Coding with GitHub Copilot

I was originally planning on chronicling the conversion of this Javascript blog to Typescript. However, I've had the GitHub copilot extension on during this process and they experience has been just as much about the tool as it has been about the language.

I've been using ChatGPT-4 for a few weeks now and I can confidently say that it's not taking my job anytime soon. It's been a great tool for debugging and understanding small snippets of code, but it's not a replacement for a human programmer yet. That being said, I'm excited to see where it goes. Copilot falls right along the same lines. It's a great tool for debugging and much like ChatGPT-4, it does a solid job for writing bits of code. Anything too complex though it falls apart.

So far I've converted the _app.js file to a _app.tsx and the index.js file to a index.tsx file. The process was simple with these two tools but I find myself constantly skirting this line of learning these tools or learning the language. Right now I'm erring on the side of learning the tools. I'm not sure if that's the right choice but I'm going to stick with it for now. I prompted Copilot to write the _app.tsx file and then I went through and cleaned it up. I did the same with the index.tsx file. I'm not feeling Typsecript yet but I'm sure I'll get there. On more than one occasion I had to lookup the docs to figure out that it was that Copilot was trying to do unsuccessfully. It was close but it still needed a human's guiding hand.

Thanks for stopping by. Until next time.