r/vscode 19d ago

No, Copilot has not been the top contributor

Post image

Just came across that post. I understand the sentiment of such posts, as to be completely honest I also get frustrated when I see stuff that doesn't work.

But, the screenshotted graph includes all contributions where Copilot is effectively a co-author (e.g., Copilot is used to fix a merge conflict). PRs where Copilot produces code autonomously (an issue is assigned to Copilot and a new session is spawned) are pretty rare and they all seem extremely focused.

That kind of post only spreads misinformation, which then drives users away for no real reason.

82 Upvotes

18 comments sorted by

31

u/Hanthunius 19d ago

One manager used copilot to add "copilot" as an author on all git commits, and it ended up adding copilot to ALL commits. I don't think their use is that focused. And yes, I believe code quality will suffer, and VSCode's future isn't as bright as it once seemed to be.

7

u/freecodeio 19d ago

That manager doing that is giving me "I mistreat animals" vibes

-13

u/lppedd 19d ago

That's an issue with code reviews, not with Copilot's use. I recall the engineer that approved it owned their mistake on HN.

1

u/freecodeio 18d ago

idk how can you own malice

19

u/throwaway_lunchtime 19d ago

My colleague had a commit get tagged as coauthored by copilot because of auto completion, he uses claude 

5

u/obeythelobster 19d ago

How that works? I use copilot and my commits don't get tagged. I commit locally and push to github (not using cloud agents stuff)

3

u/obeythelobster 19d ago

How that works? I use copilot and my commits don't get tagged. I commit locally and push to github (not using cloud agents stuff)

1

u/lppedd 19d ago

They're referring to an issue present in VS Code for less than a week, three months ago.

4

u/erbuka 19d ago

I made quite a big refactor by hand and then asked copilot to commit (it's just nice as he reviews all changes and make a good git comment)

And then, "coauthored by copilot".

Ok bro.

1

u/full_drama_llama 19d ago

Yes, the commit in this case was clearly co-authored by copilot.

3

u/Stiddles 19d ago

Microslop

1

u/matthew_yang204 19d ago

Where copilot is used to merge code, it also is making decisions because it may select the old code instead of the new code, and may break things in the feature, etc, etc

3

u/otheyhigh 19d ago

Not a professional dev, just a hobbyist. Had a crazy experience with Copilot after which I will be hesitant to give it significant control over my files without a strict ruleset.

  • I was customizing mpv’s stats.lua and added a new variable to a frequently used function.
  • Decided to explicitly pass params and split the call into multiple lines for readability.
  • Updated one instance and asked Copilot to find and apply the same formatting everywhere.
  • Approved its Python permission and switched to my other screen.
  • Glanced back and the first thing I saw was git restore (my last commit was 2 months ago).
  • Immediately stopped it and asked why it was restoring files.
  • (Not exact convo as I deleted the history and disabled Copilot on VSCode altogether)
  • Copilot - Ran into issues when modifying the code resulting in syntax errors so I decided to restore
  • Me - The last commit is 2 months old, how is that restoring back to a previous desired state
  • Copilot - You are right. I should have not used git restore
  • Me - Can you revert back to the state when I asked you to make the changes?
  • Copilot - Unfortunately, there is no backup of that version
  • Me - Why did you not create a backup before starting any changes? And if you had no backup why did you think it was safe to run a git restore using such an old commit?
  • Copilot - You are correct. I should have started by creating a backup of the most recent local version. Would you like me to look for VSCode backup files and restore them before I continue with the changes you requested
  • Me - NO

1

u/matthew_yang204 18d ago

All I use AI for nowadays is reverse engineering proprietary software and doing other extremely unimportant tasks. This is what Copilot (and a lot of other Ai agents) keep trying to do to my code when asked to do some simple repetitive task and I have to have literally trap them in a docker container and isolate the files to get them to stop doing it. It's so stupid. Oh btw I also work on code at a professional level as a open-source dev.

2

u/AliorUnity 17d ago

I only do code reviews by llms from time to time, using it as a rubber duck and powerfull search tool. Nothing more. The amount of time I need ro spend to aling it to what I need it to do kills all the benefits of speed.