TL;DR: Copilot Workspace is a great concept. But the UX and framing is entirely wrong and sets the wrong expectation for users. The current prototype is very slow (5+ minutes for one-line code changes) and the generated code is often buggy or has nothing to do with the specification. It doesn’t help me understand the code. The generated plan is usually good. ChatGPT does a much better job in my head-to-head comparisons (assuming I already know exactly what code is relevant). I'm still optimistic of where it can go from here.
I recommend everyone sign up to try it and give the team feedback.
Thanks for writing that up. It's what I suspected from my use of CoPilot.
I love copilot as an autocomplete tool... but it frequently gets things wrong, and using the chat feature to ask it to complete some task usually just generates code that breaks things. So until that improves, Im skeptical a workspace tool would work.
Workspace seems like an awesome idea though.. once the tech is further along.
It's a fork of VS Code with some AI features sprinkled in. It writes around 80% of my code, these days.
It also has a few useful features:
- a chat interface where you can @-mention files, folders, and even documentation
- if you edit a line of code, it suggests edits around that line that are useful (e.g. you change a variable name and it will suggest updating the other uses, which you accept just by pressing Tab)
- as you're writing/editing code, it will suggest where your cursor might go next — press Tab and your cursor jumps there
Looks interesting, but I don't really want my code to go via some unknown company. As far as I can tell in "Privacy Mode" code still goes via their servers, they just promise not to store anything (with the caveat that OpenAI retain stuff for 30d).
They give you the option to use your own OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure API keys, but in all honesty, I don't know if they still gather information about your code even using your own API keys.
You could use something like Little Snitch (on Mac) to check if it makes any calls to their servers.
They also allow you to override the URL for the OpenAI models, so although I haven't tried, perhaps you can use local models on your own machine.
TL;DR: Copilot Workspace is a great concept. But the UX and framing is entirely wrong and sets the wrong expectation for users. The current prototype is very slow (5+ minutes for one-line code changes) and the generated code is often buggy or has nothing to do with the specification. It doesn’t help me understand the code. The generated plan is usually good. ChatGPT does a much better job in my head-to-head comparisons (assuming I already know exactly what code is relevant). I'm still optimistic of where it can go from here.
I recommend everyone sign up to try it and give the team feedback.