[soiler]

I'm (genuinely) curious what kind of code you write. I haven't tried Copilot and I haven't used ChatGPT very much, but I feel I would be pretty surprised if either of them made significant improvements to my workflow.

Copilot I could see, since I already use Intellisense, autocomplete, and snippets to great effect. I'd be annoyed if I had to work without them. But in general, knowing what I want the code to do is >90% of the work of writing new code.

I feel there are a few possibilities for why I'm confused:

1. I'm not a very good software engineer, at least in certain respects. Maybe I should have a better understanding of architecture patterns or something I might have learned in a CS degree. Maybe I am hacking everything together and maybe I am already a slow coder.

2. I'm not [being] creative enough as a prompt engineer. I typically can't think of any way that ChatGPT could help me without ingesting my entire repo and figuring out the correct patterns. It could be, however, that there are ways to get the answers I need with better questions.

3. We do completely different kinds of work, and some kinds of coding are better suited for AI assistance than others.

[zamnos]

The opposite of 1 is also possible. You're a really good programmer and know the material better, and just don't need to ask the kinds of questions that other people are asking ChatGPT (or stack overflow, or man pages) for/are happy with your current reference materials.