I use it for coding, mostly as a time saver. Generally as I’m typing, it will give a suggestion that’s functionally the same as what I was going to type anyway so I hit tab and go to the next line. It’s able to do this accurately for around 80% of the total lines that I’m writing and going from writing full lines to writing 0-3 characters + tab on most of those lines makes a massive speed difference. It’s especially great for writing one off scripts when I’m doing something that’s not even a coding project, but there’s some tedious file juggling involved. Writing a script completely by hand for that often would take slightly longer than just doing the task manually, and as I said, it’s a one-off. But writing the script with copilot often takes as little as 10% of the time which is really nice.
Even in cases where I don’t already know how to solve a problem (particularly a problem involving specific integrations) it can often be faster to ask it how to solve the problem and then look up the specific functions, endpoints, etc it uses in the docs rather than trying to find those doc entries directly with a search. And if it hallucinates a function that doesn’t exist in the docs then I tell it that and it often successfully corrects itself. When it fails more than once I’ve generally found that there’s a high probability that the SDK/API/etc I’m looking at doesn’t have anything that does what I need so it’s time for me to start rethinking my approach
Outside of coding, I also use stable diffusion to generate images of D&D characters I’m creating instead of image searching and settling for something kind of close to what I was picturing.
I also regularly use SD when I stumble upon some art I’d like to use as a desktop wallpaper, but can’t find at high enough resolution. I just upscale it and proceed. Sometimes I’ll have something at the wrong aspect ratio and use generative fill to extend the edges of the image to the desired aspect ratio, those parts of the image are nothing special, but the important part is the original image and I just need some filler to prevent it from abruptly ending before the edges of the screen.
One last case is if I need to put together a tediously long document, I generally find that having it generate a first draft with the right structure and then iterating a bunch on that comes more easily than starting with an empty page.
A lot of the hate in this thread seems unfounded. While this video touches on some things that the community is insecure about, I think it does a good job of providing relevant and true facts that someone considering the switch should know:
For someone not sure which distro to choose, they get:
For someone wondering about game compatibility, they learn:
For someone who has used Linux on servers at work, but hasn’t tried it as a primary desktop they learn:
For someone who has never used Linux at all they learn:
All of this information is valuable, relevant, true, and important for someone to be aware of before they dive in. I say all this as a gamer that’s been playing exclusively on Linux for over a year now. It is not an experience without friction, to me that friction is worth it. If someone else doesn’t think it’s worth it, I’d rather they not switch right now, rather than switch and have a bad time. Maybe in a couple years Valve will be able to reduce the friction in the broader ecosystem the way they did on the deck. Until then it’s better not to bring people in that are going to be unhappy with the current state.