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GitHub Copilot Is Super Cool, and It Isn’t a Threat to Developers’ Jobs
Software developers are here to stay
The new GitHub Copilot is super cool and the hype behind it is reasonable. After a couple of hours of playing with it and reading about it, however, I quickly realized that it is just a cool tool and not a threat. In fact, I keep asking myself which problems it will actually solve and how much we developers should care.
Automated Stack Overflow?
Chances are that you have copied some code snippet from Stack Overflow in your journey to become a developer. Simply put, the Copilot tool is an advanced and automatic version of that practice. You still need to know what you are doing and verify and understand the code snippet before you accept it.
What concerns me here is that some developers will not know any better and will probably trust Copilot more because they hear “AI.” This is actually a current problem where devs simply rely on Google search results too much without feeling the need to learn and try to solve the problems themselves.
The tool is not perfect. Even though the suggestions are good, its creators recommend always verifying the snippets. Developers who fail to do so or don’t understand the snippets may introduce bugs to the code base, a coding style that may not match the project, deprecated things, bad practices, etc.
You are still the pilot. Remember that!
Autocompletion Is Nothing New — At Least Not at This Level
I love my IDE because over time, I have collected tons of code snippets and the suggestions I get are just super useful. It helps me code faster and even build a dependency on the editor I use.
The difference here is that instead of autocompleting the methods or the variable names, it dumps a whole code snippet — and that is super cool!
I love the idea and believe it can help speed things up a lot even though you have to verify the snippet all the time to make sure it is doing what you meant. It will get better over time but will never be perfect. The verification can actually be a great way to learn about different and common approaches…
