For programming I find it pretty useful. For MS Office it's so far not a hell of a lot more useful than clippy. The one thing it's good at is finding old stuff in SharePoint and Outlook but that's more a sign of how terrible the search functions are in those than of how good copilot is.
I can see the reports being generated myself (I work in that part) so I know what I'm doing looks good enough.
But it would be funny if I really had to give it busywork. I'd probably build a local agent (like with foundry or something) to talk to copilot keeping it busy. I like the paradox of that.
Ask it to generate a cron job for this.
They only way it'd help you is if you controlled access to AI and it was a competitive advantage for you over a fellow developer. A rising tide lifts all boats... but you are only paid for how much taller you are than the other boats.
It's important to understand that AI is capital, and it's to the owner of the capital go the spoils. Your capital is in your skills, but they are a commodity and thus you have limited leverage.
Who benefits from AI is smaller businesses who could not afford custom application development at previous development costs. It's like faster laptops and better IDEs didn't boost developer salaries.
Of course, as AI reduces the cost to operate in niches, those small businesses who just gained the ability to build an app are also more likely than before to see a bigger player drink their milkshake.
Not to mention that small businesses will have a harder time absorbing the inevitable price hike that will come once everyone has made themselves completely dependent on AI to get any work done.
Thing is, AI is being shoved top-down on devs because it's a goal for everyone, without checking if it's actually helping or hindering.
What I am seeing is juniors are blindly trusting AI output and say in a few years, it's going to be a disaster because nobody understands anything except seniors
The friction that I had in the past to getting started is gone. I have something to work on 30” after I sit on my desk.
And if something is not working, I have someone eager to discuss with me about it and patiently work towards a solution.
There's suddenly much more interest in refactoring, test coverage, etc. and more space for this work, both because it enables more AI work and because AI on clunky code makes it even clunkier much faster than human developers (who are not data scientists ;))
In addition AI makes it easier. Tell me which ones of the 70 fields in this monster class are not used for anything of consequence anymore, this kind of stuff .
So now expectations are based on a false reality and everyone has to work harder.
there might be a misattribution though. over time, id say the top down initiatives and quality at tracking them has gone up maybe 100% used to be one big project for getting rid of oracle that went for 3-7 years, but nowadays theres maybe 5 per month that disrupts the whole company at once.
There's a desire to make that LLM/agent based, but the agent still doesnt cover all the communication overhead to actually communicate the change across teams for deployments, nor is it so seamless that you dont have to take time out to understand whats happening and schedule the work, even if it is sometimes just approving an automated code change
This is the only phrase where I see where the concern for others is so deeply and genuinely expressed in america.
Strap in.
That seems like it’s doing exactly what it is supposed to. Did people think that AI would give them a four hour work day? Have you not lived under capitalism for years now?
The fact we can today enjoy 40 hours workweek is not a necessary consequence of steam machine. It is a consequence of people dying while fighting with police and capital henchmen in Chicago, and it other places.
But keep believing your overlords and their servants.
HN is full of servants hoping to be overlords one day. For all the intelligence on this site it's amazing how many lapdogs there are here
Money makes people pathetic
