I started using GitHub Copilot as a trial one month ago. My use case was editing code in a large code base, but also writing some code from scratch. Here I want to summarize my experience of my trail period.
Let us start with the advantages. Even if I have no specific measurement, I think that the productivity is increasing when using Copilot. This is especially the case when writing really standardized code e.g. creating a new Azure Function or making an API endpoint n ASP.NET core. Most of the code will be generated, and the results are quite good. In my daily work I’m writing a lot of standard code, where an endpoint receives a request, validates the payload and stores it in a database. This is a common pattern and Copilot is great and providing code for these operations. Just by typing a method signature or adding a comment, a code suggestion is generated. Before using Copilot it could take around 20 minutes to build a small endpoint and now I can do the same work in 10 minutes. As mentioned above these are estimates, I have not checked with a stopwatch, but there is a clear productivity improvement here. However, it is important to point out that one must be attentive when using Copilots suggestions. They need to be reviewed and changed so that it fits into the context of the current project. Using Copilot without review will result in build errors and bugs and fixing them might take even longer than writing all code yourself.
The disadvantage in my opinion is the user experience of the product. I mostly use it within Visual Studio and it seems like it does not work well together with build in ‘Intellisense’. If you want to look at the members of a type it can happen that it does not work and instead Copilot tries to make a code suggestions that makes little sense in that context. This is annoying, because it slows you down for a few seconds (and makes you hit ESC key a lot). However, compared to the advantages of Copilot this is easy to live with. I can also be the case that I do not now how to handle these cases correctly. Maybe there is a keyboard shortcut to fix this, but I still have to learn it. As stated, it is my first month using the product.
My conclusion after the trial period is that I really like the product, even if there are some disadvantage. The productivity improvements are good and I hope that some of the user experience issues will be resolved in the future. So my free trial will now be converted into a subscription for the product.