Comment on Is GitHub Copilot worth it to you?
howrar@lemmy.ca 1 year agoNot just the mental strain of syntax, but also variable naming, which I find to be a much bigger hurdle. Copilot will nearly always give you a “good enough” name so you can just move on to solve the actual problem. You can always come back to rename it if necessary.
mcherm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Interesting. The way I work, variable naming is one of the key areas that I would never want to outsource to an AI – careful choice of variable names is a key part of code quality for me: unimportant things should have neutral, non-distracting names while mportant things often cause me to break out a thesaurus for just the right word.
howrar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
It’s important for sure. It just so happens to also be one of those things that are very easy to verify but hard to do, which is what makes it perfect for automation.
The other nice thing about letting AI do naming is that these are names that are very statistically likely given the context. That means it’s more likely to be understood by others. If I come up with something myself, it might make sense to me, but it might not to someone else reading the code. I think this is especially important when you’re working in your own little bubble and don’t get many eyes on your code.