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Why GitHub Copilot Will Not Change Programming
Don’t worry, it won’t snatch your job
The hottest new tech of last week is GitHub Copilot. It seems like almost all programmers are playing or waiting to play with this new fancy AI coding assistant.
Some say this is an innovative game-changer that will totally change the world of programming!
But I am not so optimistic about it. From my perspective as an old-school programmer, this kind of tool looks fancy but is not as helpful as some people claim. Not to mention, it will be no substitute for real programmers.
Let me explain.
Coding Faster is Not a Big Deal
Think about it. How much time do you spend on coding?
In fact, in most software companies, the time we spend on writing code is not a high proportion of the overall software development cycle — even less than a quarter of it.
We spend much more time on requirements analysis, technical design, testing, debugging, and team collaboration.
Software engineering is hard, mostly because of the high complexity of the real world. We can’t change this — over time, abstractions in computing are inevitable. No project ever failed due to slow coding.
