Monday, August 28, 2023

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot on personal projects since March.
It’s been an interesting experience, and one that I realized I have to change.
Using Copilot nearly full time has had some positive and negative impacts on me, and it’s time to take control of how I interact with it.

I’ve liked a lot about working with Copilot.
For this duration I’ve had Copilot enabled full-time in code files.
I pretty quickly found that I was able to be productive in ways that I was struggling with before due to life circumstances.
With two kids, a full-time job, a time-consuming running habit, and ongoing medical treatment, by the time I sit down to write code for myself, I’m just tired.

But with Copilot enabled, it was a lot easier to actually write code in the evenings even when I was tired.
I could put in simple comments as prompts and get back out something that mostly-sorta worked, then shape it into what I needed.

This led me to get some work done on small projects and a few assorted scripts.
I made progress on an issue tracker I am working on with a friend.
I wrote the parser and formatter for my programming language.
This was pretty good work, and I was able to get it done even when tired!
It seemed like everything was going well.

Outside of work, all my coding was done with Copilot enabled.
I also had vim configured with rust-analyzer to show errors automatically and give me suggestions.

This worked pretty well, and it felt immediately productive.
The common wisdom is that you should use the best power tools you can in your editor to