I'm seriously impressed with GitHub Copilot [View all]

I retired from programming 10 years ago, but I still have some websites that use a CGI I wrote 25 years ago in C, which I haven't touched in the last 5 years, but I needed to make a change. The last version of Visual Studio I was using was 2012. (I hadn't updated it because it worked just fine for what I needed.) I don't have that computer now, so I installed the latest VS version, and it has changed completely -- I was lost. After trying for a few hours to get it to work with my old solution files, I gave up and decided to give Copilot a try, giving it the original source files and told it to rebuild from scratch. I was skeptical, thinking I'd end up with a mess with a lot of problems that would have to be fixed, but after quite a bit of churning and Copilot itself finding and fixing problems, it actually figured out all the dependencies I needed and downloaded everything I didn't have -- ODBC, OpenSSL, MySQL, crypto lib, and a bunch of other stuff that I thought would be a problem chasing down -- but when it finished, it actually worked!

Then, I needed a web server on my computer to test, so I asked Copilot to install and configure IIS, and it did. I also needed a MySQL server, so I asked Copilot to download and set that up with an account I could log into, and again it did it with no help from me.

Tonight, I was thinking about a web page that I have that has a lot of complex Javascript calculations. A while back I tried a program that wraps HTML in an Android app, but I couldn't get it to run the Javascript for some reason. It occurred to me that maybe Copilot knows how to do that, and it turns out, it's even better: It gave me the option to convert it to a native app, and it worked! I didn't like some of the formatting it did, so I told Copilot to change some text size and margins and to remove some unnecessary text and buttons, just describing them by where they were on the page, and I even added an app icon -- all without me having even a foggy notion of what it was doing or how the app was coded.

So, as I said, I'm seriously impressed with Copilot -- AI has completely revolutionized software development. When I left the field, it had already become largely a matter of Google > copy > paste > edit, but now, you don't even have to do that!