Write a game with Copilot 🎱

190; 12021 H.E.

This morning while at work, I received an email from Github, letting me know that I got access to Copilot’s technical preview. Of course, I immediately dropped everything in order to play with this shiny new toy I just got.

I played with it a little bit in different languages with my friends, trying to create functions over some of our custom classes or structs we made on the fly. Overall, I must say, it’s pretty impressive how it can pick up the surrounding context and write boilerplate code on it (maybe not always fully correct).

Then sometime later in the afternoon, I pulled up an empty python file and just wrote def start(, where copilot picked it from and immediately started writing down print statements, for what it seems to be a simple text-based adventure game. I tab-completed the whole game and it actually ran!

This is just a small experiment seeing how it picked up this specific example from whatever is its (controversial) training set. I recorded the game writing, where all I do is give the original start signature (this was my second attempt, so I gave it def start(self): to nudge copilot into giving me what I had right before) and just pressing tabs.

You can get the python file here.

Some very quick searching showed that this is apparently an exercise from Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw, more specifically, exercise #35. It feels as many people posted their take on this exercise from the book or some specific implementation got a prime spot in the training set and is later suggested first when evaluating.

This is my ~7th hour since I started playing with copilot, so I wanted to share some cool findings and observations when playing with it. Will it replace all software engineers? Probably not, as a good engineer is not simply a code writer of various algorithms, one has to understand the big picture and work top-to-bottom. Will I use copilot? I don’t know. It works well for JS plotting and matplotlib plotting, because I could never care less to remember d3 methods to get me a 3d pie chart. ◼︎