Are You Using GitHub CoPilot, CodeWhisperer, or Any Other AI Coding Assistance Tool?

[Shaggy Hiker]

And if you are, what are your experiences with them? I've been looking at this a bit, and can't quite decide whether it would truly help all that much (or at least whether it would justify the cost).

These are clearly pretty valuable tools, but also clearly pretty risky, as examples of them getting close, yet including significant issues, are fairly common. It's clear that accepting their choices is not good, so writing without understanding will result in bad and buggy code. Still, they do look like they would save a certain amount of time. It just looks like it would be mostly an improvement on Intellisense suggestions when it comes to VS.

[dday9]

I have asked Chat GPT specific questions which in turn spit out code that I used but I'm not using any AI to automatically generate the code as I type.

My experience has been mostly positive, although occasionally it will give me members that just straight up don't exist. Pointing out that they don't exist will typically either receive a correction or a "sorry I don't know how to do that".

[fafalone]

I use ChatGPT very occasionally when I'm hoping for a hint in the right direction. Tried at first to make it more useful, but between constantly having to rewrite the query or clarify something, and too many errors, especially the really insidious errors where it's nearly perfectly except for one easily overlooked detail that sends you into an hours-long bug hunt, overall it was a net loss for productivity for me. So I've kinda soured on AI tools until they're a bit more mature. YMMV, I hear they work a lot better on the most popular languages right now like Python, and I only do VB/tB, C, and C++.

[sapator]

On rare occasions GhatGPT through Merlin without subscription but since Merlin stopped working for me on Chrome (the "Let's Chat" button clicks and do nothing. I asked GhatGPT thought google (as it's the only thing that works and gives a left window but for the exact search, without chat ) And he replied to contact itself!) I haven't used it for a couple of months.
My last experience was negative since I won't ask "write me a select statement in mssql to count users" but rather than: I have this complex query and I need to improve it's performance.
It mostly suggested BS and stuff that will decrease performance (having an and xx is not null on and inner join to exclude null values. I corrected it and said I'm sorry I\m so sorry).
So it depends and frankly I don't want to be brain farted and using it constantly for things that are complex an I have to give some thought about.
Of course I wouldn't not be using it for some sensitive nightly batches for the accounting that we are doing here. I wouldn't bet an organization revenue rates in it.

[Delaney]

I use 2 AI Coding Assistance Tools:

First one is google to find the answers to my questions and most of the time, I find them and even example of code.
The second one is my brain which is very close if not totally an artificial Intelligence. Like all the other AI , It has grown through the absorption of data I read, saw, listened and analysis of them. I confess it is not as efficient as the one made with electronic devices but well, it does the job.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Thus far, it sounds like nobody has used GitHub Copilot. I asked because I noticed that it was included in the latest VS (though it's an additional subscription cost if you want to use it). While it's kind of like ChatGPT, it is different in that it is integrated with VS. I watched a few videos on it, and they pretty much said what Sapator said, in that the code generated was often inefficient though not always wrong.

This seems like the future, so I was curious as to whether or not anybody on here had jumped onto that train.

[fafalone]

ChatGPT is free, CoPilot is not. I'm saving my 30-day trial for when it's a more mature product, unless I hear it's way better specifically for C/C++/VBx than ChatGPT.

[Shaggy Hiker]

ChatGPT is free, CoPilot is not. I'm saving my 30-day trial for when it's a more mature product, unless I hear it's way better specifically for C/C++/VBx than ChatGPT.

That's kind of the reason I asked. I could get it paid for, I just don't know whether I'd use it based on the videos I've watched on it. I'm certainly not going to be an early adopter.

[Calpgrmr]

I use 2 AI Coding Assistance Tools:

I confess it is not as efficient as the one made with electronic devices but well, it does the job.

And... the electronic ones don't have a sense of humer. Great Post!

[NTShpikho]

I only use coding cheat sheets, and sometimes online code porters.

https://ibb.co/TmRkQg1

tried copilot and it does a terrible job at any out of the box requests.

many times I use mac's siri to play songs while I code.