If you forced me to put a number on how much more productive having copilot makes me I think I would say < 5%, so I'm struggling to see how anyone can just assert that "the rational argument right now" is that I can be 200% more productive.
Maybe as a senior dev working on a large complex established project I don't benefit from LLMs as much as others because as I and the project mature.. productivity becomes less and less correlated with lines of code, and more about the ability to comprehend the bigger picture and how different components interact... things that even LLMs with bigger context aren't good at.
I don't think about it in lines of code, but let me say that there are some efficiencies being left on the table.
It helps because I am quicker to run to a script to automate a process instead of handling it manually, because I can bang it out in 15 minutes rather than an hour.
I am more likely to try a quick prototype of a refactor because I can throw it at the idea and just see what it looks like in ten minutes. If it has good testing and I tell it not to change, it can do a reasonable job getting 80% done and I can think through it.
It generates mock data quicker than I can, and can write good enough tests through chat. I can throw it to legacy code and it does a good job writing characterization tests and sometimes catches things I don't.
Sometimes, when I'm tired, I can throw easy tasks at it that require minimal thought and can get through "it would be nice if" issues.
It's not great at writing documentation, but it's pretty good at taking a slack chat and writing up a howto that I won't have the time or motivation to do.
All of those are small, but they definitely add up.
That's today and being compared to 5% improvement. I think the real improvements come as we learn more.
> If you forced me to put a number on how much more productive having copilot makes me I think I would say < 5%, so I'm struggling to see how anyone can just assert that "the rational argument right now" is that I can be 200% more productive.
If you're thinking about Copilot, you're simply not talking about the same thing that most people who claim a 200% speedup are talking about. They're talking about either using chat-oriented workflows, where you're asking Claude or similar to wholesale generate code, often using an IDE like Cursor. Or even possibly talking about Coding Agents like Claude Code, which can be even more productive.
You might still be right! They might still be wrong! But your talking about Copilot makes it seem like you're nowhere near the cutting edge use of AI, so you don't have a well-formed opinion about it.
(Personally, I'm not 200% productive with Coding Agents, for various reasons, but given the number of people I admire who are, I believe this is something that will change, and soon.)
> But your talking about Copilot makes it seem like you're nowhere near the cutting edge use of AI, so you don't have a well-formed opinion about it
You can use Claude, Gemini, etc through Copilot and you can use the agent mode. Maybe you do or maybe you don’t have a well formed opinion of the parent’s workflow.
This is what I tried explaining to our management who are using lines of code metrics on engineers working on an established codebase. Other than lines of code being a terrible metric in general, they don’t seem to understand or care to understand the difference.
Maybe as a senior dev working on a large complex established project I don't benefit from LLMs as much as others because as I and the project mature.. productivity becomes less and less correlated with lines of code, and more about the ability to comprehend the bigger picture and how different components interact... things that even LLMs with bigger context aren't good at.