Can GitHub Copilot speed up your coding? Just watch.

We’ve been hearing how revolutionary new generative AI coding tools like ChatGPT, GiitHub Co-Pilot, and AWS Code Whisperer are, and we wanted to put them to the test. As a Manning reader, you know that our liveProject platform is a great way to develop hands-on knowledge in a hurry. We wanted to know if Copilot could help someone work through a liveProject in a fraction of the time.

So, we asked Manning author Nathan B. Crocker to help us with an experiment.

Nathan is the author of our series Open Banking App Using OpenAPIs and Spring Boot, and he knows the liveProject platform inside and out. We asked him to work through the first section of our Rust series Build a Fintech Platform in Rust using Copilot. Even though he was new to Copilot and has only a little experience with Rust, Nathan was able to complete in 20 minutes a section that normally takes an hour or more.

To prepare, Nathan first read the project’s supporting materials and installed the Copilot plugin to his IDE. The video captures everything in real time as he works through the challenge. There are plenty of places where he has to work things out himself to get his code to run, but Copilot proved to be an amazing timesaver. Check it out for yourself, and discover a new way to improve your coding speed!