As a senior developer, I don’t find copilot particularly useful. Maybe it would have been more useful earlier in my career, but at this point writing a prompt to get copilot to regurgitate useful code and massaging the resulting output almost always takes as much or more time as it would for me just to write whatever it is I need to write. If I am able to give copilot a sufficiently specific prompt that it can ‘solve’ my problem for me, I already know how to solve the problem and how to write the code. So all I’m doing is using copilot as a ghost writer instead of writing it myself. And it doesn’t seem to be any faster. The autocomplete features are net helpful because they’re actually what I want often enough to offset the cost of reading the suggestion and deciding if it’s useful. But it’s not a huge difference (vs writing it myself) so that by itself is not sufficiently useful to justify paying the cost myself nor sufficient motivation to go to the effort of convincing my employer to pay for it.
The autocomplete is amazing
It just takes the mental strain out of syntax and I can focus more on the logic and structure of the code
Like you said much better for writing unit tests, but also for log messages and comments
Even the chat is sometimes useful but not as much. I treat it as much junior engineer assistant/rubber duck. I.e. I never completely accept what it outputs and usually review everything but quite often it gives me a different idea/approach even if it doesn’t write it 100% correct the first time. Because I always review it, having it autocomplete the next line is my preferred approach so I verify each line as they come.
Once you start to past 10/20+ lines in a row you will have a bad time.
Not just the mental strain of syntax, but also variable naming, which I find to be a much bigger hurdle. Copilot will nearly always give you a “good enough” name so you can just move on to solve the actual problem. You can always come back to rename it if necessary.