What a stir there was and what an upset we got when Audacity was acquired by Muse Group. Two problems came together: on the one hand, it became the property of a company that, although it is true that it was left open source, it was also known that it was going to collect information on the use of the application. After that, I think there is no Linux distribution that has updated the application. Now, a little over a year later, I have begun to test Copilot…and it has left my head spinning.
Last summer, I don't know if it was July or August, I talked to an acquaintance of a friend about the possibility of training for something related to the web. The most accessible is web design, where you learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Having two laptops, in one of them two operating systems, an external SSD with Windows and Windows in the training center, I recently said to myself «Pablo, man, using Code OSS is great, but that thing about not being able to synchronize the settings... what if you go back to normal Visual Studio Code?", so I did it.
Copilot is really amazing
Little time has passed since I decided to have everything in sync with the official Visual Studio Code and found out that Copilot was now available to all users. More specifically, that they were going to start allowing us all to use it. That was in the middle of May, and I reinstalled the extension that had failed me in the past. For me, the funny thing is that I installed Copilot and forgot about it, but soon after I started seeing gray text that…write just what i'm thinking!
I'm not going to say I'm a professional programmer. I'm stepping foot into this world, and attending classes. It was when I saw the code of a colleague that I thought «Well, that's fine, but in JavaScript some things are left over from there«. I didn't say it, partly out of shyness and partly because I wasn't the one to say that someone else had something that could be improved, but in my exercise, which dealt with the hours of the day, I did add some comments. It was there that I started to “freak out”: I started a comment, one in which I explained that >= 6 and < 12 was enough to say from 6:00:00 to 11:59:59 if we had asked him to look only at the hours . That comment suggested it to me. Copilot automatically.
Right after, I was going to put another very similar one, not as detailed, and the little co-pilot retyped the text for me. How far can you go?
A help or harmful for those who do not know how to program...
But Copilot has its good things and its bad things, like Emmet or the Visual Studio Code MDN suggestions. Emmet, every time you start typing something it tries to guess what tag, order or code in general you want to type, and the options appear right next to where you type. If you get used to it, fine. If not, that thing about adding a label and closing it automatically is something that not all of us get along with equally well. Copilot is less intrusive, but can also be mean. First we are going to comment on this, the bad.
For those who do not know how to program, and have studied a little how Copilot works, you can ride some "cocoas" of three pairs of noses. For example, one way you can suggest code to us is through comments. As you can see in the header capture, I have asked him, in two comments, to make a loop for me to calculate the age taking into account when he was born. The loop starts with "while" and the condition is "true", so we started "wrong". Sure, you enter a loop when the condition is true, but you have to add the condition manually to start doing anything. Then it is asking for the information with «promtps», which may be what I want, but we have to understand what it tells us or it will not do any good.
Therefore, driving with a co-driver can be good, that's how we all learn in driving school, but if our teacher started touching the steering wheel and didn't let us drive for ourselves, we wouldn't learn to solve problems, and if we later took the car, we would have an accident a few meters away, for sure.
… a gold mine for those who do
However. For those of us who do know how to drive, help is not too much. In fact, airplane pilots are basically there to take off, land and solve any unforeseen event. The rest is almost all automatic. That's exactly what Copilot is: we give him directions, he tells us what to write, and if there's a problem, we either give him better instructions or fix them by hand. If in 10 lines we only have to tweak a conditional, have we gained time or not?
Suggested text appears in gray, and to accept it we only have to press the tabulatorLike with Emmet. It is also commented that we can move forward or backward through different suggestions with or + [ o ] on Windows and Linux, Command or Option on Mac, but that's something that hasn't worked for me. yes press works Ctrl + Enter so that a list with ten suggestions comes out, and probably one of those will serve us.
It supports several programming languages, but it stands out in JavaScript, Python or TypeScript, to mention a few. It also does its little things in CSS, and if we're not careful, it creates a class with its :hover that, well, at least it looks curious.
Copilot: efficiency vs “privacy”
So no, I haven't gone crazy and I don't want to be spied on, I'm not going to lie. It's also not like Microsoft (owner of GitHub) has called me and told me that they will pay me if I write well about their Copilot. What has happened is that I have seen that on this occasion a good use of "our data" has been made. Taking into account that they will always know what, how and when we do it, I did like this little co-pilot, and If you are a programmer I invite you to try it by yourself.
If not, there are dozens of videos on YouTube that will explain it better than me, with people who know how to program more, in more languages, import libraries... All you need is to use a Visual Studio Code that can be logged in with a GitHub, and the account itself, plus the extension. It does not work in VSCodium or Code OSS because they have that function disabled.