As a manager & parent with only occasional bursts of time to code (some work, mostly side/fun stuff), Copilot has turned out to be incredibly useful in smoothing over all of the small things I'm slow at because I don't do them daily. And especially since I have limited time, I just want to get the damn thing working and am quite happy to <Tab> my way there as quickly as possible.
Yes there has been a lot of hot things in A.I. in 2022 but most of them are mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD and sometimes worse like SEO spam.
Copilot is the only real value I'm getting from the recent A.I revolution and it does save me hundreds of lines of manully typing code all day. And the best part is it's getting better and better each day.
These are not just novelty value. They're great for mocking up ideas and I've also used them for generating backgrounds for advertising, for example:
"A black stage lit from above by two spotlights, very dramatic, stylish"
You can also add keywords like "modern/rustic/nature/futuristic" and it will get tuned to your desired style immediately.
Iterate on that for 5 minutes or so and there's my perfect background for a "coming soon" flyer. Way better than I could have made in Canva. Good enough that multiple people have told me the flyers look amazing, and nobody guessed it was AI until I told them.
I've been trying to set up local SD (on windows or WSL) of and on for a few weeks now. Seems to be extremely complicated even with the packages that say they are "1 click install". Then I find out they have dependencies on Cuda, a million python machine learning packages, some package called xformers that I have to compile for my specific GPU, I have to download the right SD image and config, then I have to find and install the right upscaling package and on and on.
So no, I'm not using SD. I paid for a year of Midjourney for $100. Well worth it so far and honestly I think their latest V4 is just as good as SD. Probably is SD in fact, and it doesn't have that "Midjourney style" that previous versions had.
I'm in a similar position -- I only code because I enjoy it, but I also just don't have the time to actually finish the coding projects that I'd like to. Plus, I'm a pretty bad coder because I only have a few hours every couple of weeks to focus on it, outside of the occasional bigger project. I'm going to look into Copilot to see if it can help me actually do what I want.
As a manager & parent with only occasional bursts of time to code (some work, mostly side/fun stuff), Copilot has turned out to be incredibly useful in smoothing over all of the small things I'm slow at because I don't do them daily. And especially since I have limited time, I just want to get the damn thing working and am quite happy to <Tab> my way there as quickly as possible.