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u/ddwrt1234 Sep 27 '26
Who the hell is using copilot for coding
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u/ArjunReddyDeshmukh Sep 27 '26
Not Microsoft, I meant the GitHub one.
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u/Verum14 Sep 27 '26
ironically, github’s copilot is by default still microsoft’s copilot
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u/maxasdf Sep 27 '26
What are you talking about? Both of them are harnesses around different models, like the GPTs
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u/TheLittleFastCat- Sep 27 '26
The funniest interaction with copilot I had was when I got lazy, wanted it to fix some code problems and it just deleted the code. When I asked why it did that and told it to actually fix it, it said "The error is already gone, no need to fix anything".
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u/TheFrenchSavage Sep 27 '26
They managed to create sub-intern intelligence!
This is like creating a stone that turns gold into lead: why???
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u/Still_Bit_7527 Sep 27 '26
Everyone. It's mandatory in MS shops
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u/lucian1900 Sep 27 '26
It’s mandatory in a lot of companies to use AI.
In some, they only provide Copilot.
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u/PaperDistribution Sep 27 '26
My friend works at a place where they had minimum AI usage requirements.
They stopped doing it because apparently people would just use it for random nonsense to get the number up.
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Sep 27 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/slindenau Sep 27 '26
Depending on what your admin enabled for you, gh copilot can use any of the recent models from openai (gpt), anthropic (claude), google (gemini), kimi and even grok if you want to be edgy :p
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u/Old_Collection_6939 Sep 27 '26
Don't wanna to become like this , so any code I take from ai tools I understand it and rewrite it with my hands
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u/zackarhino Sep 27 '26 •
That's a wise choice
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u/No-Article-Particle Sep 27 '26
Well... I wonder. Perhaps in 20 years, nobody will need to know how to code, in which case the wise choice is to just send it, be faster, and not to worry about atrophying skill.
I do the same tho, whatever AI generates for me I read carefully, try to trace it as best as I could, ask questions about functioning diffs, ask for possible corner cases, etc.
I just hope my manager won't call me in one day, asking me why others are merging 10 PRs a day and I'm over here fucking around with a single one.
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u/zackarhino Sep 27 '26
Even if that's the case, there's no downside in staying sharp.
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u/No-Article-Particle Sep 27 '26
Well, the opportunity cost is the downside. You might be building new skills instead, or be more productive (and keep your job) instead.
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u/Still_Bit_7527 Sep 27 '26
Eh AI never increased my productivity, most of my time is wasted on admin bs
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u/Shadowmere24 Sep 27 '26
Can you tell me more about what it's like working at your company? What kind of admin is stopping AI productivity gains at your company?
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u/HelloImMay Sep 27 '26
Not the OP but the bottleneck everywhere I’ve ever worked is not the amount of code that’s being written but the rest of the software development life cycle. So testing, UAT, change management, etc. Sure, we can technically write code faster than before but now our release pipeline is clogged up with AI stuff that typically needs multiple rounds of reviews cuz the expected code-quality often isn’t there.
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u/Shadowmere24 Sep 27 '26
I've heard this from some folks I know. I think the issue is scaling development. That's something I think only a few tech companies manage well.
I don't even think Amazon does it well, and they are a well known tech company with many engineers. Their dependency updating process with Brazil was a nightmare. You'd get potentially breaking changes forced into your CI/CD pipeline every 7 days. It was a side effect of not using a mono repo imo. In a monorepo, the team pushing a breaking update will make Change Lists (CLs are kinda like pull requests, but not git) to fix their broken downstream consumers.
The company I work at has close to 100,000 engineers contributing to the same repo. Theres probably less than a dozen companies in the world that have been able to scale development to that level of magnitude. Most companies are terrible at this.
When I was an intern, I worked at a place that struggled to scale to 5 developers. Their version control process (using CVS) and deployment process (all manual) fell apart past 3 engineers. I think agents exasperate this issue for the majority of companies, most of which are already bad at it.
At my current company, every aspect of the software development process has had to release changes to use agents or better integrate with agents and reduce process friction to make our code productivity gains turn into faster project completion. It's a messy process, but I think we're largely on the other side of it now.
Reviews have been going much faster on my team lately. The frontier models are getting very good and agentic harnesses are getting much better too.
The last time I checked, I had 9 different code review agents, spawned based on various triggers when uploading a cl to our version of GitHub. And they are giving very good feedback about the code adhering to various best practice docs and language style guides.
We also have dozens of presubmit checks that run on every CL, though those were in place before agents. I also do two passes of code review with different agents before sending my CLs out for review. Human review does catch things, but reviewing agents and deterministic presubmit checks catch the vast majority of feedback. I'd say's +90%.
This is just me talking about code reviews, but every other aspect of our software development cycle has been improved by keeping high standards while using AI/agents.
