When Copilot works, it's awesome. But sometimes it's really frustrating. (An airing of polite grievances.)

[alexepperly]

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See title. This might be a controversial take, but here goes: When GitHub Copilot works, it's fantastic. Scary, even. I've had it complete some incredibly complex code for me, and also take the boring repetition out of stuff that I would have had to write manually before.

But there are a mounting list of issues that are hard to ignore.

1. The Big One: Sometimes Copilot just decides that it's not going to give me suggestions, even for very, VERY, simple operations. Earlier today, I was trying to make a simple barplot in pandas, and no matter what I did, it would not suggest anything to me, no matter how detailed my comments were. Don't get me wrong, I can write this code myself pretty easily, but this happens pretty frequently, and is the exact type of thing that Copilot is supposed to save us time with. I have looked through the issues here and in other places, and I see suggestions from Microsoft internal folks of how to restructure your code on the page to get these suggestions to work. But frankly -- and respectfully -- if we're paying money for this service, these kinds of bugs/quirks should be worked out, and/or there should be clear warnings/guides within the extension itself about these issues. Having to find the answers buried in other message boards doesn't seem to be the way to go.

2. There should be an easy, intuitive UI to interact with Copilot, and one that is easy and intuitive to access. Copilot doesn't really have a UI, unless you count the little button at the bottom of VS Code. I know we big strong devs are way too smart and sophisticated for a UI, but just admit it -- it would be nice to have more visual representation of what is going on. Yes, you can hit Ctrl-Enter to open Copilot suggestions in a new tab, but speaking of that...

3. "Ctrl-Enter" is a strange choice for a default keymapping to open Copilot in a new tab I know you can change this fairly easily, but the fact that the default keymapping is an incredibly common keystroke for a number of other operations (namely, running code in various languages and paradigms) seems to be somewhat of an oversight.

This is an amazing tool, and I don't mean to be overly negative. The folks that have created and worked on this are clearly a lot smarter and savvier than I can ever hope to be. But, in my humble opinion, some of these issues are dragging down the ROI of Copilot.

Maybe I'm the only one having them?

[figloalds]

I want to add something but I don't think I should do a new discussion

On Visual Studio most of the times Co-Pilot decides to give a HUGE completely bogus suggestion instead of doing the 2 or so lines that I need. Here's an example of Co-Pilot filling my class with some bogus when all I needed was that it completed my set method

Also it keeps breaking auto-completion when navigating between projects in a solution and yes sometimes it just doesn't work at all

It works significantly better on VS Code (Or maybe it works because the projects I work on VS Code are smaller)

[muralive]

you are not the only one, it does do some strange things at times

[ZCG-coder]

It even says this...