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I'm not sure we should throw the baby out with the bath water here due to the large blurbs it stubs in when when it doesn't have a lot to go on in mostly empty files. It is a preview release. They are working on proper attribution of suggested code and explainability [1]. Having a stochastic parrot that types faster than I do would be useful in a lot of cases.

Yes, better layers of abstraction could make us more productive in the future, but we're not there yet. By all means, don't accept the larger blurbs it proposes, but there is productivity to be gained in the smaller suggestions. If it correctly intuits the exact rest of the line that you were thinking of, it will save time and not make you lose understanding of the program.

In some areas complete understanding and complete code ownership is required but in a lot of places, it's not. If it produces the work of a moderately skilled developer it would be sufficient. I don't remember all code I write as time passes. If it produces work that I would have produced, then I don't see how that's any different that work that was produced by my past self.

It may feel offensive but a lot of the comments against it sound like rage against the machine/industrialization opponents and the arguments sound pretty similar to those made in the past by those that had their jobs automated away. I'm not sure we're all as unique snowflakes as we like to think we are. Sure, there will be some code that requires an absolute master that is outside the capabilities of this tool. But I'd guess there is a massive amount of code that doesn't need that mastery.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...



I think it depends on how you look at it.

For small snippets that have likely been already written by someone else, this probably works great. For those though, the time savings is probably at most 5-10 min down to 1 or less. The challenge is that that’s not where my time goes unless I’m working in an unfamiliar language.

As someone who writes a lot of code quickly, I’m usually bottlenecked by reviews. For more complex changes I’m bottlenecked by understanding the problem and experimenting with solutions (and then reviews, domain-specific tests usually, fixing bugs etc). Writing code isn’t like waiting for code to compile since I’m not actually ending up task switching that frequently.

This does sound like a fantastic tool when I’m not familiar with the language although I wonder if it actually generates useful stuff that integrates well as the code gets larger (eg can I say “write an async function that allocates a record handle in the file with ownership that doesn’t outlive the open file’s lifetime”). I’m sure though that this is what a lot of people are overindexing on. For things like that I expect normal evolution of the product will work well. For things like “cool, understand your snippets but also weight my own codebase higher and understand the specifics of my codebase”, I think there’s a lot of groundbreaking research that would be required. That is what I see as a true productivity boost - I’d make this 100% required for anyone joining the codebase. The more mentorship can be offloaded, the lower the cost is to growing teams. OSS projects can more easily scale similarly.




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