Er, a lot? If your codebase is well structured most of it will follow similar patterns which you just need to repeat, with different class/variable names etc. That makes it ripe for automation with Copilot.

Then there's unit tests which cover the above - if you keep the structure similar then copilot can fly through it.

Likewise for generating things like seed data. Need to create some seeds for your database just write out what you need in a comment and Copilot gets it mostly right.

So much time saved.

I've been coding for 5+ years professionally so I mostly use it to save the effort of typing.

You need to be able to look at what Copilot spits out and understand if it's correct or not, so I'd say it wouldn't be much use for a newbie. You have to know how to structure your code and then let Copilot fill things out whilst keeping an eye on what it's doing.

Sometimes it saves me Googling something I don't know how to do if I can instruct it correctly - and then I just test that what it wrote works, so you may be able to learn some things from it but you'll be able to use it to it's full potential once you have some knowledge/experience under your belt.

I'm not sure if it's safe for a decade but I've been using Copilot for over a year and it's a huge time saver like you say. 90% of the time it gets what I need with at least 90% accuracy. Really helpful for writing repetitive code.

I find it works best if your codebase is consistent and well structured.

With GPT-4 on the horizon, and DeepMind also having a model that can compete with "the average developer", I'm super interested to see how things change in the next few years.

Cue the software developers and naysayers saying how bad it will be and how development jobs are safe for many years to come.

The video on their homepage is just their AI regurgitating known tunes.

Thanks?

It's a track called "Today" apparently.

The generic name and fact that anything with Tencent in the search returns Chinese results makes it a little tough to find. No idea why they didn't link the track.

Any Chinese folk here that can help?

Just wait for the space ads at night..

As long as they don't spread their seeds far and wide so that we have entire fields lit up at night. I'm sure the ecosystem would love that!

Faster than..what? How does this compare to what DeepMind accomplished with AlphaFold?

And the AI race to see who can profit the most out of it, continues.

Great. More for the rest of us then.

"Nah I'm good"

~ some luddite, 2022

Right. All for automation but there's little point in it unless you sort out the issues caused by monocultures. Can't automate farming if your soil has all turned to dust.