So I set up Copilot last night. Copilot is GitHub’s AI that helps with writing code. I don’t think I’d pay the list price of $10/month for this type of service, but it is free to anyone with a GitHub educator account, which was enough to prompt me to try it.

Needless to say I am suspicious. But ~44% of programmers are using AI tools in their work, and I’m curious what (if anything) they find valuable about it. I’m not far enough into it yet to offer an informed opinion, but I do intend to post here again once I’ve thought this through a bit.

Lastly, getting this working was a bit of a journey. Debian Bullseye did not have a new enough version of neovim. To install a newer version of neovim, I had to install cmake. To install cmake, I had to install a library called gettext. All of this took quite a while, but it was worth it because I can try Copilot in vim. Asking me to use a different IDE would have been a non-starter.

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