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Copilot is a verbose savant heavily afflicted by Dunning-Kruger... but an extremely useful one.

Do you remember how Googling was a skill?

Learning to Copilot, Stable Diffusion, GPT are exactly the same thing.

Copilot's full power (at this time) does not exist in generating reams of code. Here are a few things it excels at:

- Snippet search: Say you can't remember how to see if a variable is empty in a bash conditional, ask.

- Template population: Say I have a series of functions I need to write in a language without good meta programming facilities. I can write a list of the (all combinations), write one example, the ai will pick up on the rest.

- Rust: If I get trapped because of some weird borrow checker issue with `fn doit(...`, I begin rewriting the function `fn fixed_doit(...`, and 9/10 times Copilot fixes the bug.



> I begin rewriting the function `fn fixed_doit(...`, and 9/10 times Copilot fixes the bug.

This blew my mind. Thank you for sharing, I never thought of approaching it that way.


> Say I have a series of functions I need to write in a language without good meta programming facilities. I can write a list of the (all combinations), write one example, the ai will pick up on the rest.

If you are coding in a language that requires tons of boilerplate, the solution is to use a different language that require less boilerplate.


Not everyone choses the language they code in and boilerplate amount is not the only consideration when selecting a language...


Why isn’t “have an AI write the boilerplate” an equally good solution?

Asking earnestly.


Because you still have the boilerplate. When code has lots of boilerplate it's harder to find the important stuff.




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