I've been using Copilot for 5 months while building another AI productivity tool. It's changed my habits my I'm becoming a bit dependent on it for autocompletion. It feels so good just hitting TAB and moving on.

I know some developers that aren't embracing it the same way I do, making judgements without even trying it. "This is the future", I tell them, "it makes your life much easier", but there's resistance.

Prompt engineering is quite interesting too, and it may turn into a job skill later. While using Codex, I understood the importance of knowing how to ask for the right things to a non-human. Is bit like talking to Alexa in the early days, in the sense that I couldn't talk to Alexa like a human yet, I had to be specific, clear and intentional. I still see that people who are less experienced with a smart personal assistant struggle to get their commands done.

If you love this technology and would love to try it for Explaining Code in your browser, check out the extension ExplainDev (https://explain.dev). It works on GitHub, StackOverflow and documentation websites.

Disclaimer: I built ExplainDev, with the help of Copilot.

Have you considered supporting Firefox?

Also: what’s involved in writing a browser extension? What was the experience like?

I've written extensions before and Firefox has a very good polyfill [0] that makes it quite easy to write extensions for all browsers. It does get a bit trickier if you also want to incorporate TypeScript [1] or React however.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill

[1] https://github.com/Lusito/webextension-polyfill-ts