I know this is a bit late, but copilot is only ok if used for code completion. I switched to the free tier of supermaven a month ago and it’s been way more helpful, as it can handle context better. Probably cuts coding in half and takes away a third of debugging.
Asking chatgpt for code has also become better, but imo still not reliable enough to regularly use. Just had some docker code written and it got it wrong 3 times so I gave up on that.
I get your point, AI can only save time if you know exactly what you’re doing and it will only be helpful sometimes. But when it is, it’s such a time saver.
Mostly it really is just a fancier auto-complete. It is most useful for situations where you want to essentially do the equivalent of copy&paste and then make changes in a few predictable places in each copy.
It is total crap at writing code itself to the point where you need to read the code and understand it to know it hasn’t screwed up, something that takes much, much longer than just writing it yourself.
Yeah AI as a dev is shit, but AI as a more thoughtful auto-complete is actually pretty great.
To me it looks like AIs currently are right at the boundary between being a tool and being a companion. But to be a full companion, they can’t be up against the boundary, they need to be well established and tried and tested as a companion to be used repeatedly, so we’re still a few decades out from that from what I can tell.