I try to make it work for me–I really do. But it’s just never worth the time & effort.
Recently, I asked our company-hosted instance of Copilot to draft up an application note for a new product we are releasing to help get my documentation juices flowing. This product is well documented on our internal sharepoint/teams/outlook/onedrive servers that Copilot scrapes, as well as some public facing press releases and marketing content, so I asked Copilot to draft up an app note for this product specifically by name.
Its first draft had tons and tons of info that was just straight-up wrong or super vague. So I refined the prompt asking it to cite sources for each paragraph. Lo and behold, there were 9 citations, and 8 of them were general technology references or competitor products.
Maybe it’s a skill issue, but I can’t get over the fact that this shit is not just so factually wrong, but so confidently wrong.
Copilot is awful. Pretty much all the ones that operate by that model of “continuously sending pings to the server for various random requests and helpful hints” are pretty much guaranteed to be garbage, because the economics don’t work unless they pare down the resources devoted to it until it’s dumb as a post.
(Well, the economics still don’t work even then, but they’re hemorrhaging money at a little bit slower rate if they make it stupid)
Copying and pasting code to Claude, I’ve found to work decently well if you structure it so you can keep your focus and not put Claude in a position to fail too badly by taking on too large of a task. I know Anthropic has a code assistant that works on some kind of slightly different paradigm, so maybe that one is decent, I don’t know. But yeah Copilot will never accomplish much of anything helpful beyond auto-completing some statements every now and then.
I try to make it work for me–I really do. But it’s just never worth the time & effort.
Recently, I asked our company-hosted instance of Copilot to draft up an application note for a new product we are releasing to help get my documentation juices flowing. This product is well documented on our internal sharepoint/teams/outlook/onedrive servers that Copilot scrapes, as well as some public facing press releases and marketing content, so I asked Copilot to draft up an app note for this product specifically by name.
Its first draft had tons and tons of info that was just straight-up wrong or super vague. So I refined the prompt asking it to cite sources for each paragraph. Lo and behold, there were 9 citations, and 8 of them were general technology references or competitor products.
Maybe it’s a skill issue, but I can’t get over the fact that this shit is not just so factually wrong, but so confidently wrong.
Copilot is awful. Pretty much all the ones that operate by that model of “continuously sending pings to the server for various random requests and helpful hints” are pretty much guaranteed to be garbage, because the economics don’t work unless they pare down the resources devoted to it until it’s dumb as a post.
(Well, the economics still don’t work even then, but they’re hemorrhaging money at a little bit slower rate if they make it stupid)
Copying and pasting code to Claude, I’ve found to work decently well if you structure it so you can keep your focus and not put Claude in a position to fail too badly by taking on too large of a task. I know Anthropic has a code assistant that works on some kind of slightly different paradigm, so maybe that one is decent, I don’t know. But yeah Copilot will never accomplish much of anything helpful beyond auto-completing some statements every now and then.