this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
456 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
87450 readers
3620 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm curious what tasks are you using GitHub Copilot for? I left the industry before AI got huge so I was never pressured to use the tools.
All agents are pretty much the same. Think of it like pair programming with someone, except that someone doesn't have feelings and you can micromanage them.
In general, I give it instructions for what I want to accomplish. It has a "plan mode" that basically instructs the LLM to give me an execution plan to approve before actually doing it. We iterate on the implementation plan together and then when I satisfied I let it generate code.
It generated diffs essentially that I can approve or deny directly, in aggregate or by individual chunk.
I can (and do) provide custom instructions that it loads whenever I start a session. Instructions are basically md files, but it can be any text.
It's a very different way of writing code, but if you ever pair programmed with a knowledgeable junior then that's kind of what it feels like.
It can wrode code decently well and fast, and is amazing at finding stuff in a large project.
But you still 100% need to verify what it does and truly understand it.
This isn't what I was asking for, I'd like to see something like, "When tasked with X AI did Y" with breakdowns between simple bug fixes to standing up a monolith in a legacy environment.