Yea, that is basically my experience as well. On balance I feel I wasted about as much time debugging broken copilot code as I've saved from using it.

It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally.

It would have been nice of them to introduce a free tier where you could use copilot for a few hours a month for free.

Personally, I'm not a in a coding position anymore and only code occasionally on stacks I'm mostly unfamiliar with: copilot is a godsend as it saves me from googling every other lines of code to figure out which api calls I'm suppose to do to accomplish the task at end.

I see it as a stackoverflow on steroids.

Even if I don't use it much, I guess I'll have to pony up the 10 usd because I would not want to go back to googling basic syntax for everything when I'm coding something.

Is the act of finding a help for learning?

Do you retain as much? Do you need to? Is that important?

I hope this whole thing ends up like a space saving tool like Google did. I don't need to memorise that API because I can Google the docs. Now maybe that goes a level higher.

The idea of learning via copilot, producing poor code and having copilot learn from that code ... the whole feedback loop ... Is worrisome.

Ignorance is bliss.

I think the biggest thing is that when working in tech I'm unfamiliar with it's extremely helpful to get some sort of skeleton in place, even if it's wrong in some way. I'm going to have to go slowly and evaluate it either way, so doesn't really matter if it's got problems or is less than ideal. What I would do otherwise is just go copy something from StackOveflow and then comb over it to adapt to my needs. Copilot is more or less just doing the same thing, but faster.

When I'm working in a stack I know well, I can quickly put down the code I need and it will generally be pretty good. Copilot can do it faster, but it gets things wrong a lot more often than I do. Since fixing something wrong is a LOT slower than me getting it right the first time, it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.

We're also creating more complex things, that costs more money.

The market for simple SMB websites is a great example. This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB offerings.

However if you started out making websites in 1993, then there are a vast array of products and services one could move into over the last 3 decades.

It's the same with doctors, lawyers, everything.

In this context automation could be a tool that a law firm uses to enhance the quality of their product. Personally, I would pay more for a tech-savvy law firm that embraces automation, not less.

His rationale: why put wear and tear on his expensive tools if it’s just going to reduce his income in the end? Needless to say he prefers piecework because he likes to move from one job to the next as quickly as he can. He makes a lot more money that way.

Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a smart contract work as intended.

Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't think that this is the way we want to go.

A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.

I've never heard it before but i'll be using it now :)

Some code is like a giant pile of dirt; you need someone to pile it up and then you can go in and clean up the edges and make it "good" whereas other code is entirely delicate all the way through.

The big question is how much is each one and can it help. I suspect it helps for many, but those who know enough to recognize where it can flaw will have an advantage.

But newer programmers may never really "learn" the code the way the older ones do, as they'll just let the computer do the basics.