Are we talking about Copilot in particular or AI code assistants in general?
The value, for me, is extremely high.
My teammates feel the same. Our shared opinion/experience is that ChatGPT 4 is better than Copilot in general but Copilot shines in-editor because it's aware of your project. So we use both in tandem. They mostly use Chat GPT and I split about 50%/50%. (Note: I'm using the Copilot X beta which I believe uses GPT-4)
People say they're "only good for boilerplate code" but well, that's the vast majority of what anybody is writing IMO.
If I need to traverse a tree or list or something, I'm letting AI write that code. Could I write it myself faster? No, and it's going to have an off-by-one error some non-zero portion of the time if I write it. I also find it's superior to e.g. memorizing all 10,000 CSS properties along with all the classes that pertain to Boostrap or Tailwind or whatever.
I see the AI code assistant hate here and it just baffles me. It's so obviously useful to me, and I really can't imagine I'm that atypical.
Edit 1: AI help is especially pertinent if you are a "full stack coder" who is working on everything from database to frontend. Since frontends really multiplied in complexity about 15 years ago, I have not met a single "full stack engineer" who is truly fluent and expert in the entire db->app->frontend stack, because complexity and choice has proliferated at each of those levels.
Edit 2: While most of us are (hopefully) not literally writing tree or list traversals by hand in our actual daily programming lives, I hope my meaning is still clear -- I'm talking about that mundane sort of code, iterating over things, etc.
The value, for me, is extremely high.
My teammates feel the same. Our shared opinion/experience is that ChatGPT 4 is better than Copilot in general but Copilot shines in-editor because it's aware of your project. So we use both in tandem. They mostly use Chat GPT and I split about 50%/50%. (Note: I'm using the Copilot X beta which I believe uses GPT-4)
People say they're "only good for boilerplate code" but well, that's the vast majority of what anybody is writing IMO.
If I need to traverse a tree or list or something, I'm letting AI write that code. Could I write it myself faster? No, and it's going to have an off-by-one error some non-zero portion of the time if I write it. I also find it's superior to e.g. memorizing all 10,000 CSS properties along with all the classes that pertain to Boostrap or Tailwind or whatever.
I see the AI code assistant hate here and it just baffles me. It's so obviously useful to me, and I really can't imagine I'm that atypical.
Edit 1: AI help is especially pertinent if you are a "full stack coder" who is working on everything from database to frontend. Since frontends really multiplied in complexity about 15 years ago, I have not met a single "full stack engineer" who is truly fluent and expert in the entire db->app->frontend stack, because complexity and choice has proliferated at each of those levels.
Edit 2: While most of us are (hopefully) not literally writing tree or list traversals by hand in our actual daily programming lives, I hope my meaning is still clear -- I'm talking about that mundane sort of code, iterating over things, etc.