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 fucking fantastic for writing unit tests, especially when there’s a bunch of tedious boilerplate that you frequently need SOME OF. I’m also really impressed by its ability to generate real code from comments or pseudocode.
Generally, though, I find it pretty awful for writing non-test code. It too often hallucinates an amazing API and I kick myself for not knowing it existed. Then I realize it’s because the API doesn’t actually exist, and the dumb fucker is clearly borrowing from a library from a completely different stack.