Some parts of engineering are really just copying and pasting the most banal scaffolding for some framework that refuses to work. I've been working on a side project where I get to play generics golf in Rust to my hearts content, but having to constantly Google what magic incantation I have to write to get react-hook-form to properly allow me to write variable input fields for an array of strings is mind numbing. [hint: useFieldsArray only works with objects, but the TS compiler wasn't smart enough to suggest that me]
Copilot is great for this and it’s impressive how the code it suggests is in keeping with the conventions used in the existing code base. Will be even better when I can highlight something like a string literal SQL statement in code and have it suggest optimizations. That’s just a tooling issue but that kind of context switching within the IDE will be fantastic.
I used a competing product due to work restrictions and it feels like it _could_ be really useful but in practice mostly was just helpful for banging out really repetitive tests. I think Copilot is probably more robust though.
It really is. We use Copilot with three senior and two junior devs, and all of them really reported that it consistently suggests code snippets that are exactly what they were about to type.
Initially, I was a bit concerned about handing it over to the juniors, but it turns out, they aren’t really used to working with an IDE and context aware suggestions yet, so they don’t use Copilot to its fullest extent and often type stuff out even if it’s suggested to them.
The Copilot Chat thingy they have in private beta has this, you can highlight a block and ask it to simplify/optimize. Not sure how well it works in big multi-file examples, but I had a block of PowerShell in a single file it was able to work with.