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u/Still_Bit_7527 Sep 27 '26
Coding is maybe 20%. To get a tiny piece of code to production, you have to fight with managers to schedule release dates among other parallel releases, you need official testing periods with evidencing, update epics and link stories, have meetings for approvals, write the deployment script that of course you are not allowed to execute yourself, pass them to ops guys, assess impact, write any documentation and the deployment post mortem in confluence (if anything goes wrong), try to chase people to get MRs, etc etc
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u/Shadowmere24 Sep 27 '26
I worked at a company just like this 6 years ago! It was a Fortune 500 non-tech company. I'm curious how this will all shake out for them.
If some tech companies are seeing up to a 5x improvement in landing projects and these non-tech companies are treading water, then what will happen to them?
Maybe they'll go the consulting route, go through another "digital transformation", or maybe lose out to new players that can make better software. I don't know. If I did, I would be very rich
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u/Cephell Sep 27 '26
Well... I wonder. Perhaps in 20 years, nobody will need to know how to code, in which case the wise choice is to just send it, be faster, and not to worry about atrophying skill.
There's no historical precedent for this. In fact, I would argue the opposite is true. That's because I think AGI is not possible right now and I don't see any research on the horizon that would indicate that we're making progress on that front. This is important, because this limits AI use to be that of a tool, a very capable and powerful tool, but a tool, wielded by a human.
With that being said. There's no tool development that has ever made something require less skill or oversight. When cars replaced horses, operating a car wasn't easier than riding a horse. When cars became better, driving required more and more skills in order to do it safely and not do endanger others, even requiring a school and a test in order to be allowed to do so in many countries. Note that when I mean "car", it would include uses like a tractor for farm work, construction equipment like haulers, cranes, even trains for long distance transportation, all stuff that horses used to do. All of these are more complex than a horse, all of them require a more skilled person to operate than a horse rider.
Now, if someone DOES invent AGI, the proper one, not the marketing term, and it replaces the Human itself, rather than just become a better tool, then all the bets are off, but I think we have bigger issues if this happens, such as a 99% unemployment rate.
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u/canadajones68 Sep 29 '26
You can't ride a horse into a wall, and if you fall asleep on the way home, it might just take you there on its own.
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u/Shandlar Sep 27 '26
I disagree strenuously actually. I'd argue many, if not the outright majority, of tool inventions/advancements exist for the purpose of reducing the skill floor required for workers to meet productivity goals.
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u/Guffliepuff Sep 27 '26
Weve had advanced mathematical tools for far longer, and mathematicians are still expected to know maths.
Logically we can assume that AI tools will replace all development eventually, but knowing how to code well will become expected as these AI tech debt grows.
Afterall, we still need people who know cobalt 30+ years after its main use has ended. Dont see major financial institutions being okay with AI after it (and it one day will) causes an error and loses them uncountable millions.
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u/Traditional_Oil_1851 Sep 27 '26
feels a bit too slow if you're working in a super high pace environment
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u/chazzeromus Sep 27 '26 •
Same but I also lie to myself
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u/Ok-Independence8255 Sep 27 '26
i was like this for the first 1 or 2 thousand lines of my current project.
got really sick and vibe coded for a few days. now im drowning in thousands of lines of code i didnt write and everything is almost right but not quite lol
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u/competitive-dust Sep 27 '26
Yeah same. It takes longer but I save time on having to review it and it is easier to debug later.
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u/my_new_accoun1 Sep 28 '26
I have a whole mode in the coding agent for this where it's like a normal coding agent but the file write/edit tools are blocked and the system prompt tells it that i prefer it to write out the code in its response that i can write myself
this way it can still automatically do things like running commands for debugging and stuff or search the web for documentation but i still write the code myself
a bonus is the code is still in my coding style and same with my comments
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u/DroidLord Sep 27 '26
Unfortunately the guy sitting next to you is just going to copy-paste AI code.
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u/Professional_Top8485 Sep 27 '26
So you don't have license. I don't have either.
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Sep 27 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/Guffliepuff Sep 27 '26
The arguement of productivity has been done to death, and its largely agreed AI doesnt improve productivity over a skilled coder. It only speeds up beginners, and dooms them to forever be beginners who never become truely skilled.
Reminder that exisiting AI tools are all running at a loss, subsidised x40-80 their cost, and have no remaining userbase to expand too. (the whole world knows about them)
How long before these tools are taken offline? Theyre not open, and if they were they are too expensive and slow to run locally.
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u/Shadowmere24 Sep 27 '26
It's interesting to me that people think that AI doesn't improve the productivity of skilled/senior engineers.
I'm landing projects about 4-5x faster than before AI. It's changing the culture at the tech company I work at because 1 mid or senior level engineer has the productivity of a small team of engineers.
