It’s Like GPT-3 but for Code – Fun, Fast, and Full of Flaws
I was pretty sceptical of Copilot when it was announced, but after having used it for a while I think it&#x27;s more that it&#x27;s been kind of sold as something that it&#x27;s not.<p>What it does offer for me, in practice, is basically &quot;clever autocomplete&quot;. Say I wrote a little bit of code:<p><pre><code>  bounds.max.x = bounds.min.x + width
</code></pre>
Then copilot will suggest that the next line is:<p><pre><code>  bounds.max.y = bounds.min.y + height
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s reasonably smart, and it adapts pretty well to whatever code you are currently writing. It makes writing those little bits of slightly repetitive code less annoying, and I like that – it feels like a useful productivity boost in the same way as regular &quot;dumb&quot; autocomplete is.<p>However I&#x27;d say too much of the initial coverage was along the lines of &quot;you can just write the function name and it will fill in the body!&quot;. That will work if you want to write `isEven` or `capitalise` or something, which again is quite nice. But I have found that basically any other prompts product a function that either does something completely wrong, or introduces a subtle and non-obvious bug. And this actually feels kind of dangerous – I&#x27;d absolutely caught myself a few times from just going &quot;it&#x27;ll probably be fine&quot; and accepting whatever Copilot has spewed out.<p>I&#x27;ll remain sceptical of it as a system that sucks up and regurgitates vast lakes of open-source code and sends my every keystroke to Microsoft, among other things. But it&#x27;s definitely something I&#x27;d pay for a local version of.