My experience with Co-Pilot for a couple of projects.
If you want the answer in one word then answer is Big “NO”
I tried my hand on this extension and here is my brief review on the same!
What is GitHub Copilot ?
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) its an IDE for millions of developers across the world. GitHub Copilot is available today as a VS Code extension. It is a pair programming tool built using AI technology to help users of VS Code by auto-completing the code.
It is built over a language model called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3) by Open-AI.
It is trained over a large data set containing human comments, queries and data from internet through which it predicts and shows the possible sentences or queries to choose from. This is just an overview of the working of the extension. Also, I have access to Open-AI API which has a similar chat-bot named “Chat”, which works similarly.
Take a look :
Let's dig in further. So back to our question — if GitHub copilot actually worth it and would it replace developers or is it just like any other extension.
Before I got access to use Co-Pilot, I created an extension that would work similar to Co-Pilot in the FE but with a different back end system. It just scrapes the web and gives the snippet that user is looking for and I have named the extension as — Clara Copilot.
Link to My Copilot Alternative: Click Here !
Now let's see a comparison between GitHub Co-Pilot and Clara Copilot and see how it works.
I think both extension does the great job, but when it comes to generation, I feel GitHub copilot is much more dynamic. While the extension I made is totally static and every time it just tries to search for a snippet, it shows the same snippet, whereas GitHub Co-Pilot gives me around 10 different variations which I can use.
Now you an overview of these two extensions and it would not be right to chose a winner on this grounds. Because, my copilot (Clara) works on web scraping, which means if it could not find answers from Stack-overflow, it's not going to show any results. But when it comes to GitHub Co-Pilot, I can adjust the comments to make it suggest reliable and better answers.
Verdict
Will it replace the developers? No no! Can everybody use it? No no no! Basically, even a person without programming knowledge would not be able to use GitHub copilot as a person requires basic programming knowledge to use and get a hold of it.
But GitHub copilot has a lot of potential. And also it has a lot of scope to improve. For now, it can be used by developers to speed up MVP's and proof of concept kind of projects, but it cannot be used in industries.
Where Can it be Used:
- Pet or personal projects.
- Rapid prototyping.
- Googling time will be reduced to quite an extent.
If you reach until here thanks for reading! if you find this blog useful, don’t mind sharing it!
About Me : I'm just a developer.
