blog/copilot

[utterances-bot]

I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind - Josh Collinsworth blog

Why I worry about the effect GitHub Copilot is having and will continue to have on the accessibility of the web at scale.

https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/copilot

[XTapped]

I know this isn't the point of the article, but you should try the Copilot Chat extension. It might be better since Copilot's inline chat and autocomplete use GPT-3.5 whereas Chat uses GPT-4.

[meryantona]

Very interesting article. Thank you. I agree completely with the "we deserve better" part.
I don't use Copilot daily, but my experience with ChatGPT is so similar.

[weestoater]

Superbly written article. I'm in agreement with everything you say and share the exact same worries.
Thank you so much for putting all these points into such an excellent piece and enabling me to help begin a discussion with my peers as we face many of these issues ourselves / in our organisation.

[Holf]

Brilliant article. I stopped using Copilot after a short while for these very reasons. I do still use ChatGPT 4 a lot but I have experience already in the languages I typically use, so I can ask questions very precisely and have a sort of sixth sense for when something sounds not quite right. And, I really want to learn and understand what I'm being told and the conversational style is really good for follow up explorations, and so on.

Even so, when I'm on the edge of knowing what I'm doing I can still get diverted into half an hour of blind alley without realising it, to then find a quick Google sets me back on the right path.

ChatGPT 4 has been really helpful for getting my head around TypeScript, but then I was already familiar with C# and JavaScript, so had a fighting chance to spot when it was telling me porkies. I would be far more hesitant to rely on it for learning stuff that is more outside of my comfort zone and which has genuinely different semantics and structures, e.g. Rust or Go.

In summary I feel that, at the moment, rather than levelling the playing field, these tools actually help experienced coders more, because such coders will naturally use better prompts and more easily spot hallucinations.