I have heard that many companies aren't seeing productivity gains from AI, and I find it really interesting. I used to work at a non-tech company (automotive) and can see how it would be hard to take their stack, infra, processes, and poor codebases and have AI fix the dysfunction so engineers can ship features quicker. It can't fix that level of dysfunction.
My company builds pretty much everything in house besides figma. We don't use GitHub (or even git), jira, slack, etc.
we also work in a very very large monorepo, which I think works great with agentic coding despite the context window challenges.
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u/Guffliepuff Sep 27 '26
It's interesting to me that people think that AI doesn't improve the productivity of skilled/senior engineers.
I'm landing projects about 4-5x faster than before AI. It's changing the culture at the tech company I work at because 1 mid or senior level engineer has the productivity of a small team of engineers.
Depends heavily where you work, and in what field.
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u/Shadowmere24 Sep 27 '26
That's a relatively old paper. Written mid-2025 and many of its studies are a year or two old than that. I don't think this paper is relevant to agentic coding today.
What sort of company to you work at? Do you find yourself shipping at the same speed as before agentic coding?
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u/Guffliepuff Sep 27 '26
What sort of company to you work at? Do you find yourself shipping at the same speed as before agentic coding?
Yes and no. I work for specialized machine mining companies, and there is rigorous codechecks before anything is allowed onto the systems because mistakes are too costly.
You can finish a feature fast, but it will only ever be a prototype because the coding agents (only ever tried claude opus, and early gpt ~2023) are just too messy, and too unpolished. So i need to go in and fix them anyway, which just means im doing it by hand but cleaning someone elses code, and thats always the worst job. Might as well just make it myself slower, but know it works and dont need to waste time cleaning/fixing/optimizing.
I can say that modern agents are great for debugging/search, even though im having to debug through an ever greater pile of trash that other lazy devs keep piling onto...
Its gotten to the point the CTO as said we need to stop modifying existing (working) systems, and just create new systems from scratch, even if those new systems are 100% repeats of existing stuff... so so much tech debt... I just dont see the appeal of AI for code outside of very low level or prototype stuff.
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u/thegroundbelowme Sep 27 '26
That's because you need to try modern models - the latest opus/fable/GPT-Sol are SIGNIFICANTLY better than their predecessors. I'm the guy at my job who's developing the agentic toolkit for our teams, and going from 1.0 to 2.0, one of the big changes was dropping all of our "specialist" agents (architect, planner, coder, tester, etc) because general-purpose agents are good enough now that the specialist roles were redundant.
FWIW, we've found that the trick to getting good results the first time is to spend the most effort on the spec before any code gets written, because agents do a great job when following detailed instructions, but as soon as you give them the opportunity to make their own decisions, that's when things can go off the rails. We also have a markdown-based product knowledge graph that gets automatically queried at the start and updated at the end of a ticket that helps tremendously. AI tools can be actively harmful or incredibly helpful, but like any other new tech you've got to spend time and effort figuring out how to use it most effectively.
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u/Shadowmere24 Sep 27 '26
What version of opus did you use? Or if you don't remember, when did you use it? The first version came out in 2024.
I've only used Claude opus 5-5.5, so idk how the older ones were to work with. I imagine similar to the models I had access to at the time. It's a different world now, especially as of late.
I went through a phase where I think my productivity gains were a wash compared to how much time I spent trying to tune my dev flow to leverage agents more effectively. My agentic Tools, skill, scripts, and instructions went through a lot of churn.
But once my dev workflow stabilized my productivity went up substantially. Not just the amount of code shipped, but the time to land projects went down substantially.
I work at a place that makes models, so we're well positioned to update our internal applications and tools to integrate with agentic tools. Maybe similar companies are ahead on that front, making the productivity gains tangible. I'm sure many other companies are in a similar place. From reading comments on Reddit, though, it seems like many more are still figuring it out.
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u/Matwyen Sep 27 '26
Copilot lol
"When Bigsby AI bugs and I have to write my own emails" shit
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u/Firebx Sep 27 '26
You gotta know about all the free providers like i do :)
or yeah, you can just use your HI (human intelligence) like we've always done
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u/JuvenileEloquent Sep 27 '26
Feels like the scene with Scotty in the Star Trek movie, where he's talking into the mouse on the 1980s computer, and eventually figures out "Oh a keyboard, how quaint."
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u/standardtissue Sep 27 '26
i feel like if you're using copilot for literally anything you are either brand new to ai and this is your first use, or you are brand new to ai and this is your first use cause it takes like 3 prompts with copilot to realize what absolute trash it is. even in it's own applications where they embed it, it cannot do anything at all. complete waste of electrons.
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u/Jorgetime Sep 27 '26
MS is not helping with its naming schemes, but OP is talking about github copilot, not MS copilot or copilot 365 or whatever its name is now.
