I’ve seen copilot spit out garbage dozens of lines long for something I swore must be one or two stdlib functions. Yep, it was, after reading some real documentation and using my brain. It was some NodeJS stuff, which I never work with. Don’t get me wrong, I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer— it is an algorithm predicting the next token based on the current tokens.

Reminds me of The Primeagen quote: “If copilot made you 10x better, then you were only a 0.1x programmer to begin with”.

As someone who uses ChatGPT and Claude daily, but cancelled my Copilot subscription after a year of use because it intimately just wasn’t that helpful to me and didn’t provide enough benefit over doing it by hand, I kind of sort of agree. Maybe not entirely, but I can’t shake the feeling that there might be some truth in it.

The code that AI generates for me is rarely good. It’s possible to get good code out of it, but it requires many iterations of careful review and prompting, but for most cases, I can write it quicker by hand. Where it really shines for me in programming and what I still use ChatGPT and Claude for is rubber ducking and as an alternative to documentation (eg “how do I do x in css”).

Besides the code quality being mediocre at best and outright rubbish at worst, it’s too much of a “yes man”, it’s lazy (choose between A and B: why not a hybrid approach? That’s… not what I asked for), and it doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know”.

I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy. We need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to a dumb computer.

I am a competent coder. I have been a coder since I was in middle school. I know at least 10 languages, and I could write my own from scratch.

I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge myself. In fact, if I done something before, I find it boring.

So copilot helps me because I always find something new to do, something I don't understand, something I'm not good at.

So yes, I'm confident I'm competent. But I always do things I'm not good at for fun. So it helps me become well rounded.

So your assertion it only helps me because I'm incompetent is true and false. I'm competent, I just like to do new stuff.

I use multiple daily and have definitely seen a productivity boost. If nothing else, it saves typing. But I'd argue they are in essence a better search engine - it answers "you don't know what you don't know" questions very well, providing a jumping off point when my conception of how to achieve something with code or tooling is vague.

I think for more boilerplate-esque code-monkey type code it can be a boon.

I think the unfortunate reality is that this makes up a shockingly large amount of software engineering. Take this object and put it into this other object, map this data to that data, create these records and move them into this object when then goes into that other object.

You shouldn't be. For code bases where context is mostly local they destroy human throughput by comparison. They only fall down hard when used in spaghetti dumpster fire codebases where you have to paste the contents of 6+ files into context or the code crosses a multiple service boundaries to do anything.

A competent engineer architects their systems to make their tools as effective as possible, so maybe your idea of competent is "first order" and you need higher order conception of a good software engineer.