Speaker: Rizel Scarlett @blackgirlbytes

For more, see the table of contents

Notes

• AI pair programmer
• Not magic
• Compare to Gmail smart compose – suggests continuations
• Draws context from comments/code
• Suggests lines/functions

Open AI

• Powered by Open AI Codex – translates natural language into code
• GPT-3 – generative pre-trained tranformer 3 – deep learning to produce human like text
• Duolingo GPT-3 uses for grammar correction
• Codex code based
• Played with https://beta.openai.com/examples – Movie to Emoji and Mood to Color (many others).
• There is also https://beta.openai.com/playground (if you login) where it can generate code from a comment. Even lets you specify a language
• Also learned you can paste a hex code into google and have it show you the color

Copilot Labs

• Hover over suggestion to get more
• Experimental feature to include an explanation of what code does
• Plugins – VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim
• Can choose not to include public code
• Can do some (human) language translation

Benefits

• Code faster and clear – good at patterns, syntax (ex: regex) so don’t need to google, write better comments so copilot can give good suggestions
• Write good docs – in markup
• Be a better mentor – avoids nervousness of someone watching you type because don’t have to worry about syntax, helps mentor people in languages don’t know
• Gain context for new concepts – studying for interviews (leetcode), explain new code base, create short demos in new languages as dev advocate

Tips

• Turn off when writing initial structure. Turn on once have pattern going. Comments not useful at first.
• Good when writing unit tests.

Cost

• $10/month
• Free if open source or student

My take

Rizel has a lot of energy and is very relatable. She also did “group play” with openai early. All of that helped engage the audience. I’ve read about co-pilot but it was really cool to see it and the features/benefits/use cases. I enjoyed seeing her passion for the tool and the examples. I also liked how she avoided it from devolving into an argument about the ethics of co-pilot. Rizel didn’t let the wifi problem throw her. It was unfortunate that the demo didn’t work even though other internet stuff did. [block? too bandwidth heavy?] The code to tweet was cool

For co-pilot, some looks cool. Some of the comments were longer than the code. So in real life, I imagine you wouldn’t use it for everything.