> I just don’t understand how this is a net time/energy savings?
At the end of the day is all about trust. Do you trust code you find in SO/Copilot to be good enough for your use case?
In my case I do not trust SO code. Whenever I use SO, if I find some snippet that seems to be the code solution I'm looking for, I copy-paste the snippet on my IDE, read through it carefully, rename variable names as needed, handle edge cases, remove unused code, etc., etc. Any code solution I find in SO gives me the "starting" kick, which is about 10% of the total effort of writing code from scratch. The remaining 90% (to understand the code that is being committed) cannot simply go away. I do not expect Copilot will make much of a difference.
At the end of the day is all about trust. Do you trust code you find in SO/Copilot to be good enough for your use case?
In my case I do not trust SO code. Whenever I use SO, if I find some snippet that seems to be the code solution I'm looking for, I copy-paste the snippet on my IDE, read through it carefully, rename variable names as needed, handle edge cases, remove unused code, etc., etc. Any code solution I find in SO gives me the "starting" kick, which is about 10% of the total effort of writing code from scratch. The remaining 90% (to understand the code that is being committed) cannot simply go away. I do not expect Copilot will make much of a difference.