I'm seriously impressed with GitHub Copilot

[William Seger]

I retired from programming 10 years ago, but I still have some websites that use a CGI I wrote 25 years ago in C, which I haven't touched in the last 5 years, but I needed to make a change. The last version of Visual Studio I was using was 2012. (I hadn't updated it because it worked just fine for what I needed.) I don't have that computer now, so I installed the latest VS version, and it has changed completely -- I was lost. After trying for a few hours to get it to work with my old solution files, I gave up and decided to give Copilot a try, giving it the original source files and told it to rebuild from scratch. I was skeptical, thinking I'd end up with a mess with a lot of problems that would have to be fixed, but after quite a bit of churning and Copilot itself finding and fixing problems, it actually figured out all the dependencies I needed and downloaded everything I didn't have -- ODBC, OpenSSL, MySQL, crypto lib, and a bunch of other stuff that I thought would be a problem chasing down -- but when it finished, it actually worked!

Then, I needed a web server on my computer to test, so I asked Copilot to install and configure IIS, and it did. I also needed a MySQL server, so I asked Copilot to download and set that up with an account I could log into, and again it did it with no help from me.

Tonight, I was thinking about a web page that I have that has a lot of complex Javascript calculations. A while back I tried a program that wraps HTML in an Android app, but I couldn't get it to run the Javascript for some reason. It occurred to me that maybe Copilot knows how to do that, and it turns out, it's even better: It gave me the option to convert it to a native app, and it worked! I didn't like some of the formatting it did, so I told Copilot to change some text size and margins and to remove some unnecessary text and buttons, just describing them by where they were on the page, and I even added an app icon -- all without me having even a foggy notion of what it was doing or how the app was coded.

So, as I said, I'm seriously impressed with Copilot -- AI has completely revolutionized software development. When I left the field, it had already become largely a matter of Google > copy > paste > edit, but now, you don't even have to do that!

[Shrek]

1. I've been using it for a few weeks

Still learning my way around it, but saves me time in lots of little ways.

I am loving it for sanity checks and doing little tasks that I hate bothering with (e.g. writing simple scripts, base64 encodings, syntax reminders).

It also seems fairly good at reading a stack track and suggesting a possible root cause. That's a big plus for me.

[Sector 001]

2. .

Last edited Thu May 14, 2026, 06:34 PM - Edit history (1)

[walkingman]

3. Cool, As someone that used C in the early 70s on a DEC PDP-11/03 (two 8" floppies) it really would have been

a huge help. I worked for ATT and used it to target software interrupts to point to hardware faults. It previously required analyzing octal dumps through registers and was very time-consuming and the likelihood of making a simple error was high.

Very Cool!!

[William Seger]

4. I hear you; I started programming in assembly language and microcode on a HP 1000

... (one of the few competitors to the PDP-11, but not nearly as successful), with a very primitive debugger for assembly, and nothing for microcode. After that, C seemed super sophisticated! I didn't care for C++ at all (designed by committee, it was just more complicated than it needed to be). Java was okay, but in its early days, it was always a PITA to get stuff to build when you were putting together a bunch of utility functions that used different versions of the utilities they called, and then six months later with a new version of Java, it wouldn't build again. The last few years of my career, we were using C#, and I liked that a lot -- that's what I would use today to code anything new, other than HTML and Javascript for web pages. I definitely found using Visual Studio to be far, far superior to a text editor for writing code, and I do believe AI is taking all the IDEs to a whole new level! But I have to say... I'm glad I was in programming back when it was fun, and I'm really glad to be out of it now!