I feel the problem with discussions about Copilot is that they consist of roughly two groups of people talking past each other. The first group believes that Copilot should be able to write code for whatever you tell it to write code for. The second group thinks Copilot is a fairly overpowered autocomplete.
The first group gets annoyed all the time because Copilot fails to write most code when prompted with comments, or writes inaccurate code at best. They get upset when they see that Copilot can reproduce GPL code when prompted in a specific way.
The second group most prompt Copilot by allowing it to tab a complete a line or two at a time, and they are actually super happy because Copilot is way better than any other existing autocomplete; it's basically in a class of its own. To them, the GPL issue seems a bit more abstract, because they would never use Copilot to do that anyways.
I fall pretty firmly into the second camp (can you tell?). Allow me to soliloquize for a moment. Copilot is an incredibly powerful tool, probably the most powerful one I have, but, just like any tool, you need to really learn your way around it, and understand what it can and cannot do, before you start making judgments. I'm not surprised that you turned it off after using it twice. Imagine saying you stopped using React after making two components!
Maybe I should write up a bit more about how I use Copilot, but in a nutshell I feel that it falls somewhere between a 2x-better autocomplete and (and this bit is even more interesting) a tool similar to google search, but more tightly integrated with the coding environment. The second bit is why it's so good. Imagine if I were to continuously google search everything I was doing while coding, while I was coding it. Sure, most of the time it'd just confirm you were doing the right thing, but... every now and then, Google might turn up a better strategy than the one I was currently trying. That's how I feel Copilot works all the time; it's continuously "google searching" for alternate approaches, and every now and then it'll be like, "aha, did you think of [this thing]" and really take me aback, because I wouldn't have even thought to Google for that particular bit of code / problem / strategy.
Of course, you could continuously google search everything you did as you did it, but it would be a massive waste of time. Just imagine Copilot is doing it for you, and returning what it found. Most of the time I know what I'm doing, but every now and then, the result is remarkable.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that even small snippets of licensed code can be problematic. I don't know exactly what the cutoff is, but when I tried Copilot it often suggested to auto complete snippets of code that were long enough that if I was intentionally coping them from a licensed codebase, I would handle the license. I'm not talking about whole giant functions, but small functions or large chunks of a function.
It is true that more commonly it suggested at most a few lines of obvious code which could really only be written the way it suggested, but a number of people in the comments on this article mentioned using Copilot to come up with test cases, so I think people are actually using it to suggest larger snippets of code.
The first group gets annoyed all the time because Copilot fails to write most code when prompted with comments, or writes inaccurate code at best. They get upset when they see that Copilot can reproduce GPL code when prompted in a specific way.
The second group most prompt Copilot by allowing it to tab a complete a line or two at a time, and they are actually super happy because Copilot is way better than any other existing autocomplete; it's basically in a class of its own. To them, the GPL issue seems a bit more abstract, because they would never use Copilot to do that anyways.
I fall pretty firmly into the second camp (can you tell?). Allow me to soliloquize for a moment. Copilot is an incredibly powerful tool, probably the most powerful one I have, but, just like any tool, you need to really learn your way around it, and understand what it can and cannot do, before you start making judgments. I'm not surprised that you turned it off after using it twice. Imagine saying you stopped using React after making two components!
Maybe I should write up a bit more about how I use Copilot, but in a nutshell I feel that it falls somewhere between a 2x-better autocomplete and (and this bit is even more interesting) a tool similar to google search, but more tightly integrated with the coding environment. The second bit is why it's so good. Imagine if I were to continuously google search everything I was doing while coding, while I was coding it. Sure, most of the time it'd just confirm you were doing the right thing, but... every now and then, Google might turn up a better strategy than the one I was currently trying. That's how I feel Copilot works all the time; it's continuously "google searching" for alternate approaches, and every now and then it'll be like, "aha, did you think of [this thing]" and really take me aback, because I wouldn't have even thought to Google for that particular bit of code / problem / strategy.
Of course, you could continuously google search everything you did as you did it, but it would be a massive waste of time. Just imagine Copilot is doing it for you, and returning what it found. Most of the time I know what I'm doing, but every now and then, the result is remarkable.