this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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I use Copilot, but dislike it for coding. The "place a comment and Copilot will fill it in" barely works, and is mostly annoying. It works for common stuff like "// write a function to invert a string" that you'd see in demos, that are just common functions you'd otherwise copypaste from StackOverflow. But otherwise it doesn't really understand when you want to modify something. I've already turned that feature off
The chat is semi-decent, but the "it understands the entire file you have open" concept also only just works half of time, and so the other half it responds with something irrelevant because it didn't get your question based on the code / method it didn't receive.
I opted to just use the OpenAI API, and I created a slack bot that I can chat with (In a slack thread it works the same as in a "ChatGPT context window", new messages in the main window are new chat contexts) - So far that still works best for me.
You can create specific slash-commands if you like that preface questions, like "/askcsharp" in slack would preface it with something like "You are an assistant that provides C# based answers. Use var for variables, xunit and fluentassertions for tests"
If you want to be really fancy you can even just vectorize your codebase, store it in Pinecone or PGVector, and have an "entire codebase aware AI"
It takes a bit of time to custom build something, but these AIs are basically tools. And a custom build tool for your specific purpose is probably going to outperform a generic version
That's not how I use it at all. I mean I started out doing that, but these days it's more like this (for anyone who hasn't used copilot, the grey italic text is the auto-generated code - tab to accept, or just type over it to ignore it):
Sure - I totally could have written the constructor. But it would have taken longer, and I probably would've made a few typos. And by the way it's way better than copying from Stack Overflow, because it knows your coding style, it knows what other classes/etc exist in your project, etc etc.
It's also pretty good at refactoring. You can tell it to refactor something to use a different coding pattern for example, and it'll write 30 lines of code then show you a git style diff.
Not to mention you can ask questions about your code now. Like "how has X been implemented in this 20 year old project I started working on today?" Or one I had the other day "I'm getting this error, what files might be causing that?" It gave me a list of 15 files and I was able to find it in a few minutes. The error had no context for me to figure it out.
I second this. GH Copilot for coding is an amazing tool, not just for boilerplate, but to fill complementary logic, brainstorm test cases, rewriting and refactoring, reducing typos or "copy and paste" errors, documentation, prototyping code from a human-written description, and probably several other things at different levels of competence.
Makes me wonder what people that don't find it useful are trying to do with it. Sure you'll probably need or want to change some things, but that's miles ahead of having to write it from zero.
Hell, if you start declaring a function with a good name and good names + types for the arguments, it'll often write an implementation that is mostly correct using the rest of the file as context.
Copilot Pro?
Well I have Copilot Pro, but I was mainly talking about GitHub Copilot. I don't think having the Copilot Pro really affects Copilot performance.
I meanly use AI for programming, and (both for myself to program and inside building an AI-powered product) - So I don't really know what you intend to use AI for, but outside of the context of programming, I don't really know about their performance.
And I think Copilot Pro just gives you Copilot inside office right? And more image generations per day? I can't really say I've used that. For image generation I'm either using the OpenAI API again (DALL-E 3), or I'm using replicate (Mostly SDXL)
I mainly use it for troubleshooting stuff, which includes everything from bash to node and react, Python to ..DNS. idk.
Copilot Pro, confusingly, isn't GitHub copilot related. I do have GitHub copilot, I agree gpt4 is better in general, just not in my IDE.
Idk how Microsoft has bungled this naming... They own GitHub now right?!
So there's Microsoft Copilot, which is like bing chat for windows. But now there is Microsoft Copilot Pro for $20/mo, which uses gpt4 turbo. Haven't seen much on it.
And even more recently, Google Bard is now Gemini, but you can do Gemini Ultra for $20/mo. Supposedly trying to contend with ChatGPT 4 as well.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
much
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You haven't followed been following Microsoft for long have you? The first version of Windows was version 3.0 (there were technically earlier versions but they were "a work in progress" and weren't really usable at all). The third version of Xbox was called "Xbox One".
I have been using Windows since before 3.0.
Your point, while comical, is kind of irrelevant as far as naming two independent products the same thing.