Review
Copilot writes a surprising share of my boilerplate and a worrying share of my bugs. A year of daily use, measured honestly.
Ten dollars a month for a tool that writes your tests, your boilerplate and your regexes is an easy yes. Treat its confident suggestions in unfamiliar code the way you would treat a keen intern's: read every line.
Get startedFree tier · Pro $10/mo
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The interesting question about AI coding tools stopped being 'does it work' about two years ago. It is now 'where does it cost you more than it saves'. After a year of Copilot in VS Code across three real codebases, I have a clear map of both.
Tests. Boilerplate. Data transformations. Regular expressions. Configuration files in a syntax I use twice a year. In these cases the suggestion is usually correct on the first try and reviewing it takes seconds.
It is also a superb autocomplete for patterns already present in the file. Once you have written one mapper function, the next four write themselves accurately.
In an unfamiliar framework, Copilot produces code that looks idiomatic and is subtly wrong — a deprecated API, a hook called in the wrong place, an option that never existed. It is confident, so it is persuasive, so you lose twenty minutes.
Chat is a good explainer, particularly for inherited code — highlight a function, ask what it does, get a usable answer. Agent mode, which makes multi-step edits across files and can open a pull request, is impressive in demos and inconsistent in large repositories. Cursor still handles whole-codebase context better.
The real risk is not that Copilot writes bad code; it is that accepting a suggestion feels like less of a decision than writing one. Set a rule and keep it: nothing gets committed that you could not explain in review. That single discipline turns Copilot from a liability into leverage.
A year in, I would not code without it, and I trust it least exactly where I know least. Ten dollars, high return, one discipline required.
| Free plan | Limited completions and chat requests monthly |
|---|---|
| Pro price | $10/mo or $100/yr |
| Business | $19/user/mo with policy controls |
| Editors | VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, Visual Studio, Xcode |
| Agent mode | Multi-step edits and PR authoring |
| Free for | Verified students and popular OSS maintainers |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
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