How I Am Using GitHub Copilot

Above is a video I produced to demo GitHub Copilot to my coworkers. If you haven’t yet explored using a Large Language Model to you help you code, it is worth a watch. I screen-recorded myself developing an optimization for Penumbra (this project) and edited it down to about 6 minutes.

I use Copilot in other ways not covered in the video. It’s clearly been trained on other Ray Tracer Challenge implementations so it very quickly autocompletes tests with all the exact values. This has saved me a bunch of mindless typing. It also autocompletes production code that satisfies the tests, which is often less helpful for this project since I usually want to spend some time thinking about how to implement these things. But sometimes I turn it back on to get suggestions that prompt me to consider a different and potentially better solution.

If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll notice that I’ve switched to Rust targeting WebAssembly. There’s a story behind that! But it will have to wait for a future post.

Making this video was a lot of fun! A little less fun was navigating how to host video on this site without introducing a dependency on a third-party. There’s a good reason why just about everyone uploads to YouTube — doing this reasonably well is not easy. This may wind up needing to be a journal entry or even video of its own.