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Sean Cassiere
Sean Cassiere

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Continue using GitHub Copilot?

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)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

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 β€” 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).

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

Totally down for an Open Source version of it, without all of its magic being hidden inside a blackbox.

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tim012432 profile image
Timo

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.

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piyushmultiplexer profile image
Piyush Goyani
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wrench1815 profile image
Hardeep Kumar

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. πŸ˜‚
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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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wrench1815 profile image
Hardeep Kumar • Edited

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 πŸ˜‚ it uses codegrepper api to perform search.
github.com/badboysm890/clara-copilot

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link2twenty profile image
Andrew Bone

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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fish1 profile image
Jacob Enders

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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piyushmultiplexer profile image
Piyush Goyani

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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hyrumwhite profile image
hyrumwhite

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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robertandrews profile image
Robert Andrews • Edited

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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mrdulin profile image
official_dulin

There is no free plan for personal developer, so I uninstalled it from my VS Code today. Farewell GitHub Copilot.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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felipekm profile image
Kautzmann

Hey, thanks for bringing this discussion, I'm curious about the results.
BTW I'd pay for sure, the tool is amazing.

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liamjoneslucout profile image
liam-jones-lucout • Edited

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

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.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

Subscriptions, that bane of our existence....
I'll also continue using it till I feel like it needs to be axed to save on financials 😡.

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attkinsonjakob profile image
Jakob Attkinson

For my personal projects and playing at home with stuff, definitely not worth the 10 bucks. I wish it had a free tier, similar to TabNine.

For work, I do like it. If I convince my company to pay for it, I'd definitely like to keep using it. But it's not something I can sell like "the bets tool ever, I'll increase my productivity by 20% and you get more features from me because of it". But it will be rather like "Can the company afford 10$ monthly for each developer in my team? Buy this then. No? Alright...."

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olivierjm profile image
Olivier JM Maniraho

I used it for a while and I didn't find it useful enough to pay $10.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

That's certainly interesting, since most people I've spoken to that have used Copilot for over a week, and had rave reviews regarding it.
Either ways, its $10 saved. Can't hate on that πŸ˜„.

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kamarton profile image
MΓ‘rton Somogyi

What programming languages ​​did you use? My personal experience is that the offers are very useful for python or PHP, but less so for dotnet.

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olivierjm profile image
Olivier JM Maniraho

I used it with Javascript mostly, It was a useful autocomplete but definitely not worth $10, maybe because the value of $10 is much more compare to other regions.

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seancassiere profile image
Sean Cassiere

Makes sense. It really is one-part autocomplete, and one-part contextual guessing.
I'm in Sri Lanka, and we are having abit of a dollar crisis, so I understand what you mean regarding the value of that $10 πŸ₯².

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aisirachcha21 profile image
Ryan Kuruppu

Honestly, yes I would if 10 USD didn't cost a ton here. It's 100% worthwhile given the productivity benefits. Sometimes so help given that it figures out what I need even before the vscode intellisenses comes into play and that speaks volumes

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bip3r profile image
Or Orsatti

No ! Dont let it practice on you ! It will take all of our jobs !

All jokes aside, CP is awasome. It lets you focus on the big task, similar to high level programing languages that use a garbage collector, for an example.

Code away !