Walk through of GitHub Copilot’s agent mode to add a feature to Deployinator 2022 for VS.
Apologies that this was "written" in Word and just pasted here in an attempt to find a better way to share it.
The prompt:
The initial response broken down:
Seems like a good plan and noticing right away it’s using phrases from comments in my code like “If a path is not viable (e.g., does not exist or is otherwise invalid)” in new context.
This is still part of the initial response:
The build error was indeed not due to the new code as it stated.
I noticed two things in the new code (this is about 2/3 of the new it created):
It decided to only use up to 3 suggested new target paths. It struck me as wrong initially but, on further thought, I decided this was a good idea.
It used a hash set to detect potential duplication but then also used another collection to keep the results. This seemed a bit newb’ish to me.
It didn’t trust SuggestNextTargetAsync to not return duplicates.
So I asked:
And asked:
I expected the first answer but not the second. Still, I think I’d just clear the collection on start.
Taking some action:
I highlighted the bit about making it clear if duplicates are returned by SuggestNextTargetAsync despite me saying to trust it. It turned my points against each other in a reasonable way.
So, now, I decided to really see what it could do:
The initial response comes in rather quickly:
and it continues by doing the necessary recon:
and continues to make the changes:
When I first read this, I thought it was done here but no:
I was pretty intrigued with the selection handling for the radio buttons. I think I have always done this with a simple model for the selection which is probably why I don’t [didn’t] have an EqualityToBooleanConverter.
I decided just to run the code and hope for the best but:
Let’s see what it does if I just tell it what’s happening:
In the end, the use of a converter and multibinding seems to have gotten more complex than using a simple model especially considering me wanting to also show the original path in red or something to highlight the fact that it is bad.
That said, it works:
It amazes me how far I got so quickly and perhaps I'll egg it into converting to a model approach for the list of paths and continue to act as a sort of technical product manager to get this feature into Deployinator.
