Copilot — How Much Does it Really Help?
I’ve used GitHub Copilot for a few months now. I get it free as a student, but it’s only $10 a month, or $100 a year.
The idea is new and exciting — get suggested code from software that understands not just the variables in your scope and the correct syntax of your language, but has training from an enormous array of other repos to pull from.
It’s the next-generation version of IntelliSense. And it’s already made a huge difference in my experience as a software developer.
There are some things that do sometimes make me want to strangle Copilot, like the fact that when it makes a suggestion, I don’t get IntelliSense, which is still occasionally helpful (particularly for automatic imports). Though that may just be a VS Code issue.
Oh, and when it’s completely wrong, it’s just an annoying distraction.
But overall I love Copilot. Here’s why.
1. It’s smart
Before I used Copilot, I figured it was the kind of breaking edge technology that shows potential, but just isn’t good enough yet to actually be worth using. Is AI really good enough to meaningfully predict what code I’m about to write?
Turns out, yes, it is. It’s certainly not perfect. But about 50% of the time it at…
