After my initial 2~ months of using GitHub Copilot for coding coding tasks (on the side) I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that it is not worth it. Not worth the $10/month, not worth the complexity to my tooling, and overall was a tool that was providing me negative value. The latency was the big killer for me. It took too long to get any response, and with a hit rate of well under 40% (gut estimated) for being kept, I dropped it like a sack of potatoes very quickly. Since Copilot's release, there have been a number of other tools pop up of various quality and utility. I've not tried most: I find AI coding assistants to generally be more of a detriment to my workflow than a boost.
However, at the suggestion of my brother, I tried out a coding tool that he had been
using: Supermaven and I have to say, my experience has been
mostly pleasant. It appears to be a project by one person and has plugins for most
of the tools that I'd be interested in using it with, namely, neovim. The latency is
very good, and while the results are still not stellar, it mostly limits itself to
finishing the current line, instead of generating huge blocks of text. This is
important! My time with Copilot made me realize that the longer a generated block of
text was, the more likely it was to be wrong. Supermaven gets this right be being
more conservative and emphasizing speed. Now, I don't know what model is backing
Supermaven, but it also appears to be better and much faster than GPT-3.5 which backs
Copilot, the two metrics I generally care about here.
I'll likely keep my Supermaven subscription active for awhile. It's been mostly pleasant, and the cost is reasonable for the value it provides for now.