I haven't found it that useful in my main product development (which while python based, uses our own framework and therefore there's not much code for CoPilot to go on and it usually suggests methods and arguments that don't exist, which just makes extra work).
Where I do find it useful are
1) questions about frameworks/languages that I don't work in much and for which there is a lot of example content (i.e., Qt, CSS);
2) very specific questions I would have done a Google Search (usually StackOverflow) for ("what's the most efficient way to CPU and RAM usage on Windows using python") - the result is pointing me to a library or some example rather than directly generating code that I can copy/paste
3) boilerplate code that I already know how to write but saves me a little time and avoids typing errors. I have the CoPilot plugin for PyCharm so I'll write it as a comment in the file and then it'll complete the next few lines. Again best results is something that is very short and specific. With anything longer I almost always have to iterate so much with CoPilot that it's not worth it anymore.
4) a quick way to search documentation
Some people have said it's good at writing unit tests but I have not found that to be the case (at least not the right kind of unit tests).
If I had to quantify it, I'd probably give it a 5-10% increase in productivity. Much less than I get from using a full featured IDE like PyCharm over coding in Notepad, or a really good git client over typing the git commands in the CLI. In other words, it's a productivity tool like many other tools, but I would not say it's "revolutionary".
> 1) questions about frameworks/languages that I don't work in much and for which there is a lot of example content
Books and manuals, they're pretty great for introductory materials. And for advanced stuff, you have to grok these first.
> 2) very specific questions I would have done a Google Search (usually StackOverflow) for ("what's the most efficient way to CPU and RAM usage on Windows using python")
I usually go backwards for such questions, searching for not what I want to do, but how it would look like if it exists. And my search-fu have not failed me that much in that regards, but that requires knowledge on how those things work, which again goes back to books and other such materials.
> 3) boilerplate code that I already know how to write but saves me a little time and avoids typing errors.
Snippets and templates in my editor. And example code in the documentation.
4) a quick way to search documentation
I usually have a few browser tabs open for whatever modules I'm using, plus whatever the IDE has, and PDFs and manual pages,...
For me, LLMs feel like building a rocketship to get groceries at the next village, and then hand-waving the risks of explosions and whether it would actually get you there.
I used Google Search for all of the above and would usually find what I needed in the first few hits -- which would lead to the appropriate doc page or an example page or a page on SO, etc.
So it's not like CoPilot is giving me information that I couldn't get fairly easily before. But it is giving it to me much __faster__ than I could access it before. I liken it to an IDE tool that allows you to look up API methods as you type. Or being able to ask an expert in that particular language/domain, except it's not as good as the expert because if the expert doesn't know something they're not going to make it up, they'll say "don't know".
So how much benefit you get from it is relative to how much you have to look up stuff that you don't know.
Well, like I said, a well-designed IDE is a much bigger productivity booster than CoPilot, and I've never heard anyone describe JetBrains, NetBeans or VSCode as "revolutionary".
Where I do find it useful are
1) questions about frameworks/languages that I don't work in much and for which there is a lot of example content (i.e., Qt, CSS);
2) very specific questions I would have done a Google Search (usually StackOverflow) for ("what's the most efficient way to CPU and RAM usage on Windows using python") - the result is pointing me to a library or some example rather than directly generating code that I can copy/paste
3) boilerplate code that I already know how to write but saves me a little time and avoids typing errors. I have the CoPilot plugin for PyCharm so I'll write it as a comment in the file and then it'll complete the next few lines. Again best results is something that is very short and specific. With anything longer I almost always have to iterate so much with CoPilot that it's not worth it anymore.
4) a quick way to search documentation
Some people have said it's good at writing unit tests but I have not found that to be the case (at least not the right kind of unit tests).
If I had to quantify it, I'd probably give it a 5-10% increase in productivity. Much less than I get from using a full featured IDE like PyCharm over coding in Notepad, or a really good git client over typing the git commands in the CLI. In other words, it's a productivity tool like many other tools, but I would not say it's "revolutionary".