Counter article: https://jadarma.github.io/blog/posts/2024/11/does-github-copilot-improve-code-quality-heres-how-we-lie-with-statistics/ about the original statistics article from Github this talk and blog post is about: https://github.blog/news-insights/research/does-github-copilot-improve-code-quality-heres-what-the-data-says/
If you rather like a reactionary video commentary to the article from The Primeagen: https://youtu.be/IxYN7DKefmI or watch on Invidious, a privacy focused web YouTube client without using YouTube directly: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=IxYN7DKefmI
It annoys me so much, too, that Microsoft keeps on advertising with those fictitious numbers, despite multiple studies showing very different results. At some point, it’s just misleading advertising, which is illegal where I live.
Because its a “study” and “statistics” and not an “advertisement”, it does not fall under the laws of ads I assume. And why too many take this seriously, because it presents numbers… Microsoft is not the only company doing this, but one of the strongest companies to fight against. It’s actually depressing.
Terrible article. 90% fluffy rant. 10% actual points.
Obviously GitHub is biased here, but anyone that has actually used Copilot knows it is useful. It’s not going to write your whole program for you but it clearly improves productivity by a small amount (which makes it a no-brainer commercially).
For some reason the author clearly needs Copilot to be useless. I’m not sure why.
Copilot was worse than useless in my situation. My team tested it out and immediately were losing productivity due to it. Terrible autocomplete is worse than just jumping over to ChatGPT or Claude when we actually need help. It literally was so bad we all overwhelmingly said “no, but can we get something like <literally any competitor> please”.
While the author does not like Copilot or Ai tools for this task, the entire article is not about Copilot itself. The author makes points and points out why the statistics and article from Github/Microsoft is nonsense and misleading at best, or even straight up lies at worst. Its not just that Github is biased here, hey first straight up lie with the statistics and why the brought up points of Github makes no sense or are misleading. The author of this article did actually a good job of breaking it down and explains each point.
which makes it a no-brainer commercially
There is no such thing as “no-brainer commercially” when Ai is involved. If you turn off your brain because you are using Ai, then you are using Ai wrongly. And soon you will find yourself in trouble, especially if its commercially used.
A commercial no-brainer means it makes such financial sense that even someone with no brain would make the same decision.
For $100/year subscription, it has to save something like 2 hours of dev time per a year for it to make financial sense.
It doesn’t mean that anyone gets to switch off their brain
There is no such thing as “no-brainer commercially” when Ai is involved
There absolutely is. Copilot is $100/year (or something like that). Developer salaries are like $100k/year (depending on location). So it only has to improve productivity by 0.1% to be worthwhile. It easily does that.
You can’t “turn off your brain” when using copilot. It isn’t that advanced yet.
I will instead label them as “Copilot-ers” and “Control-ers”, for brevity.
Were the Copilot-ers copiloted or are they copilots? 🤔 There are probably both kinds.
