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 $10 a month on it? And if so, how do feel about adding another monthly subscription to the ever-growing list?
Edit: I personally will continue using Copilot.
Latest comments (42)
Honestly, yes I would if 10 USD didn't cost a ton here. It's 100% worthwhile given the productivity benefits. Sometimes so help given that it figures out what I need even before the vscode intellisenses comes into play and that speaks volumes
For me personally it can't support me enough yet, so I would disagree. I isn't worth that 10 bucks a month for me personally. For a company and if it really speeds up you productivity, this subscription is really nothing for this potentially powerful tool. Nevertheless I will continue to use it time to time as long as it's free for students.
I’ll stop using it, not because it isn’t cool but the parts that are useful for me are hardly worth it
No ! Dont let it practice on you ! It will take all of our jobs !
All jokes aside, CP is awasome. It lets you focus on the big task, similar to high level programing languages that use a garbage collector, for an example.
Code away !
For my personal projects and playing at home with stuff, definitely not worth the 10 bucks. I wish it had a free tier, similar to TabNine.
For work, I do like it. If I convince my company to pay for it, I'd definitely like to keep using it. But it's not something I can sell like "the bets tool ever, I'll increase my productivity by 20% and you get more features from me because of it". But it will be rather like "Can the company afford 10$ monthly for each developer in my team? Buy this then. No? Alright...."
This thing was really good with Android Studio (Java-Kotlin both). I want to subscribe to it but 10 USD/month is quite costly for India. If it could have been 20-30 USD / year I would have immediately subscribed to it.
To give you an idea how much 10 USD is here is, I can buy dinner for 2 in a higher end restaurant with it. So not worth it.
I am liking someone's idea here to ask my employer to buy this, but I don't think that is happening.
Been using it since November and it’s gotten to the point where it’s become so useful, paying for it isn’t actually a choice.
The question I have about Copilot is what is the implications of using code produced by it?
Under what license did Microsoft obtain the training data? Under what license does that generated code fall under?
Is it a derived work?
It's useful enough to charge my employer for the cost. Otherwise, I'd pass.
Oooh, that's a response I haven't gotten yet. Thank for sharing.
Out of curiosity, has anyone else in your team wisened up and also gotten your employer to get Copilot for them? (Its cool if you don't answer this, especially since it relates to your employment)
Since Copilot just announced it is going to be a paid product, we haven't gotten around to it yet. But, we've been able to have other developer tools covered.
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. 😂
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.
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.
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 😂 it uses codegrepper api to perform search.
github.com/badboysm890/clara-copilot
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.
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.
Hey, thanks for bringing this discussion, I'm curious about the results.
BTW I'd pay for sure, the tool is amazing.
I will continue. Saves me more $$$ worth of time than 10$ a month. So easy math here.
Absolutely agree. It obviously depends on a developers rate, but a $50/hr dev would only need to save 12 minutes to break even. One successful suggestion could save 5 minutes of searching for “that one property/method/etc.”
I have saved hundreds of 10second increments while coding with copilot just because I don’t have to type out so much. On top of the help for correct property names or idiomatic approaches for unfamiliar libraries, it’s a win-win in my book.
I do get CoPilot for free though, as a member of an org that is maintaining a popular open-source library.
For those of you who value CoPilot but can’t fork out $10/mo: can you afford to help maintain a popular open source library?
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.
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.
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.
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.