I wanted to implement the dark mode on my pet project mobile app for a while -- could never find enough time and motivation to do it until now. Last night I finally started chatting to Github Copilot (Claude 4 sonnet model):
18 hours? No way. It will take me at least 4 weeks working on this little project solo for 2-3 hours a day after work.
Let's see what we (Copilot and I) were able to accomplish:
There are lot more screens, I'm showing only the most significant ones here.
It took about 3 hours total, talking to Copilot, asking questions, watching youtube videos while waiting for Copilot to complete the response to a particular prompt, then iterate again, and again, and again, until it was ... done!
It touched pretty much every single file in the project.
It's done a lot of heavy lifting -- produced a lot of code, and did it very fast.
If you know what you are doing (if you know what questions to ask Copilot in the right way) -- your effectiveness as a software engineer will go through the roof. Some unintended findings -- sometimes, you ask Copilot a question, but it kind of knows where you are going with it, so it does a lot more than you ask. For instance, I asked to apply a dark mode styling for a particular card which it missed on one screen, and it figured out that the rest of the cards need to have the same approach applied -- I didn't complained and accepted the change.
At this point, I ran out of steam -- going to sleep, and will release all these changes tomorrow night after work.
P.S. After proof reading this post, I realized -- one really has to keep the architecture clean (and simple) in order for Gen AI to be able to help effectively. GenAI praised this project highly, which was very flattering — all the prior decisions on the project helped to implement non trivial tasks super easily in just one session.
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