Why I'm no longer using Copilot

the reason I'm no longer using co-pilot actually starts out rather simple recently I decided to redo my neim config from scratch and in doing so well I forgot to add co-pilot back in if I had remembered I'd probably still be using it however I'm not both my editor and code have been co-pilot free for about a month now and I have no intention of going back so in this video I want to look at some of the reasons why I don't want to go back and what that means for me in the future the first of these reasons starts with some simple advice if you don't use it you'll lose it ask anyone who's taken a break from weightlifting or playing a musical instrument and they'll tell you that this advice is pretty sound this rule isn't ubiquitous however not every skill you have will be lost over time for example once you've learned to ride a bike you'll pretty much have that skill for the rest of your life however when it comes to writing code I'm not sure the same can be said one thing I am sure of however is that by using co-pilot it has had an effect on the way I write code something I now call the co-pilot pause this was where I would start by typing out a couple of characters of the code I intended then I would just stop and wait what I was waiting for was for co-pilot to tell me the code I was about to write rather than just writing it myself with co-pilot enabled this Behavior wasn't that noticeable but once I no longer had it it was much more pronounced and it got me thinking under co-pilots is this what writing code had become reviewing AI generated suggestions instead of using my own brain and writing it myself to me this felt very similar to just copy and pasting from stack Overflow albeit in a much more efficient way the thing is I hadn't done that for a number of years not only this but as soon as I went co-pilot cold turkey it took me a little while to go back to writing code like I did in the BC era fortunately this only lasted for a couple of days but the experience made me feel like I would eventually lose my skills if I didn't keep them up so by no longer using cop pilot I'm taking my coding skills back as well as taking my skills back there was something else that was happening I was having fun if you're anything like me then you probably enjoy writing code maybe a little too much however since introducing co-pilots into that workflow it had become a lot less enjoyable for me the active writing code provides a few key experiences it enables me to learn something new to be creative and to solve problems by using co-pilots I had inadvertently given away some of the gifts that coding gives to me me now to be fair to co-pilots it's not meant to be about having fun its intentions are to increase developer productivity although more on that in a minute interestingly enough however github's own study into developer productivity and happiness found that co-pilots improved developer satisfaction between 60 and 75% with three indicators being less frustration more fulfillment and focus on satisfying work to me these numbers actually make sense especially as the experience of using co-pilot took me back to when I was a much more Junior engineer when I initially started my software development career yeah it was kind of frustrating A lot of my time was spent dealing with silly issues such as syntax problems or just a misunderstanding of how a language Works often times it would take hours in order to find the problem the thing is though it was a right of passage I had to encounter those challenges in order to get better if instead I had a tool such as co-pilot I doubt I would have faced those problems and then improved either way I fall into the 40 % that doesn't feel more enjoyment when using co-pilot and I strongly believe that in order to get really good at something you have to enjoy it speaking of getting good one of the best ways to improve your skills is to be constantly learning but knowing what to learn and making time for it is sometimes a struggle fortunately that's where the sponsor of today's video brilliant.org can help brilliant is one of the best ways to learn computer science math and data science interactively and offers bite-sized courses that range across a variety of different skill levels and subjects given we're talking about co-pilot and AI you can also take advantage of brilliant to better understand how the technology behind it works by taking the course on how llms work this course will allow you to get Hands-On with real language models as you explore how they build vocabulary choose their next word and much more you'll also be able to understand the importance of training data and the role it plays in generating output looking at models trained on big text terms and conditions versus those trained on the lyrics of Taylor Swift so to try everything that brilliant has to offer free for 30 days visit brilliant.org dreams of code or click the link in the description down below you'll also receive 20% of brilliant's annual premium subscription a big thank you to brilliant for sponsoring this video the next reason I'm choosing to no longer use co-pilot is to do with quality as I mentioned before co-pilot is meant to be a productivity tool and in some cases it does a really good job of achieving that goal however I find a lot of the time it makes mistakes and instead I'm much more productive when just using a good language server not only that but after time I found the suggestions that co-pilot provided were woefully out of date when it comes to software development things change rather rapidly and documentation that worked for a library maybe 2 years ago can be out of date when applied to the current version this is a fundamental flaw of co-pilot as the data it's been trained on grows more and more stale considering that the two main benefits I got from co-pilot were dealing with boilerplate and working with the apis of a new framework the fact that the suggest s were often stale meant that I would often have to refer to the documentation anyway not only do I anecdotally find that this quality is an issue research has also been done on the matter with studies showing that the code AI generates is often having to be Rewritten this coupled with the fact that I may not truly understand the code that co-pilot generated gives me concern for the future maintainability of the code despite these concerns however co-pilot is still rather good at generating boilerplate and if it wasn't for this next reason I could see myself keeping C co-pilot around just for that task unfortunately however there's a big problem with co-pilot that I kind of neglected privacy if you know my content then you know that I'm into self-hosting open source and privacy co-pilot is pretty antithetical to all of these and none more so than privacy as you use it it constantly sends up Snippets of your code up to a remote server to make matters worse if you're on the individual plan then these code Snippets are saved by default unless you've explicitly opted out for me this is kind of unacceptable but it was the last nail in the co-pilot coffin that I needed so with co-pilot no longer installed what am I going to use next well nothing yet I'm probably going to take a break from AI for a little while before maybe looking at some open- Source models that I can self host if that's something of Interest then let me know in the comments down below I'm taking a break from using AI mainly because we're in one of the biggest hype Cycles I've ever seen and I'm both fatigued and slightly underwhelmed but who knows maybe I'm just nostalgic for a more simple era of writing code and by taking AI out of my editor I'm just living in the past

Channel: Dreams of Code

Views: 160,833

Keywords: copilot, ai, coding, software, software dev, develop, software developer

Id: Wap2tkgaT1Q

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024