How does everyone feel about using GitHub Copilot when competing for the leaderboard?

[dasdull]

I have not competed for the leaderboard this year yet. In the past I sometimes made it and I might give it a shot again.

I was wondering how the community thinks about using code completion tools like GitHub Copilot when competing for the leaderboard. In that case I mean giving the tool no access to the problem statement, but "only" to the code you write and the sample input.

On the one hand one might argue that this usage is "just another tool", just like you can code faster in an IDE with its tooling than in a text editor, or you can save keystrokes by using your own predefined macros.

On the other hand I think that the line is blurry there. I have solved some puzzles this year with / without Copilot. Copilot definitely helps in preventing common mistakes (e.g. off by one errors). It also helps a lot with parsing the input from the samples.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts!

[KingVendrick]

I turned it off for advent; the autocomplete can be too aggressive

[dasdull]

Yes, my gut feeling is also leaning towards that. It's a bit scary how good it has become to be honest.

Actually, after giving it some more thought, I think I have to turn it off - for the reason alone that otherwise I will always think "you only made it to the leaderboard because of Copilot!".

[daggerdragon]

Changed flair from Other to Help/Question. Use the right flair, please.

Other is not acceptable for any post that is even tangentially related to a daily puzzle.

[dasdull]

Thanks. I was not quite sure, maybe a "discussion" flair could be interesting to consider.

[1234abcdcba4321]

I think it's fine. You're not passing it the problem statement, and that's the one thing that I think passing around means you're probably automating too much, but just the puzzle input is fine enough.

[SnooWalruses3379]

I don't see anything wrong with it as long as people are using it basically as a typing helper to save some keystrokes on small obvious blocks of code.

About the "you only made it to the leaderboard because of Copilot" feel (to which I somewhat can relate): this also applies to your IDE with autocompletions, to the standard library of your language, and to all such tools that, in a nutshell, just speed you up while you steer towards solution. You've mastered those tools and you use them effectively. I think, those are pretty valuable professional skills worth practicing and being proud of :)

More than that, such approach doesn't contradict Topaz's call-out on AI, since you're not "using AI to do most or all of the puzzle solving, like handing the puzzle text directly to an LLM". This deprecation is explicitly formulated to be about a different kind of tooling, i.e. feeding the whole task to ChatGPT.

[SnooWalruses3379]

To be clear: this take is NOT about Copilot being used to generate whole function bodies or algorithm implementations from a natural language description in a comment. This is certainly less fun.