Have you used any intelligent code completion in the past? E.g. I'd really be interested how it compares to TabNine[0], which already gives pretty amazing single line suggestions (haven't tried their experimental multi-line suggestions yet).
Interestingly the founder of TabNine (which was acquired by Codota[0]) is currently working at Open AI (edit: comments corrected me he left in December 2020 according to his blog).
I imagine they're livid about Open AI creating a competing product.
TabNine at times was magical, but I stopped using it after Codota started injecting ads directly into my editor[1]
I'm curious as to how relevant Copilot would be when autocompleting code that is specific to my codebase in particular, like Tabnine completes most used filters as soon as I type the db table name for the query. I'm a big tabnine fan because it provides this feature. I'm much more often looking to be suggested a line than an entire function because I'm mostly writing business logic.
also tabnine is useless in multi-lines completes. which is where co-pilot should be strong.
Yeah, I've been very happy with Tabnine for a while, but the prospect of good multi-line completions is appealing. I might try running both Tabnine and Copilot simultaneously for a bit to A/B test.
I've been using TabNine for a couple years – constantly impresses me, especially how quickly it picks up new patterns. I wouldn't say it's doing my job for me, but definitely saves me a lot of time.
I have used IDEs with good knowledge of the types and libraries I'm using (e.g. VSCode with TypeScript). They offer good suggestions once you start typing a function name.
But nothing gets close to Copilot. It "understands" what you're trying to do, and writes the code for you. It makes type-based autocompletions useless.
tabnine works quite similarly to copilot. it's not a thing that "knows about types and libraries", it's a similar predictive machine learning method as copilot seems to use.
I tried out TabNine. It was a very frustrating experience. In almost all cases it gave completely useless suggestions which overrode the better ones already suggested by IntelliJ. I persevered for a few days and then uninstalled it.
[0]: https://www.tabnine.com