I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind.

It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better names and descriptions to my methods. I write better code, documentation, and tests.

Copilot has made me a better programmer. No kidding. This is a huge achievement. Kudos to the GitHub Copilot team!

How big/complicated are the functions Copilot is autocompleting for you? I'm thinking perhaps reading 10 potential candidates is actually slower and less instructive than trying to write the thing yourself.

It shows the suggestions line by line, and only shows the best guess. It's not more intrusive than Intellisense.

You can actually see all the code blocks Copilot is thinking about if you want to, but that is indeed a distraction.

The animated example on https://copilot.github.com/ shows it suggesting entire blocks of code, though.

It does actually suggest entire blocks of code. I haven't quite figured out yet when it suggests blocks or lines - if I create a new function / method and add a doc string it definitely suggests a block for the entire implementation for me.

I see, I think the most useful case for me would be where I write a function signature+docstring, then get a list of suggestions that I can browse and pick from.

Do you have examples of what the line ones can do? The site doesn't really provide any of those.

Take a look at this minimal example I just created where I did just that -- created a new function and docstring. This example is of course super simple - it works for much more complex things.

https://gist.github.com/berndverst/1db9bae37f3c809e5c3f56262...

https://github.com/HackerNews/API doesn't list this as a valid endpoint. Indeed, when I try to access it via curl, I get a HTTP 405 with a "Permission denied" error (same result when I try to access nonexistent-endpoint.json).

Based on the HN search on the website, I'd expect the correct autocomplete to involve hn.algolia.com [0].

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/api points at https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=...

To me, this points at the need for human input with a system like this. There is a Firebase endpoint, yes, and Copilot found that correctly! But then it invented a new endpoint that doesn't exist.