I work somewhere where they actively encourage copilot, and I actually have some good use-cases.
Most of the time it is just autocomplete on steroids. Scanning the suggestion and hitting tab is almost always faster especially if you have to write a lot of repetitive code.
Generating useful documentation.
I work a lot with legacy codebases. Oftentimes I use copilot to explain what a chunk of code is doing, or give it a requirement and see what it generates based on context. At this point I think working with a legacy codebase as a new maintainer would be a lot harder if I didn't have copilot.
> Most of the time it is just autocomplete on steroids.
imo this is kinda underrated, I use it all the time and it's a real time saver for me. It seems to have a good recall for things you've been doing recently, so it'll make suggestions based on a method I just added or a variable I just declared.
Another fun one I had recently was implementing elo ranking. I'd done some reading so knew what I was doing, but based on the function name and comment it generated the whole thing for me, including all the correct argument names and object properties. Watching it pop up line by line was very cool!
Most of the time it is just autocomplete on steroids. Scanning the suggestion and hitting tab is almost always faster especially if you have to write a lot of repetitive code.
Generating useful documentation.
I work a lot with legacy codebases. Oftentimes I use copilot to explain what a chunk of code is doing, or give it a requirement and see what it generates based on context. At this point I think working with a legacy codebase as a new maintainer would be a lot harder if I didn't have copilot.