GitHub Copilot

When one gets snippets from Stack Overflow, he/she doesn't assume it is tailored specifically for the task, so extra check, modification are applied. With copilot people (eventually, especially beginners probably) will assume that the code produced by "magic" AI does exactly what they asked for.

I don’t know if I agree with this, but I think it depends what you mean when you say “programming”.

I use programming as one of the examples of intrinsically human work.

You have a (general computing) machine that can do anything(), it only has meaning and utility from humans thinking about problems they have and how to solve them.

The hard part of programming is analysing what problems you have, and what you want to do about them.

This is why one of the distinguishing features between junior and senior programmers is that seniors tend to think about the (human) problem they’re solving a lot more.

Tools like copilot help with the physical interfacing between programmer and machine, but they don’t eliminate programming.

But a recurring worry people are expressing in this thread is: some people think they _do_, and how insidious that idea is.

The tool is great, the managers deciding that time spent thinking about its output, or developing their staff’s skills, is a waste because “just use what the AI says”, are the danger.

As long as people and computers exist, there will be programming.

not actually “anything”

I had visions of writing tests and then the AI would do the production code. I think that would be a lot better. Comments are too hard to get right. Good Luck!

I don't understand how code ownership will work. The application is "trained on ... source code from publicly available sources", but "code you write with its help, belong to you". I get that most code it generates appears to be unique, but they admit that fragments of verbatim code occasionally appear. Unless the code they are using is all BSD-licensed, surely this breaches those licences?

I'm not worried about programs like Copilot, in the same way that I'm not worried about outsourcing. If price was the sole factor in software engineering then all jobs would have already been shipped overseas. Instead, an awful lot of companies tried that, and realized that it's far from the bees knees.

AI tools like this will be force multipliers, the same way that IDEs are. SWEs 20 years ago decried the rise of the IDE the same way that some are moaning about this. "It'll lead to a generation of know-nothing programmers." Instead, SWEs are more productive today than they ever have been before.

Software engineers should welcome the day that an AI makes it possible to describe what you want instead of telling the machine exactly what to do. That's where I see this technology going in 20 years. That said, it will likely never be good enough to replace an engineer completely because the value of an engineer is in deciding what to build and how to build it. Not in determining exactly which lines of code to write. SWE will be more enjoyable as a field in 20 years because we won't have to wrangle compilers, or deal with fundamental limitations of how computers express ideas versus how humans express concepts. Instead, we'll let the AI translate for us and deal with all those problems automatically.

In the short term, I see lots of potential for this technology to make something like the ultimate cross-compiler. If you can take someone's code, convert it to some kind of universal representation (embedding), and then convert that to another language (and get working code that verifiably produces the same results) you would make a ton of money.