> From my limited perspective if I can save 15 minutes a month with copilot, the tool has paid for itself.
The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code.
For an experienced programmer, even one unfamiliar with the language I believe that its time costs will be more than writing the code themselves after anything beyond the first pass is taken into consideration.
For the inexperienced programmer, this can significantly hinder the progress of learning how to program well and while it may save 15 minutes a month, if it delays onboarding or software development skill accusation by a month or two then it is by far a net negative.
Yes, it can write boilerplate code quickly - but I've found that using the IDE that I do (Jetbrains family) between live code templates and macros and current language structures, I haven't needed to write boilerplate code in a while.
Additionally, what boilerplate-ish code I have written, tends to be only on the first pass through the code. The updating and maintaining and bug fixes for an existing code base, I haven't seen Copilot or other tools able to integrate into an a large project correctly.
If you're doing rapid prototyping... maybe it would be more useful, but writing new code all the time is a small fraction of what most developers do.
> The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code.
Have you actually used it? It's really easy to avoid any multi-line suggestions. In the past year+ of using it I've run into an issue that was due to generated code twice. Maybe a total of 30 minutes debugging? Compare that to the fact that it's probably saved me a couple hours of typing. And that's not even counting the "ugh what's the name of this again, lemme look it up" stuff which imo is where it really shines. That probably triples how much time its saved me
The issue that I've seen is that while it may shave off 15 minutes of writing code in a month, it also adds another 30 minutes of debugging code that you didn't pay attention to when using it to write the code.
For an experienced programmer, even one unfamiliar with the language I believe that its time costs will be more than writing the code themselves after anything beyond the first pass is taken into consideration.
For the inexperienced programmer, this can significantly hinder the progress of learning how to program well and while it may save 15 minutes a month, if it delays onboarding or software development skill accusation by a month or two then it is by far a net negative.
Yes, it can write boilerplate code quickly - but I've found that using the IDE that I do (Jetbrains family) between live code templates and macros and current language structures, I haven't needed to write boilerplate code in a while.
Additionally, what boilerplate-ish code I have written, tends to be only on the first pass through the code. The updating and maintaining and bug fixes for an existing code base, I haven't seen Copilot or other tools able to integrate into an a large project correctly.
If you're doing rapid prototyping... maybe it would be more useful, but writing new code all the time is a small fraction of what most developers do.