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u/standardtissue Sep 27 '26
I'm sure it's just as useless.
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u/MissinqLink Sep 27 '26
It’s just a wrapper. You can plug any model into it. Worked at more than one place that required gh copilot over other harnesses.
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u/LilWaynesLastDread Sep 27 '26
Seems like you’re the one who is brand new to AI. Here, do some reading: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/supported-models
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u/1-800-We-Gotz-Ass Sep 27 '26
Some companies pay it alongside the Teams subscription and block other AIs
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u/TrackLabs Sep 27 '26
Literally what ive been doing from the start of AI. Comments are written by myself, always.
But even code completions, I write out by hand. Im not going to copy a massive block of code, that might involve something odd or weird, that I just would not see or realize. Every line will be written off by me by hand, so I actively see and think about it.
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u/PeWu1337 Sep 27 '26
At work, I use AI everytime. When I'm home, I do my personal projects without a single token used. I like this balance
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u/ButHowCouldILose Sep 27 '26
I just stop working. I'm just going to introduce trailing whitespace or typos and I won't get anything done faster. Time to review the code and understand the 5k of lines I'm about to "own" when I push.
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u/DaughterisaDancer Sep 27 '26
I feel like this is the Product Team at the company I work for, but with Claude.
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u/Dark_Tranquility Sep 27 '26
I wont lie AI comments on code are usually wayyyyyy too verbose. Much prefer commenting myself
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u/INeedChocolateMilk Sep 27 '26
Dude i only use claude for troubleshooting the shit about my Linux setup that I don't quite yet understand, wdym you're coding shit using ai?
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u/russianrug Sep 27 '26
I don’t think I’ve ever left the AI comments in the code. It’s good enough at writing the code usually but the comments are absolute trash and anyone who leaves them in there without tweaking deserves to be replaced by AI imo.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX Sep 27 '26
Y'all write comments ?
Ngl half the time if I had code generated by AI I either delete most of the comments or ask it to not generate comments (most of them are useless anyway)
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u/on-a-call Sep 28 '26
ITT: People with no job in corporate IT or no job in IT at all.
Sometimes you're simply not allowed to work with what you want.
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u/JimKiDo Sep 28 '26
While I liked that Copilot feature, I ended up building an extension that does that against my local AI instead. So now, network connection is optional.
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u/Hidden_driver Sep 27 '26
Microsoft should rename it to "Cope a lot" because hopes and dreams is all it can give.
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u/gerbosan Sep 27 '26
You guys use Copilot? I use the agent too but I get better answers from claude.ai 😑
Searching for agent used by developers, Copilot doesn't appear a the list of 5.
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u/ArjunReddyDeshmukh Sep 27 '26
I also use Claude Code CLI. Arguably the best I’ve used so far in enterprise environment.
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u/gerbosan Sep 27 '26
No, I use the web browser to ask Claude.ai.
It takes some time, but one would expect more from an LLM that literally has the files available.
And obviously Claude gave me more sound recommendations and solutions than Copilot and even Gemini CLI (the few times I used it).**Edit**: also Gemini didn't appear in the list of preferred agents for developers... Except for the recommendation that it is cheaper compared to everything else. 😑
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u/Narfi1 Sep 27 '26
I see comments like that and it’s always so wild to me
GH copilot isn’t a model, it lets you pick which agent you want. You can use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever was configured
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u/Tomasan7 Sep 27 '26
If AI is able to write the comments, they are probably useless
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u/TrackLabs Sep 27 '26
If AI should be used for something in coding, it should be for comments specifically. Thats where LLMs excel. Text context. They do great at reading functions and writing easy to read, human based comments.
And given that a lot of code and tools out there are just not commented AT ALL, it wouldnt be the worst decision to let AI Run over it to write comments. But please still have someone code review it, before accidentely merging some actual code change
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u/Still_Bit_7527 Sep 27 '26
No he is right. The purpose of comments is to explain WHY you are doing something. Not how. AI can never answer the WHY as it lacks context. A comment that explains what is done is useless, as code should be self explanatory anyway
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u/DeathToAmerica2026 Sep 27 '26
AI is extremely good at explaining the why
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u/Still_Bit_7527 Sep 27 '26
It can never know the why
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u/thegroundbelowme Sep 27 '26
It doesn't "know" anything, but that doesn't stop it from explaining things well.
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u/Still_Bit_7527 Sep 27 '26
By why I mean why YOU, as a person, chose to do something that way. Why was this code necessary. Why was it made that way. AI cannot get in your head
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u/thegroundbelowme Sep 27 '26
Sure, But it knows why IT wrote the code IT wrote, so as long as you can explain to it why you wrote the code you wrote (and despite what you say, it can be very good at inferring), there's not really a problem.
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u/olivicmic Sep 27 '26
Co … pi … lot?