Comment on The Copilot Delusion

• cabbage@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I think chapter 2 does a good job presenting the advantages.

  Maybe you inherited someone else’s codebase. A minefield of nested closures, half-commented hacks, and variable names like d and foo. A mess of complex OOPisms, where you have to traverse 18 files just to follow a single behaviour. You don’t have all day. You need a flyover—an aerial view of the warzone before you land and start disarming traps.

  Ask Copilot: "What’s this code doing?"
  It won’t be poetry. It won’t necessarily provide a full picture. But it’ll be close enough to orient yourself before diving into the guts.

  So—props where props are due. Copilot is like a greasy, high-functioning but practically poor intern:

  • Great with syntax
  • Surprisingly quick at listing out your blind spots.
  • Good at building scaffolding if you feed it the exact right words.
  • Horrible at nuance.
  • Useless without supervision.
  • Will absolutely kill you in production if left alone for 30 seconds.

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