Cody

This finding bewilders me, because my copilot (I use Sourcegraph’s Cody) has become an essential part of my dev productivity toolset. Being able to get answers to questions that would normally break me out of flow mode by simply Option + C’ing to open up a New Chat has been a productivity boost for me. Getting it to give me little snippets of code that I can use helps keep me in flow mode. Getting it to do a first pass on function comments, which I then edit, has made it much easier to get over the activation energy barrier that usually holds me back from doing full commenting. I can’t say if the bug count is higher or not. Maybe it is higher in terms of total number of bugs I write throughout my coding session. But if bug count goes up 10% then the speed with which I fix those bugs and get to a final edit of my code is 30% or 40% faster, so the bug count is not the right metric. Maybe the differentiator is that I am a solo-dev for all this work, and so the negative effects of the copilot are only experienced by me. If I were in a 10 person team, the bugs and the weird out of context code snippets would be magnified by the 9 other people, and the negative effects would be strong. But I don’t know.

I have been using Cody (sourcegraph.com/cody) for about 6 months now and it's completely changed the way I write code. But, there was an adjustment period to learn how to work with the tool. Expecting a code copilot to just give you working code 100% of the time is unrealistic today, we may get there eventually though. I've been writing code for close to 20 years now across the full stack, I have written a lot of bad code in my life, I have seen frameworks come and go, so spotting bad code or spotting bad practices is almost second nature to me. With that said, using Cody, I'm able to ship much faster. It will sometimes return bad answers, i may need to tweak my question, and sometimes it just doesn't capture the right context for what I'm trying to do, but overall it's been a great help and I'd say has made me 35-40% more efficient. (Disclaimer: I work for Sourcegraph)

As my 2nd brain I use the paid version of Sourcegraph Cody ;)