Comment on The Copilot Delusion
cabbage@piefed.social 2 weeks agoI 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.