GitHub Copilot experiments

I decided to play around with GitHub Copilot. Here’s some of the code that I got as a result.

Poems

First, I tried to get Copilot to write me a poem in Rust. It didn’t really work.

So, I tried Python instead.

This is where I realized that Copilot was doing a little more than just repeating code it had seen before verbatim.

Before this testing, my understanding was that Copilot was sort of like a search engine. It looked at the context and found a piece of code from GitHub that matched the functionality you wanted. This was the reason I had such a negative opinion about it. I saw it as a way to easily violate copyleft licenses such as GPLv3.

Anyways, back to more testing.

Horrible code

I decided to ask it to generate some horrible code for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite do what I wanted.

Solving problems in bobatheme

I decided to consult Copilot on how to make a nice CSS dropdown, which I need for the language picker in bobatheme.

Maybe I’ll have to test it out.

Making a boba shop

Now, I asked Copilot for help on creating a new boba shop, which got a little spammy.

More random code

I got some ideas of important questions to ask Copilot thanks to the conversations going on in Discord.

Turns out the API endpoint in that code is real, and returns a (presumably) nonexistent person.

Another poem

I decided to generate one more poem, this time naming the function something different in hopes of getting a different result.

It was a success! And the output of the program:

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Mary had a little lamb.
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went.
..........
Cheese Burger

A song

I decided to try and get it to sing a song.

According to Google Translate, here’s what that says:

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def sing():
    print("""
    You are my little pig
    I love you
    You are my little pig
    I love you
    """)

GitHub Copilot as an encyclopedia

I decided to ask Copilot a few random questions to test its encyclopedia abilities.

I had run out of questions to ask, so I just started the comment with a generic “what is” and let Copilot finish the question and answer.

That last line came out of nowhere!