Why I Quit Copilot | Prime Reacts

The reason I quit copilot is my 30 day trial ran out.

Every Neovim user reconfigures their setup once in a while, just as soldiers sharpen their swords.

I thought we memorized stuff because its faster when its in L1 cache compared to checking the internet.

Memorization can be scary though. Depends on your job and how technical it is. I was in munitions systems in the Air Force. We were taught to not rely on imperfect human memory and follow the documentation every time, regardless. I argue that co-pilot is bad because it gives you the fallacy that you do have everything memorized because we just glance at it and agree with copilot. It’s like saying oh that’s easy, I remember that.

Being free for educational use is a genius move if your plan is to produce a generation of developers who are dependant on your product.

"If you find yourself frustrated from -writing- code, I think you are a bad programmer" Gotta say, I agree with this statement. EVERY TIME I have found myself frustrated while writing code, it was because of some inadequacy in myself. Either I didn't know how to use some data structure, or I didn't know how to solve some common code problem, or I didn't understand the math to solve a problem. And EVERY TIME I have solved this frustration by learning more. Furthermore, I agree with his take on Copilot because Copilot "solves" these problems for people by removing that knowledge requirement from the developer. Bad programmers feel less frustrated with it because it's doing that work for them. The problem is, they have no way of knowing if it's done a good job or not. It doesn't make them better programmers, it just makes them more comfortable being bad programmers.

Literally, my job blocked Copilot on the firewall and I didn’t even realize for a minute so I decided it was time to save $10 a month

Privacy/telemetry/leaking is a significant issue in a lot of industries. For example I work on a semiconductor manufacturing related project that is dealing with High-NA EUV lithography - it's forbidden to send data to any external service, including google translate. But I bet it's the same in car manufacturing, aerospace, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, etc. (Although I personally don't mind, since I like to write my own code, and usually structural/architectural design is the hard part, not typing it out.)

I tried something similar called Codeium AI. The initial adrenalin rush was awesome. It was like this thing just reads my mind and typed it super fast. But the longer I used it, the more it felt like a crutch. After every block I had to ask myself. "Is that OK?", "Would I have written that this way", "What is that code even doing?". It took away the focus from what I write, to how it was written, and thus the AI started to slow me down. I think I prefere a good LSP + Some Documentation on a second monitor. It's a good tool for writing Boilerplate no doubt, but if you have written that Boilerplate 100s of times, why not just have a version of it ready for Copy and Paste, or a Code-Snippet/Template.

Prime: "It will never hurt you to memorize something" Baby Shark: *exists*