before i left my last job, we were being required to use github copilot.
this is after i gave them numbers showing that after one month of trialling it:
- tasks took me the same amount of time on average to complete, but
- code reviews took twice as long, as:
- the code was shit.
- i didn't understand my 'own' code.
- the code wasn't idiomatic to our design patterns, and had to be rewritten.
i already had half a year of experience of successfully wrangling copilot for extrapolating/translating large/repetitive administrative shell/ansible scripts. but for heavy coding tasks — rather than modelling the problem and developing a solution — i was spending the same amount of time effectively letting a JS bootcamp intern (mis)interpret my specifications line-by-line and then i would proofread their mistakes. in a way, this took more time because it left me very little time for self-review before i was under pressure to move on to the next thing.
the bosses got the same results from the other two people who trialled it, and decided not only to buy into copilot, but to implement chatgpt to automatically write copy and translate it for customers. that went about as well as you might expect.
i am so fucking done with tech.