I trialed GitHub Copilot and used ChatGPT for a bit, but recently I found myself using them less and less.
I’ve found them valuable when doing something new(at least to me), but for most of my day-to-day it seems to have lost it’s luster.
I’m a FSE and I use GitHub copilot and Perplexity. I wouldn’t want to code without them anymore.
I want to get things done (especially when I’m at work) and not spent time reading docs or having 20 tabs of stackflow open. I’ve had enough of that lol.
I think everyone here knows copilot but perplexity is a lot smaller and newer. It’s basically like chatgpt but faster and it googles stuff, giving sources for each claim that I can read for myself.
For example, for my latest project I decided to give tailwind a try and instead of having to look through the docs for every little thing I just ask perplexity and it sums it up for me, even giving examples.
And I use copilot a lot for mundane tasks, for example when I write an API that takes an object of type Foo, Copilot auto Fills making variables and checking each for nulls and then I use that API in the frontend copilot already knows what I’m about to do and auto-fills the fetch.
I often use Bing AI when I forget some syntax or need a quick explanation of some api
I used to ask things on the chat. But now when I think on trying I end up thinking on how I’m going to have to deal with trying to avoid it making things up and it puts me off.
I still have copilot on but I find it not really useful beyond very simple things. It is a smarter autocomplete, so it’s nice. But you always need to have your brain turned on because it definitely invents things.
It’s also sometimes entertaining when it makes things up. I especially enjoy when it makes up entries in the changelog.
As for ChatGPT, I use it occasionally mostly for tedious things I don’t want to spend time on. But I’ve definitely used it less lately. The hyper has faded.
I’ve been using ChatGPT4, through the phind.com web site because it allows one to include web links which phind.com pulls information from and then includes within the context info delivered to ChatGPT4. This has proved to be invaluable when trying to figure out new libraries - I just include a link to their documentation and start asking my specific integration/usage questions.
I’ve also been learning how to write my own Stable Diffusion implementation, and Phind.com’s context packing functionality has been extremely helpful explaining and describing how components work, how they integrate, and explaining the aspects of the papers this work is based I am not confident I completely understand. It’s a tireless explainer, which never gets bored and always responds with a chipper attitude.
