Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:55:12 +0000

Content warning:llms, genai, copilot, rant

Somebody tagged Copilot in a pull-request for a project, or maybe it encroached itself there (I don't know, it could be the latter: Silicon Valley doesn't understand consent), and it was every bit as I would have expected:

* It suggested logging about an error condition, which may plausibly look like good advice, but wrong because this was in an initialization function that would bubble up the error instead.

* It never suggested that instead of using an environment variable for a configuration setting, it would be better to support a new entry in the configuration file, and/or through a dedicated command line option that can pass arbitrary key+value parameters.

* As for the environment variable name, it missed that the project name is used as prefix for all of them, and was fine with an “XDG_” prefix, presumably because there are a couple of other locations where environment variables related to the XDG user directories spec are read.

All in all: a waste of time and processing power.