Mastodawn

@mayintoronto I don't like it. I push back against using it when I can. I can't always since work is really keen on shoving it into every part of the company.

My team mates have few to no issues using it, and my manager likes to use it. Fortunately, my manager is pretty lenient on my non-use so long as I get work done.

For a project I'm working on, I have given in to his request that I use AI to convert our Chef recipes into Ansible playbooks. This is mainly due to having a hard deadline controlled by another team.

I'm manually reviewing every line it generates, which is standard practice in the company.

May Likes Toronto

@bryanredeagle "Manually reviewing every line it generates" sound like a healthy practice, albeit a tad tedious.

How's your experience been so far?
Every time I do anything with these tools, I get lured in a little deeper. I'll never get a dev to build the lightweight internal tools I want to build. So yeah.

@mayintoronto It's mixed. I like writing code, and developing. It's the fun part of my job. So I'm coming at it from the angle of it making the fun part tedious and boring. I'm also specifically using Copilot in VS Code since that's what we're allowed to use currently.

So my work is converting whole Chef Cookbooks to Ansible Roles. When I've asked it to convert the whole thing, it doesn't finish entirely. I kind of think its context is getting filled up, and moves on to the next file before it finishes the current one. I get a lot of half complete playbooks.

When I ask it to convert individual recipes, it does a pretty good job. It's using some older Ansible formatting, but that's not a big issue to me. For the most part, the output was correct and how I expected it to be.

@mayintoronto I also asked it (kind of on a whim) to create a bash script that would download and build a software, Asterisk, into an Ubuntu package.

To its credit, the script was correct. It didn't work, but that was due to a shortcoming in the tool it chose to use called checkinstall.

@mayintoronto My biggest gripe with Copilot is with its integration with VS Code. I kept it running while I edited its output, and wrote an Ansible Inventory module as well.

While you type, it attempts to be helpful. The way I write code is very similar to how I write prose. I type out my train of thought, and then go back to edit. This is, generally, because I know what I want to do and how to do it.

Copilot will try to be helpful and auto-complete code for you. Sometimes it's right, sometimes not. If you hit tab, it'll output its suggestion. If you hit escape, it'll remove the suggestion. It slowed down my typing because I had to keep dismissing it. I plan on finding the setting for the live suggestions on Monday and turning it off. The code it suggests is not technically wrong, but not always what I'm intending to write. I'm going in a different direction than what it thinks I am.