Six months using GitHub Copilot daily, here is what it actually changed about how I code

I joined my first proper dev job eight months ago. For six of those months I have had GitHub Copilot running in my IDE and at this point I genuinely cannot imagine going back. Here is what actually changed, not the marketing version.

The inline completion is the thing you notice immediately. It predicts what you are about to write and shows it as ghost text, you press Tab to accept. After a week or two it starts feeling less like a tool and more like your hands are slightly faster than they used to be. For boilerplate and repetitive patterns it is almost eerie how often it gets it exactly right.

Copilot Chat is what I reach for when I am confused. I can highlight a function I do not understand and ask it to explain it, or paste an error and ask it to fix it. It is faster than Stack Overflow for most things and it has context about my actual code rather than giving generic answers.

Copilot Edits is the newer feature that I think is underrated. You describe a change you want across multiple files in plain language and it makes those changes simultaneously. For refactors that touch several parts of the codebase that used to be a painful manual process.

The slash commands are worth learning. /explain, /fix and /tests are the ones I use constantly. The /tests command in particular is how I got into writing unit tests properly because it does the tedious part of generating test cases automatically.

Context awareness is important to understand. If you use the @workspace tag it gives Copilot full context across your project, which significantly improves the quality of suggestions compared to just working from the current file.