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Comment by spreiti

2 days ago

I use GitHub Copilot in Intellij with Claude Sonnet and the plan mode to implement complete features without me having to code anything.

I see it as a competent software developer but one that doesn't know the code base.

I will break down the tasks to the same size as if I was implementing it. But instead of doing it myself, I roughly describe the task on a technical level (and add relevant classes to the context) and it will ask me clarifying questions. After 2-3 rounds the plan usually looks good and I let it implement the task.

This method works exceptionally well and usually I don't have to change anything.

For me this method allows me to focus on the architecture and overall structure and delegate the plumbing to Copilot.

It is usually faster than if I had to implement it and the code is of good quality.

The game changer for me was plan mode. Before it, with agent mode it was hit or miss because it forced me to one shot the prompt or get inaccurate results.

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spreiti

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gcbirzan  1 day ago

> I see it as a competent software developer but one that doesn't know the code base.

I know what you mean, but the thing I find windsurf (which we moved to from copilot) most useful (except writing opeanapi spec files) is asking it questions about the codebase. Just random minutiae that I could find by grepping or following the code, but would take me more than the 30s-1m it takes it. For reference, this is a monorepo of a bit over 1M LoC (and 800k YAML files, because, did I mention I hate API specs?), so not really a small code base either.

> I will break down the tasks to the same size as if I was implementing it. But instead of doing it myself, I roughly describe the task on a technical level (and add relevant classes to the context) and it will ask me clarifying questions. After 2-3 rounds the plan usually looks good and I let it implement the task.

Here I disagree, sort of. I almost never ask it to do complex tasks, the most time consuming and hardest part is not actually typing out the code, describing it to an AI takes me almost as much time as implementing for most things. One thing I did find very useful is the supertab feature of windsurf, which, at a high level, looks at the changes you started making and starts suggesting the next change. And it's not only limited to repetitive things (like . in vi), if you start adding a parameter to a function, it starts adding it to the docs, to the functions you need below, and starts implementing it.

> For me this method allows me to focus on the architecture and overall structure and delegate the plumbing to Copilot.

Yeah, a coworker said this best, I give it the boring work, I keep the fun stuff for myself.

madcocomo  2 days ago

My experience is that GitHub Copilot works much better in VS Code than Intellij. Now I have to open them together to work on one single project.

hansmayer  2 days ago

Yeah, but what did you produce with it in the end? Show us the end result please.