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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3073 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 2023

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Has anyone else tried Github Copilot, and found it to have really insidious downsides? I noticed the other day that copilot really fucks up my mental flow when building a program, it's like it prevents me from building a complete mental map of the global logic of what I'm doing. It's not that the code copilot outputs is bad exactly, it's that writing the code myself seems to make me understand my own program much better than just reading and correcting already-written code. And overall this "understanding my code" effect makes me code much faster, so I'm not even sure that copilot truly provides that large of a speed benefit. I also notice my mind subtly "optimizing for the prompt" instead of just writing the code myself, like some part of my mind is spending its resources figuring out what to write to get copilot to produce what I want, instead of just writing what I want.

Maybe copilot is a lifesaver for people who aren't programming particularly complex programs, and I do think it's useful for quickly making stuff that I don't care about understanding. But if I'm writing a new Reinforcement Learning algorithm for a research paper, there is no way that I'd use it.

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