I pay for copilot. It saves me a modest number of minutes of time per week. That's worth a small fee.
And before someone jumps in: I and my other co-founder who also uses copilot (We are the only two in the company who do, I think, without checking) are the compliance team. We're both very senior and use copilot basically a line or three at a time as a smart autocomplete. It's still worth it.
> [we] use copilot basically a line or three at a time as a smart autocomplete.
I think this is the best way to think of CoPilot. GitHub is selling it like its going to write all your code for you, but in reality it is just next-generation auto-complete.
That's not a bad thing. In some ways I'd argue its actually better. GitHub needs to change its marketing because even most developers seem to think that its out there to take away our jobs. Its not and can not. But it provides the smartest auto-complete you've ever seen and that can be useful, especially when wading through mundane parts of your codebase.
I found copilot to be less useful than autocomplete. Typical autocomplete suggests things that actually exist and work in the codebase. While Copilot would suggest things that look superficially like names that exist or ways I might have named it, but very often just wrong.
I find typed languages like Rust or Typescript make VS Code super powered and provides much more value than copilot.
Not surprisingly (Google's internal code analysis tooling is quite sophisticated), Google has added a post-processing filter to remove results that don't compile, but that's not publicly available: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/07/ml-enhanced-code-completio...
It's really just perfect for remembering obscure things and can easily be prompted to generate the boilerplate. If you surround it with your style you will see it try to use the same techniques, however if you work on large code bases it gets annoying when it starts copying the bad habits you are trying to get rid of. In those cases it's actually kind of good for bringing to your attention that the building next door is still on fire.
And before someone jumps in: I and my other co-founder who also uses copilot (We are the only two in the company who do, I think, without checking) are the compliance team. We're both very senior and use copilot basically a line or three at a time as a smart autocomplete. It's still worth it.