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TIC software engineers recently began using GitHub Copilot. Chris Doyle, Enterprise IT Architect, says that GitHub Copilot has been affectionately described as “Your AI pair programmer.” According to Doyle, TIC software engineers seamlessly integrate its features into their daily workflow within Microsoft Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ JetBrains. The result? Significant time savings and increased productivity, allowing engineers to better focus on architecting solutions and solving interesting problems rather than fighting syntax errors and generating boilerplate code. GitHub Copilot offers inline code completion that auto-suggests whole lines of code, functions, or even entire blocks of code based on the context and user’s coding style, helping reduce the tedious drudgery of writing repetitive code such as tests. The inline chat feature helps coders solve complex problems iteratively through prompts, often providing alternative approaches and saving developers the hassle of round-trip Google searches to sometimes dated solutions. It also helps engineers build hands-on expertise with new or unfamiliar platforms and coding languages. Doyle states it is important to note that GitHub Copilot is not a perfect tool, and that reasoning and the human brain can never be replaced. However, leveraging AI tools like GitHub Copilot have inarguably made immediate impact and are already reshaping how engineers write software.
