I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for Unity development and it is incredible. It has saved me from tons of bugs, speeded up my work by 2x, and even taught me a lot of C# (which Unity uses and I haven’t used before).
How does it work? You install it as a VS Code extension and then, as you type, it (very magically) suggests what should come next. For example, I have a very simple utility class with a static field, WorldWidth, to get the size of the screen in world coordinates. Suppose I wanted to add a WorldHeight field. I press enter, and I literally don’t even have to start typing:
It knows that this is the other function I’d likely want.
Okay, but that’s very simply. How about something more complex? This is a long function, so excerpting part of it, but it’s a nested for loop that looks at each column on the game board.
At the end of this function, I press enter and:
Note that bool lastIter went from y == board[x].Length - 1 to board.Length - 1. Fancy!
Its context-awareness is also great when you don’t want to have to look up math formulas:
(…it works for much more complicated math, too.)
And it saves tons of time writing out annoying debugging messages or ToString functions:
The downside of using this is that I’m much more likely to repeat code, because I don’t have to write it all out. For example, in the GetVerticalRuns/GetHorizontalRuns functions above, I probably would have pulled out the loops into a common function if I had to write it myself. However, I also probably would have messed it up on the first try.
If you do any programming, I highly recommend signing up for Copilot. It takes away a lot of repetitive, annoying, and route work and lets you concentrate on actually getting your project working.
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 