[h335ian]

Having recently participated in a of review GitHub Copilot to determine if we might allow it at work, I can say it appears that most of the utility is in tab-completion of what you were roughly intending to express, in very short form: variable completion, expression completion and function/method/class/object/value signature completion.

I personally didn’t see suggestions that would have significant impact on code quality - simply helping one more quickly express initial concepts including all the language necessities. Intellisense++ish.

I have only seen it assist developers who were going down a bad path get there more quickly. I have not observed anything that would encourage/discourage any design pattern or developer choice.

My gut tells me that the fact that devs can more quickly deliver a “solution” (bad/good) means that they deliver their fat PR and … well … it’s fat - so it’s not scrutinized as well as it might have been had the dev taken some time and another set of eyes hit their branch before they got too far along. It’s often much harder to get the proper attention and review on a large-ish PR than it is to peek in along the way.

I personally couldn’t find anything that I feel would inherently lead to lower quality code. I do see how devs could more quickly deliver their low quality code and it can be a challenge to deny that code.

I’m left on the fence. I’ve found it valuable for autocompletion of what I’m about to express, but I also have no illusion that it’s going to tell me that what I’m about to express is stupid and/or of low quality.

Those things about quality are also quite language specific. Not so much about guessing what you might be about to type for tab-completion.

Also note - it’s about efficiency - as GitHub has stated. Duh. Notice copy/paste declined? Tab-completion. How many jr devs have you seen that won’t just write out a function declaration, they copy paste an entire function, gut it, and write their code. Odd to me, super slow and lame, but even I have seen the utility of tab-completing empty function blocks that are 90% of what I wanted.

Sooo. I’m inclined to say it’s interesting - but in no way at all diagnostic, deterministic or a very good study when it comes to writing conclusions. These are hyperbolic statements. Nearly link-bait.