By Janus Boye
Seb Barre is Digital Platform Product Lead at TELUS in Toronto and his team have been early adopters of GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is also known as 'Your AI pair programmer'. It’s a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist developers by suggesting code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor.
In a recent member's call, we heard from Digital Platform Product Lead Seb Barre at TELUS, a Canadian national telecommunications company. Seb is on a growing team of developers that have been piloting it for the past 2 months to help make them both more productive and happier.
The conversation started with how they usually say no to experiments like these at TELUS, but with GitHub Copilot it was different.
Dealing with personal accounts and an internal waiting list
GitHub Copilot for Business was initially released in December 2022 and TELUS started their pilot in late May, but in the meantime a few had already started using Copilot on their private accounts.
When they officially started with Copilot, there was already quite some excitement about reaping the benefits among the dev team. At the same time, there was also a concern over whether usage would be spread out over personal accounts. Personal accounts don’t have the crucial policy controls and corporate licensing offered by Copilot for Business.
Seb explained that they initially decided to go with a smaller pilot with just 25 people. Quickly they found that their developers were writing more code and developers also praised improvements, where Copilot was helping them do things better in unexpected ways.
As momentum grew, they even had an internal waiting list at some point, which spanned every level of the organisation from junior developers to vice presidents.
During the initial weeks of usage, GitHub Copilot was more and more adopted and TELUS also kept an eye on the licensing cost. With the current $19 per month/per user licences, it quickly adds up if you have many who have a licence, but don’t actively use it.
An assistant for juniors as well as rusty seniors
While initially, the expectation was that Copilot would be most helpful for junior developers and potentially replace the need for a senior developer to supervise and help out, TELUS quickly found that Copilot was equally valuable for what Seb referred to as ‘rusty seniors’.
By rusty seniors, Seb referred to experienced team leaders or managers, who used to write code all the time, but now are spending more time with other tasks such as going to meetings, architecture workshops and reviewing documentation. GitHub Copilot was also widely used among this group and with very positive feedback, as many of them felt empowered by Copilot to get back into coding.
In the call, Seb shared a few numbers to put the usage in perspective:
75% of developers will only accept suggestions if they look entirely correct, with only 25% choosing to accept imperfect suggestions with the intention of improving them manually post-acceptance.
30% of suggestions are accepted, and this number has stayed consistent as adoption grows.
Copilot challenges and risks
In the member’s call, Seb highlighted two key challenges from their early adopter experiences:
It’s crucial to get people to stop using personal licences, but not always easy. Using the Business plan provides the policy benefits and avoids the additional costs for each individual developer
How do you maintain engagement? At the moment, 60% of the people with Business licences are using it daily, but they are paying for 100%
Seb also mentioned that TELUS had considered the risk of a potential brain drain in the long-term, asking questions like: What if Copilot is down? Can our developers then still be productive? They haven’t experienced this yet, but it’s worth keeping in mind as usage continues over the coming years and essentially redefines what it means to be a developer.
Learn more about Copilot
In March GitHub unveiled Copilot X with GPT-4 and new features, including the ability to explain code in plain language and also expanding usage across the entire coding creation lifecycle.
The conversation continues in our peer groups and at our upcoming conferences. At the Boye Aarhus 23 conference in November, we’ll have a Creative Tech conference track once again.
Finally, you can also lean back and enjoy the recording from the call below.