GitHub’s Copilot service recently made its public debut after months of being a whitelisted beta. I was lucky enough to be accepted to the whitelist very early on, and so I’ve had a lot of time to form opinions on the service, its shortcomings and surprising benefits. Now that the service is public (and Microsoft thinks it’s ok to charge $10 a month for this service) here are my thoughts on whether or not Copilot is worth your time (and money).
The Gimmick Factor
There’s no avoiding the fact that the first time you start using GitHub Copilot it feels a little gimmicky. You write a few code comments and it generates what you would call reasonable code, but not always the approach you were looking for. This doesn’t fade with time either. Sure, in larger projects with more context where you’re not doing anything too unique it will probably work fine 99% of the time, but the moment you try to do something unusual, it gives some weird results. You can expand a side-panel to see all the different suggestions it has, and sometimes that will help if the first response is not what you were looking for. After the initial stage of using it and once the gimmick starts to wear off, you see it for…
