Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Like many people I thought Copilot was neat but ended up uninstalling it because it caused more problems than it solved. Reading the comments here, it seems that most of the people who get value out of it would be better served creating a set of snippets. If all you need is to fill in boilerplate all the time or repeat general test structures but with different arguments, just make a snippet. Every major code editor supports this and they're really easy to setup and use.



I haven't used Copilot but found this comment interesting. Back in the 1990s when I started programming (BASIC and C) I did maintain collections of code snippets that I used in different programs here and there. I used to cherish those snippets and dedicated a good amount of time to maintain them available through my computers.

Then the Internet and Google came around. I found that instead of me maintaining those code snippets, I could search in Excite/Altavista for how to do something, and it will be stored there for me. Later came sites like StackOverflow (expertssexchange before it) which concentrated much of that information which before was scattered in PHPBBs and Geocities pages.

Now I see this Copilot app like the evolution of that; Instead of having to manually go searching for a snippet, I imagine I can "pull it" almost automatically while I am writing code, with an AI helping me search for the right snippet with the current code context.

That doesn't sound bad at all.

Nevertheless, I haven't used it because I DON'T want my code to be sent to Microsoft or any other company. And I don't believe in adding random code for which I don't know the license! What if there is some code which was AGPL that Copilot happens to use? that's pretty bad.


Or better yet, save the snippet as a function/procedure in the code, and avoid needless duplication (DRY/Occam's razor).


You can take snippets with you from job to job tho.


I guess that depends on your contract.


In my experience, most of the code snippets weren't useful and testing the less useful code snippets costs more time than it saves.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: