GitHub's AI pair programmer tool Copilot, has moved from Insider Preview status to prime-time Production for all. With this move, Copilot is now yet another subscription service at $10/month to use its admittedly powerful features.
So my question is this; to anyone who has any experience using Github's Copilot, have you found it useful enough to justify spending $10 a month on it? And if so, how do feel about adding another monthly subscription to the ever-growing list?
Edit: I personally will continue using Copilot.
Top comments (42)
If Copilot is truly useful, $10 is really nothing in terms of developer productivity.
That being said, I hope a fully open source alternative springs up — this is the kind of tool that absolutely should be open and hackable. (The open source version still needs to cost something, maybe even more than $10 because AI compute ain't free).
Totally down for an Open Source version of it, without all of its magic being hidden inside a blackbox.
I think an open source machine learning model wouldn't explain as much as you want. What I wish Microsoft to do, is to increase the transparency what material and from which platforms the model has been trained on.
I think you can look over this.
openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
arxiv.org/abs/2107.03374
To be honest I don't wanna spend on copilot and already stopped using it.
It was fun, yes, i learned a lots of things, including promises, learned vuex nuxt, vue too and I'm actually js allergic, still am. 😂
It was a good tool but, it never worked correctly, there is always a chance of it not working properly,or providing correct solutions, or finding anything at all. It's normal i know. Also the way i used copilot was like a dictionary and i don't think that I'd like to pay for a dictionary while it is on internet as well, for free, with some extra steps. Clara copilot does same but uses stack overflow.
This is actually quite interesting. I so far haven't come across anyone else who has used Copilot to learn something new in the JS world. Mostly, everyone else (myself included), seem to be using it mostly for contextual autocomplete and alternate suggestions.
Just curious, did you find learning with Copilot to be easier/more intuitive? And how's suggestions from Clara Copilot? From initial Googling, it certainly looks interesting enough to give it a shot.
Haha well i am a weird bunch so ye u do things unexpected. And yes i think i found learning with copilot easier. I did started learning with tutorials but I'd get bored in few minutes. Here with copilot, i learned by doing.
Say im writing code to fetch data from backend, I'd just write
method: {}and then function name and let copilot suggest, after that I'll dissect code and understand how it's working and why. This way it is much clear to me what exactly is happening, since in real life, to do list is not gonna be implemented. And let's be honest, to do list tutorials doesn't teach much either way.Clara copilot is a good alternative. Not the best but it does save me some time searching around. Type what you want to search of, then select it and then ctrl shift p, search snippet. Though it's still a miss or hit but anyways it works, kind of 😂 it uses codegrepper api to perform search.
github.com/badboysm890/clara-copilot
You might want to add the discussion tag to the post to increase visibility.
Personally I'm going to stop using co-pilot, whilst it's a powerful tool it's basically just a powerful auto complete feature which I don't feel justifies $10 a month.
Thanks for tip regarding discussion tag, this was a question I just had in my head and I wanted to poll the community on it.
I've loved every second of it. For example I had 4 different files, each for GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE.
I wrote the first GET file, and then was able to just press tab to essentially auto complete the 3 remaining files. I love it.
I agree with this sentiment. Plenty of times, over the past 5 months, that I've been working in a project and Copilot was there alongside me making my life all the more easier.
Well, Copilot been very useful and once, the thing is if you are doing freelancing stuff then I would recommend it as $10 is not large for that. Apart from that for regular/hobby daily job it may be costly. But the thing is it's addictive and specially the code generation part. So use with care, because it affect work/result(+) and coding skill/speed(-).
So basically if you generating enough revenue from it than go for it.
That's reasonable and definitely makes sense. I'm personally curious about people's thoughts on it, considering the Insider Preview had a sizeable userbase from what I can understand.
I thought it was neat, but honestly use it more like a party trick than a vital part of my workflow. I picked up the 60 day trial, but won't be paying for it when that ends.
That's certainly fair. I've always felt that Copilot should not be a vital part of your workflow, rather just a helper sitting on your shoulder. I'll continue using it till I decide to stop.
On a side note: I've found Coplit to be a tad bit agressive in its suggestions at times. Maybe a something like setting levels of suggestions being provided.
It’s funny… I both am and am not a good customer-fit.
Am: Not a real developer, would benefit from the feature.
Not: Not a real developer, so unlikely to pay $10pm for it.
I know exactly when you mean.
I'm a hobbyist developer (not even sure if this term is even real), and I've come really appreciate having the Typescript compiler and Copilot on my shoulders. One of them is very strict whilst the other provides useful suggestions.
For now, I'll continue using Copilot, and will probably axe it only if it starts to become a financial burden.
There is no free plan for personal developer, so I uninstalled it from my VS Code today. Farewell GitHub Copilot.
Fair fair, completely understandable. A few people I work with still have their student emails and are going to continue getting some use out Copilot using them.
Hey, thanks for bringing this discussion, I'm curious about the results.
BTW I'd pay for sure, the tool is amazing.
Freelancer here. I'm pretty sure I will. It's definitely been a time saver for me. Writing crud apps or a data pipeline seems to tie in well with it's capabilities.
That's nice to hear. I've also found the same to be true. Using it in both REST and GraphQL projects, I've found its contextual autocomplete to be quite accurate. It likely has something to do with projects having a bunch of repeated code/patterns in it.