Well it hasn't been a year or two, just 6 months. But I believe the addition of the Chat window to CoPilot and an improvement in the accuracy of its m

Ed Crewe: Software Development with Generative AI - 2024 Update

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2024-06-09 20:00:06

Well it hasn't been a year or two, just 6 months. But I believe the addition of the Chat window to CoPilot and an improvement in the accuracy of its models has already made a significant difference.

On balance I would now say that even a fluent programmer may get some benefits from its use. Given the speed of improvement it is likely that all commercial programming will use an AI assistant within a few years.

The new Chat window within your IDE gives you a context sensitive version of Copilot ChatGPT that can act as a pair programmer and code reviewer for your work.

If you have enabled auto-complete then you instigate that usage by writing functional comments, ie prompts then tabbing out to accept the suggestions it responds with.

To override these prompts, you instead can use dot and get real code completion options (as long as your IDE is configured correctly). Since code completion has your whole codebase as context, it complements CoPilot reasonably well. But whilst the code completion is always correct, CoPilot is less so, probably more like 75% now compared to its initial release level of 50%