Hitting Pause on Copilot, Why I'm Breaking Up With the AI Coding Assistant

Alright, let's talk about Copilot for a minute. You know, that fancy AI coding companion that's supposed to revolutionize how we write software? Yeah, I was totally hyped about it at first. Autogenerating boilerplate code with just a few keystrokes? Sign me up! But after giving Copilot a solid try, I've realized it's just not vibing with my coding flow. In fact, I've decided to part ways with the AI assistant altogether. Hear me out...

The Copilot Pause

Have you noticed yourself doing this weird pause when using Copilot? You'll type out a few letters, then just stop and wait for it to fill in the rest. It's like my brain got trained to expect the AI to just vomit out my code for me. I caught myself doing the "Copilot pause" constantly, and it made me feel like I was losing touch with my own coding instincts. Not a great feeling.

Training wheels

Part of why I fell in love with programming in the first place was the creative challenge of solving problems through code. There's just something satisfying about finally cracking that nasty bug or piecing together an elegant solution. But with Copilot constantly jumping in to auto-generate stuff, that fun started to fade. It felt like I had training wheels permanently stuck on my coding bike.

Quality? More Like Quantity

Okay, I'll give Copilot this, it's a beast at rapidly pumping out basic boilerplate and code structure. But the quality of its suggestions? Oof, that's another story. I lost count of how many times its attempts were just straight-up outdated or totally missed the context of what I was working on. I'd inevitably have to go back and refactor everything, kind of defeating the whole "productivity" premise.

Who am I sending my code to?

This one really got me though, every time I accepted one of Copilot's suggestions, it was sending snippets of my proprietary code off to some cloud to get data-mined. As someone who values open-source and privacy, that was a hard no from me. I'm not about to hand over my work to get exploited by some faceless tech giant's AI models.

So for now, I'm breaking up with Copilot. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic for a simpler era of coding without so much AI assistance. Or maybe I'll rediscover that spark that made me fall for programming in the first place when it was just me, my text editor, and some good ole' fashioned problem-solving. We'll see.

At the end of the day, we all have to do what feels right for our individual coding styles and values. Copilot might be a game-changer for some developers, but for me? I'm happy to hit pause and go my own way, at least for a little while.