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Hopefully, my experience will give other developers a better understanding of how this tool works and if it lives up to the hype. I’ll also use my 20+ years of experience as a Senior Full-Stack Developer to compare it with my day-to-day before Copilot. In this article, I’ll share my experience after one week using the tool and dive into key findings from this trial period. So, to get some answers, I put GitHub Copilot to the test.
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OK, that last one might be a bit philosophical, but the others felt testable.
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Now, there’s a tool that promises to improve the developer experience even more: GithHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Overall, these tools help developers reduce errors and improve the quality of their code. For those who use tabs or spaces for indentation, now whatever is set up on a project is automatically applied when the file is saved. If developers forget to close a bracket, the code formatting tool Prettier triggers a reminder to enforce a consistent code style. There’s no need to keep a programming language reference open in a browser tab now that developers can start the function name and the syntax parameter will pop up. For example, ubiquitous code highlighting reminds developers to finish their strings. With these tools, developers can focus on building great software and spend less time completing tedious tasks or combing through code to discover minor errors. Now, support tools like syntax highlighting, function syntax assistance, autolinting, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistance are available directly in your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or the editor where you code. Before text and code editors, developers were tasked with having the correct code passed to a compiler.
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