GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

It's not. The legal system doesn't have the consistency or dependability of code. A lot of legal 'results' (judicial decisions) are somewhat arbitrary, balancing abstractions with practicality and so on, but get attention because they include clear explanations of the basic issues. Other lawyers then treat those decisions as 'legal facts' by echoing the language and (basically) challenging other lawyers to come up with a more impressive explanation than the decision that they are citing.

Look into a famous recent copyright case, Cariou v Prince. Cariou is a photographer, who made a series of photographs of people in Jamaica an dpublished them in a book. Prince, an artist, liked them, and then treated them as raw material, basically printing them up large, adjusting them, and slapping some paint on top, and declaring it original art - indeed, he called it 'appropriation art' saying 'this is mine now.'

Cariou was upset (very understandably) and sued. The judge found for Cariou, said that Prince was a bullshit rather than a visual artist, and ordered the infringing work to be collected and set fire. Prince appealed, and his appeal succeeded, with the 2nd circuit saying it was "transformative" from the point of view of a "reasonable observer" and therefore fair use, because Prince had added a different aesthetic by turning the portrait photos into oversize graffiti-collage mashups. Cariou gave up at that point as he didn't have the resources or will to fight the case further, and eventually the two artists settled.

Look up the art and see for yourself. I think Prince does have his own aesthetic, but it's a very shallow one that just surfs on other people's work, not very different from drawing glasses and a mustache on top of an existing portrait and saying you made an original work. In many ways, what he's selling is his taste, and the modifications he makes to the picture are just a sort of signature that's semantically equivalent to saying 'I, Richard Prince, approve of this image' - the artist as curator-critic of others' work, if you like.

Back in the computing context, this decision substantially loosens the boundaries of copyright. Found some code you wish you had written and want to put out your own thing, but feel stymied by the license? Just refactor it, add a bunch of sassy comments, and make the interface (whether, CUI, CLI, or API) aggressively different - not necessarily better, just distinctive. If it's fun and whimsical, make it corporate and bog-like. If it's scientific and functional, make it silly and juvenile. Just futz with it a bit until you can plausibly say you either made it better or easier to read or more accessible/intercompatible in some way. Hell, slow it down a bit and say your code smells better because it cooks the JSON longer, and generates a bunch of 'useful' statistics that might seem superfluous to the original designers but are essentially interesting to you. You'll probably get away with it.

Then making it work with Neovim seems like an odd choice.

It's the fact this could even have a different meaning that makes this a useless metric - defining 'quality' or 'coverage' is subjective. The majority of tests written are meaningless noise, and serve mainly to distract from covering 'critical' failures. Again, a subjective measure, in the sense that was is critical to you and me may not be the same thing.

Which is what makes this whole concept of code coverage so much toxic nonsense...

Not to argue against writing 'quality' tests, but high 'coverage' actually decreases quality, objectively speaking, since erroneous coverage of code serves negative purposes such as obscuring important testing, enshrinig bugs within testing.

I would make my case here CodePilot and all such 'AI' tools should be banned from production, at least until they solve the above problem, since as it stands they will serve to shovel piles of useless or worse, incorrect testing.

It is also important to remember what AI does, i.e. produce networks which create results based upon desired metrics - if the metrics were wrong or incomplete, you produce and propagate bad design.

So yes people use it now as a learning tool (fine) and it will get 'better' (sure), but as a tool, when it gets better, it will constrain more, not less, along whatever lines have been deemed better, and it will become harder, not easier, to adjust.

It's certainly a good autocomplete but it can't be used for anything more complex because you just can't trust it. Every now and then it produces an entire function filled with complexity and I think "This looks right but I would need to independently verify everything" and at that point it's easier to write from scratch.