Greentext

I just generated an entire angular component (table with filters, data services, using in house software patterns and components, based off of existing work) using copilot for work yesterday. It didn't work at first, but I'm a good enough software engineer that I iterated on the issues, discarding bad edits and referencing specific examples from the extant codebase and got copilot to fix it. 3-4 days of work (if you were already familiar with the existing way of doing things) done in about 3-4 hours. But if you didn't know what was going on and how to fix it you'd end up with an unmaintainable non functional mess, full of bugs we have specific fixes in place to avoid but copilot doesn't care about because it doesn't have an idea of how software actually works, just what it should look like. So for anything novel or complex you have to feed it an example, then verify it didn't skip steps or forget to include something it didn't understand/predict, or make up a library/function call. So you have to know enough about the software you're making to point that stuff out, because just feeding whatever error pops out of your compiler back into the AI may get you to working code, but it won't ensure quality code, maintainability, or intelligibility.