I have mixed feelings about AI, but given that it can sometimes be useful, I decided to accept the offer of a free licence for Copilot. I have a co-worker here who is a big fan, and keeps making “ooh” and “aah” noises every time is does something impressive.
Sadly, my experience is somewhat different. As a general rule, when it offers code in Visual Studio, the code has two major issues…
- The code doesn’t compile. Now maybe I’m old-fashioned, by I like to write code that does cause compiler errors. Copilot seems to disagree, and adds calls to non-existent methods and properties on my objects.
- It rarely completes code blocks. For example, if I start to add a Blazor component, Copilot will offer to complete the code, includes masses of complex, usually irrelevant content. However, it doesn’t close the component tag, leaving me with code that doesn’t compile (again).
However, today it has taken a sinister turn against me. I could forgive the previous issues as being due to limited technical capabilities (although the way it’s being touted you wouldn’t believe it), but when it starts being rude, I have to object!
For example, I just started typing a TODO comment, and its suggested completion wasn’t exactly a big boost to my ego…
I don’t claim to be the greatest programmer in the world, but my code isn’t that bad!
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had just been adding a few TODO comments to remind me what I need to do. I came ack to the first one, with the intention of writing some code, added a new line after the TODO comment, and it prompted me with the exact TODO comment that was on the line above…
You can’t make up this sort of stuff!
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