I'm very old man shouting at clouds about this stuff. I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand and I don't want to merge code neither of us understand.
I'm very old man shouting at clouds about this stuff. I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand and I don't want to merge code neither of us understand.
But I refuse to use it as anything more than a fancy autocomplete. If it suggests code that's pretty close to what I was about to type anyway, I accept it.
This ensures that I still understand my code, that there shouldn't be any hallucination derived bugs, [1] and there really shouldn't be any questions about copyright if I was about to type it.
I find using copilot this way speeds me up. Not really because my typing is slow, it's more that I have a habit of getting bored and distracted while typing. Copilot helps me get to the next thinking/debugging part sooner.
My brain really comprehend the idea that anyone would not want to not understand their code. Especially if they are going to submit it as a PR.
And I'm a little annoyed that the existence of such people is resulting in policies that will stop me from using LLMs as autocomplete when submitting to open source projects.
I have tried using copilot in other ways. I'd love for it to be able to do menial refactoring tasks for me. But every-time I experiment, it seems to fall off the rails so fast. Or it just ends up slower than what I could do manually because it has to re-generate all my code instead of just editing it.
[1] Though I find it really interesting that if I'm in the middle of typing a bug, copilot is very happy to autocomplete it in its buggy form. Even when the bug is obvious from local context, like I've typoed a variable name.