As a polyglot who works in 4-5 different languages every 3-6 months, it's been very valuable.
I forget a lot of things, simple dumb stuff like type conversions or specific keywords spelling. Copilot takes care of 99% of that so I can focus on my higher level spec.
If anything sometimes it's too agressive. I start typing a word and it's already building up the rest of the application in a different direction...
Spaced repetition doesn't help with the use case of needing to recall lots of little details spread across a wide number of knowledge domains. You'd spend more time trying to remember everything than on actually doing useful work.
Also, that little "building confidence in yourself" rider that you added suggests that you think the OP doesn't have confidence in themselves. Careful about those assumptions; in this case it comes across as a little patronizing.
> Also, that little "building confidence in yourself" rider that you added suggests that you think the OP doesn't have confidence in themselves.
They certainly do have confidence, but it doesn't hurt building upon it. I don't think confidence is a discrete 0 or 1 variable. It's a continuous variable, from 0 to infinity.
By the way, I made a question, not a statement. I welcome the argument on whether it's worth the time to memorize the stuff Autopilot can autocomplete. That's something to measure and debate.
> Careful about those assumptions; in this case it comes across as a little patronizing.
Thanks for the heads up. This is important. But I didn't make any assumption. It seems maybe you made an assumption about me making an assumption?
If that's the case, don't worry as I did not feel patronized.
No. Spaced repetition is a good tool for learning vocabulary.
It's not a silver bullet / holy grail / MacGuffin / etc.
There's a community of people obsessed with spaced repetition. None of them seem to have accomplished spectacular feats of learning. There's a good reason for that.
(The flip side, however, is that many people who have accomplished spectacular feats of learning DO often use spaced repetition, but among a broader repertoire).
I'll give an example: Landmines are a good tool for slowing an enemy army. However, if your military consists of *just* landmines, it won't be very effective. That doesn't make landmines a bad tool. Indeed, even a super-weapon, like the first jet fighter, won't win a war if it's your *only* tool.
Learning -- even a language -- is a complex process, and you need many tools. Spaced repetition is awesome for factoids. If you want to learn a language, you need to memorize vocabulary. SR is great for that. If you add 5-15 minutes of spaced repetition to a good language program, it will help a lot. If that's where you spend a majority of your time, you'll learn very little. However, SR won't help you practice a broad range of skills around listening, speaking, understanding communication styles, or quite a few other things.
Ditto with physics and math. If you know equations, it accelerates everything else. However, the bulk of the knowledge isn't factual or procedural; it's conceptual. Simply memorizing formulas won't help you. On the other hand, in most cases, once you learn conceptual knowledge in physics, you never forget it.
"Coding vocabulary" isn't in my top-50 problem with junior developers. Naming variables, algorithms, systems design, etc. are. Most of those don't align to SR. I'd take a programmer who spends 8 hours coding over one who spends 8 hours memorizing library calls in an SR system.
Note 2:
The spacing effect is /somewhat/ broadly applicable (but far from universal), but spaced repetition specifically is only helpful for factoid-style knowledge. You can look over the different classifications of knowledge, skills, and abilities (factual, conceptual, procedural, declarative, etc.).
I find it’s less about actually forgetting and more about all the mundane details I usually bounce around a codebase to find. What’s the third argument to that function again? Oh, copilot autocompleted it correctly.
It’s not always right but it’s right enough it’s a big timesaver.
I agree in concept, in practice I find the relative frequency of "I can't quite remember that thing" is way higher than learning new things I don't know if copilot is right about.
> what will be the consequences?
for me, usually a failed build or unit test :P low stakes stuff
I forget a lot of things, simple dumb stuff like type conversions or specific keywords spelling. Copilot takes care of 99% of that so I can focus on my higher level spec.
If anything sometimes it's too agressive. I start typing a word and it's already building up the rest of the application in a different direction...