Last week at work every developer got access to a GiHub Copilot Enterprise license. After playing around with it at work for a while, I’ve now decided to also get a personal license for myself to use on personal projects. I still have a couple of weeks left before I have to pay for it (there’s a free trial for a month) so I’m currently trying it out and need to decide if it is actually worth it for me.

My initial impressions have been quite positive. While it isn’t some mind-blowing game changer, so far it has been basically a really nice, more powerful autocomplete in the editor. Overall it felt more useful in my small pet projects than our huge project at work because there are fewer details to consider.

Update - 28.03

Having used Copilot for now a good two weeks in total, both at work and also in some pet projects at home, I think that I’ve decided that it’s worth the 100€ per year for me.

Copilot has been pretty useful especially on greenfield projects where I have to build stuff from the ground up. Also when working with Go, it is really helpful to be able to quickly ask a question in the Copilot Chat instead of having to google every little detail.

I’m overall suprised how much I’ve been using these AI tools over the last couple weeks. GitHub Copilot, but also ChatGPT or Google Gemini have actually been pretty useful for me for day to day questions. They have kind of replaced Google for a lot of usecases for me.

When it comes to actually paying for these tools, I still think that at the moment GitHub Copilot is the only one where it makes sense for me to pay for it. I don’t think I’m getting enough use out of ChatGPT/Gemini to actually justify paying some monthly/yearly fee for some additional features.