---

layout: post
date: 2025-04-03
title: Using GitHub CoPilot

---

I've been doing a bit of small scale personal development over recent weeks including building out some simple one-use case tools. I've found CoPilot and AI generally brilliant for this work.

I'm at a point in my career where I've been professionally hands-off for about 7 years and I'm a bit rusty in writing code. What I can do however, is read code and understand it and spot issues.

This makes CoPilot a perfect helper for me. I can ask it to produce the code I am looking for and check it for bugs, test that it performs how I expect and had asked for, prompt for more changes, or make some edits myself.

I wouldn't class my personal development work as vibe coding which seems to be the meme du jour, It's an educated prompt from an educate engineer and reviewing as if it were an open source contribution, it is small scale personal use so less concerns than perhaps where  I would be more wary for example of leaning on it for production systems in a corporate setting.

In that corporate setting I would flip the roles and have AI review my work, look for a failure to follow a design pattern, look for defensive coding gaps, look for performance issues and any missing test cases.