I’ve been using the github copilots agent a bit for work and personal stuff. Some random findings below … Sometimes it’s quite useful in saving me a load of time in creating boiler plate code. It seems to cope quite well either with creating a new thing that’s relatively easy to describe or doing a task I can easily describe. I’m also starting to get a bit better with it “Investigate and suggest a fix for …. <stack-trace-here>”. So far, I’ve :
- Created a simple demo site to help secure a deal for a customer (take their food rating data and plot it on a leaflet map, with a site theme that vaguely matches the customer).
- Created an internal tool to show me the status of various git repos I care about (is the last build over a week old? is the build passing? are there open PRs from my team that need review etc?)
- Showed how an existing project could move from using Google Maps to Leaflet.js and perhaps have a different search mechanism.
- Upgrade an existing project from bootstrap 3 to 5
In most cases, I’ve found most success with sticking to a “middle of the road” configuration (i.e. trying to stick with the most common things in a field – so let’s have Laravel, specify an explicit PHP version (8.3) and tell it I want a bootstrap theme (I don’t really do npm/JS/Tailwind stuff) Where I’m still seeing pain is when I want to build on top of what it’s just generated, or explore multiple options in two branches. Eventually one of us gets into a mess, and I decide it’s wrong 🙂 To try and help, I read “Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software with GenAI, Chat, Agents and Beyond” – given it’s written by one of the authors of The Phoenix project. Unfortunately it’s too repetitive, doesn’t really go into great detail and is already too far out of date (published Oct 2025). I felt they could easily have cut 100 pages out of the book without there being any great loss. There were some useful nuggets of info, but the book itself felt disappointing. I guess I need to keep looking.