Experiencing GitHub Copilot as a vRO Developer

What is Copilot?

A new AI tool named Copilot by GitHub is on hype these days. As the site suggests, It’s basically an AI-based programming assistant that can help you with writing code more than just auto-complete. It is available to use with Visual Studio Code, Neovim and JetBrains.

Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer | The GitHub Blog

I am totally amazed by this idea and have a feeling that AI will definitely take over some day. Anyway, let’s future decide it’s fate. Now, I am thinking if It can help a vRO Developer like me to write some code in similar way. So, I signed up for Copilot and in few days, I was added to their Technical Preview program. If you want to try it by yourself, you can setup your VSC with Copilot plugin using this tutorial here.

Let’s Try

I already had Visual Studio Code installed and just downloaded Copilot Plugin for VSC from here.

First, I tried to fetch all admin Vdcs from pvdcs.

then, I tried to write a code on fetching all the templates from vSphere.

I found Copilot quite intuitive. It was not all perfect and required constant guidance by me. This also means that you must know what you’re doing and have at least a rough idea on how to derive the Copilot’s attention to provide the right code. It was just throwing random hints in the beginning. But as I continued writing code, it started to suggest more sensible code which I think is very amazing.

Verdict

vRO uses a proprietary JavaScript which is not readily available online and limits the size of training set required by systems like OpenAI (on which Copilot is based) to provide more & more realistic responses. Currently, Copilot uses GitHub code to train itself as you can see from the suggestions, so if more people share their vRO code on GitHub, Copilot will become more instinctual over-time. However, you may look out for NodeJS & Python code where can definitely find some use case.

If you ask me, I do my share by publish vRO JS code on my repository here. You may find hundreds of scripts there as well as on gist page here.

Moreover, since Copilot is a not free anymore, I personally don’t think it would be a good idea for any vRO Developer to purchase it and make anything good out of it.