Is It Hype? Github Copilot (The Future of Programming)

Key Takeaways

write a string to a file i'm going to start typing the definition already you can see based on the comment ghetto copilot has completed this function for me these aren't code snippets i'm not running macros this is an ai coding assistant that is looking at what i'm doing and making predictions on what i want this is really cool because i have written just three comments and hit tab a couple times and i have 18 lines of code what's up guys today i want to talk about github copilot i want to answer the question is it hype this will be the third video in the is it hype series a series where i try out new and existing technologies to determine if they're actually useful for developers like you and i so is github copilot hype does it live up to the expectations is it useful is ai pair programming everything that it's summing up to be first off let me go ahead and just answer the question yes i've been using github copilot for about a year now and i can tell you that my productivity has gone up drastically github copilot is so good that i think there'll be a gap between engineers who know how to use ai programming assistants and those who don't in this video i'm going to show you how github copilot can take your developer productivity to the next level let's get into it alright so we have an empty python file here i have an empty directory here and what i want to do here is just write to a file so i'm going to type a comment and i'm just going to say write a string to a file i'm going to start typing the definition and already you can see based on the comment ghettocopilot has completed this function for me these aren't code snippets i'm not running macros right like this is an ai coding assistant that is looking at what i'm doing and making predictions on what i want that's pretty cool so now we have a function that we can write to a file let's let's keep going right how well can github copilot really listen right so let me drop another comment right create a list of objects with three key value pairs of different types and interestingly you can see that as i'm typing i was typing different and it actually guessed that i wanted to say different types so it's already inferring what i want to see so let me just hit enter here sure we'll make it a function i'm fine with that okay and as you guys can see create lists it's so it's creating a list with three items in it and they all have uh they all do have different types right because we're gonna end up with a float here so that's really interesting that's really cool all right so let's keep going right so let's uh let's let's run some operations right so let me create a list you know let me generate my list here and now i want to um you know let's keep pushing get up co-pilot say i want to change the name right so that's something you do often like string modification so i'll write a comment here i'll say you know um for each item in the list update the name to uppercase [Applause] and write to a file right so kind of combining things here seeing if github copilot can keep up okay so got the for loop and it is uh it is doing the work for me right so keep in mind brett this is this is really cool because i have written just three comments and hit tab a couple times and i have 18 lines of code and this is just in within some four minutes right so you can see this you can see copilot really helping you out here as you build out you know large code bases as you work through hundreds and thousands of lines of code um you know the prediction isn't perfect i will say you have to you have to be looking at what co-pilot is generating for you but overall it is incredible at at get guessing what you want next based on the context around it all right so what else can we do with this let's run it right let's make sure that this actually runs so let's go ahead and run you know python main it ran fine no errors and look we got a a bunch of files generated and if you walk through the code you know we have this running exactly right so i have a right to file function create list and i'm getting a list with the name key value pair where the name is name plus the index getting generated i create this list called the function loop through and i upper case the name as you can see in the output it's calling my right to file function and if i step in to these items you can see that it just threw a string it wrapped the dictionary in the string call and that's going to give us this output so pretty incredible pretty incredible let's look at a node.js example and then i want to show you an example of how i use github copilot in my new application that i'm writing okay so now i have all right so i have express.js and you can probably guess what i'm going to try to do here i want to see if github copilot can generate an express.js application for me on the fly i'm just gonna type generate generate express app [Music] okay so so this is interesting right so it is generating an express app but you can kind of tell in this case github copilot is literally just reading from a like a an existing express js app and just guessing at all the different things that i want to do with it right it just keeps importing keeps setting up services you have to give github copilot some direction sometimes so let me be more specific here generate a small express app okay perfect so you know with a little more direction i literally just added the word small it knows what i want right i just wanted to spin up a tiny express js application now i want to show you an example of github copilot inside of an application that already has code written in it so i've opened up my application that i'm building called timeva feel free to check out my previous videos i'm in the process of launching time the v2 it's the second version of the application to help you manage your productivity so this is a real application the application is an electron vue.js typescript application and i'm using pina js as my store and i'm going to show you how github co-pilot can jump in here and help write mutations in my store with very very minimal work so let's jump into this so we have the store and check out my video on pinot stores if you're interested in that but long story short is we have state getters and actions actions are your mutators so what we're going to do is we're just going to kind of make up a new mutation based on some of the state i already have existing in the store and we're going to let github copilot do the work for me so what i'm going to do is i have this function that increments uh an occurrence of this object and what i'm going to do is just create the opposite right i'm going to create decrement so i'm just going to start typing here decrement tag occurrence and so it's starting to you know create and generate the code for me it's looking around and it's seeing that it's already done a version of this and there it is okay so you know this is one of those cases where like the code was right above and it's a decrement so you just minus minus but it can get a lot more complicated than that and you want github copilot to do these things for you okay so for instance let's just jazz this up a bit right let me create an arbitrary function replace activity tag right okay i want a tag and a tag to replace so i'm going to give github copy some more information here exactly new tag okay and it's going to call it looks like wow yeah just okay so it's coming here with the splice function it's just going to go ahead and find the index of this and cut one item and replace it with the new tag so just like that github copilot jumps in takes control and writes what i want to do i think the key thing you need to keep in mind with ghetto copilot is that you need to know what you're trying to accomplish i would never give get a copilot to an amateur programmer that doesn't know what they're trying to build or do when github copilot generates bad output it will cause bugs i've had cases where i'm just glossing over it not looking at the output of github copilot and i've created issues for myself so when you try this out definitely watch the code that's being generated github copilot is not going to replace engineers it's going to help engineers that know what they're doing do it faster okay i want to show you one more example inside the time of application let me undo all this and let's hop into all right so let's check out this file i've used github copilots to generate basically every function in this file previously so you can see here i have a bunch of converter functions that basically take um seconds and converts them into a different format so for instance this function here will take seconds and convert it into a minutes hour display with the shorthand format so what i'm going to do here is basically create a new function that does exactly this but in a different format so we're gonna see how well github copilot can look at my comment analyze what i'm looking for and then generate the function so all i'm gonna do here is come to the top and say converts converts time in seconds to i want this in let's see what what format let's do something kind of weird i want uh one hour and two it's really interesting it's it's even guessing formats for me which is really cool um one hour let's let's get tricky with it so i want 15 min right so this shorter format and then i want um 30s format right so it's very inconsistent i actually don't know if github copy will be able to pull this off so let's see okay let me change the name of this function i think this is a dupe um and i want to return a string here actually so you know sometimes it doesn't always generate the right output you have to give it some more information by just continuing to to code the thing that you're trying to see so seconds um long hour medium minute short second i don't know weird function name but whatever all right so it's first of all it's it's getting the hours minutes seconds and now it's now it's trying to generate some outputs and you can see here get up copilot actually fails to generate the output that i want to see right but even when github copilot fails it still gives you a lot of information to work with right like i can come in here and just change this hour min second and now it's complete right so even when get out co-pilot fails it's still giving you output and it's still saving you lines of code we're just scratching the surface of what github copilot can do github copilot is hype download it try it out it's going to make you a more productive engineer a couple things you have to watch out for don't over rely on it and make sure you know what you're trying to do before you ask github copilot to generate code for you huge thanks for watching the video give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you enjoyed it it really helps out the channel and i'll see you guys in the next one [Music]