Programming

GitHub Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4.5 works okay in codebases that have established and obvious patterns. It can continue following those patterns with careful guidance, review, and a healthy dose of manual testing. I generally get a modest productivity boost for code that is pretty straight forward, though you either have to spend time ensuring quality up front or fixing the slop afterwards, and there are times when it just won’t get something right that you’re better off doing yourself. Don’t expect it to come up with any clever or innovative solutions to hard problems: it’s just going to make a big bowl of hacky slop soup for you instead. It also does a shit job writing clean, maintainable code using things like the DRY principle, high cohesion / loose coupling, properly naming things, etc.

With all the babysitting required, the productivity increase is modest, but existent.