have no business calling yourself a developer.)
Copilot is best for easy boilerplate and repetitive code. Problems arise as soon as you ask it to get "creative."
One time I decided for shits and giggles to just keep pushing tab and see where it went. It didn't take long for it to enter a useless recursive loop, hallucinating a new iteration of the same thing on each line.
It definitely isn't gonna magically think up new algorithms for you. I don't know what everybody is scared of. It ain't even gonna replace my kid programming on Scratch.
I mean didn't we all do this when phones started autocompleting sentences like a decade ago? (Or however long it was, time perception is fickle)
It will if employeers only want ai code
Always ask it to write tests for the code it generates. Of course, then you have to validate that the code works AND that the tests work.
Or just write the damn thing yourself and save a bunch of headaches and wondering if you got the tests right it if there’s some screwy corner case lurking because of its implementation.