Copilot is most useful for the smaller stuff

Posted Nov 10, 2025 13:49 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
Parent article: About KeePassXC's code quality control (KeePassXC blog)

> Copilot is good at helping developers plan complex changes by reviewing the code base and writing suggestions in markdown, as well as boilerplate tasks such as test development.

Honestly, I've haven't even had much luck with that. I've had Copilot enabled for a while and it's most helpful for things like:

* you're restructuring a list to a dict or vice-versa, after you've done two it suggests: do you want all these as well?

* you're adding an error check, after typing the if statement it completes the rest of the error handling for you based on the other similar blocks nearby.

* noticing when I've typed the wrong variable name and suggesting the correct one

* you're creating a k8s YAML config and it's helpfully suggesting the keys you need to add with useful suggestions.

I wouldn't know how to even document how I used it, I don't know the prompts it used, or if it even does something smarter than that.

I wouldn't try it on anything larger, certainly my attempts to use it at refactoring haven't been great (very slow) and I suspect this is a common theme: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1kvlj4m...

It doesn't seem to understand code bases at all at a larger scale. But maybe I'm using it wrong.

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Copilot is most useful for the smaller stuff

Posted Nov 10, 2025 14:52 UTC (Mon) by Baughn (subscriber, #124425) [Link] (1 responses)

It’s a naming thing.

As in, there are multiple tools named copilot. The article is talking about the chat mode, most likely, where the data is sent to Sonnet 4.5 or similar. You’re talking about tab completion.

Neither option is as good at coding as e.g. Claude Code, so we’re also talking about quite limited use cases.

Copilot is most useful for the smaller stuff

Posted Nov 10, 2025 23:18 UTC (Mon) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Copilot IDE integration also has a chat panel.

But there are lots of ways to invoke it to create a PR, including IDE or from the main GitHub web site: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-ag...