Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
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Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#2Feels like its a magical thing for me honestly. although I'm never waiting for suggestion while coding, sometimes the suggestions just slipped through and there is the OMG moment when it completes your thought.
1 thing though, tab for auto complete still does not work for me.. ever
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#3Well if they ever get it right I guess I could always become an electrician (this is not a dig on electricians, it seems like a fun trade, that or under water welding)
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#4Well if they ever get it right I guess I could always become an electrician (this is not a dig on electricians, it seems like a fun trade, that or under water welding)
Yeah, the real curse is on the programmers who are going to be out of jobs much sooner than people anticipate.
All the talk about the low quality of code got me thinking: if humans aren’t reading the code, then the only thing that matters is correctness. Correctness may be an easier problem to solve than readability and refactorability.
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#5Well if they ever get it right I guess I could always become an electrician (this is not a dig on electricians, it seems like a fun trade, that or under water welding)
Yeah, the real curse is on the programmers who are going to be out of jobs much sooner than people anticipate. All the talk about the low quality of code got me thinking: if humans aren’t reading the code, then the only thing that matters is correctness. Correctness may be an easier problem to solve than readability and refactorability.
They are intertwined, no? All the training inputs would be based on the code that was affected by the aforementioned traits.
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#6His conclusion to the question in title : "I don't know."
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#7> The code Copilot writes is not very good code.
This has been my experience as well. Some of the early promo material for Copilot showed someone writing a function signature with docs, and having Copilot write the entire body. This rarely works for me, except for fairly trivial functions. This is also not how I normally write code.
However, where Copilot has been rather good is offering intelligent "tab completion", where it makes a suggestion for the next line of code. In particular, it seems very good at figuring out the structure of my code and making sensible suggestions.
I suspect that if anyone ends up using Copilot for the long term, they will (as a human operator) need to learn and gain intuition about how to use Copilot's strengths and avoid its weaknesses.
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#8Well if they ever get it right I guess I could always become an electrician (this is not a dig on electricians, it seems like a fun trade, that or under water welding)
Yeah, the real curse is on the programmers who are going to be out of jobs much sooner than people anticipate. All the talk about the low quality of code got me thinking: if humans aren’t reading the code, then the only thing that matters is correctness. Correctness may be an easier problem to solve than readability and refactorability.
Media synthesis means artists of all sorts will take a hit. Gpt means writers, programmers, journalists, and others will take a hit. Prompt engineering and larger models could mean any procedural use of knowledge in any context could be subject to automation.
Consumer level robotics, drones, and battery tech is close to a level that manual labor, delivery, and such tasks can be automated.
Maybe we should be preparing for post-scarcity. At the very least, the idea of "jobs" is going to have to transform. The 40 hour work week isn't going to make much sense in the near future.
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#9Well if they ever get it right I guess I could always become an electrician (this is not a dig on electricians, it seems like a fun trade, that or under water welding)
Yeah, the real curse is on the programmers who are going to be out of jobs much sooner than people anticipate. All the talk about the low quality of code got me thinking: if humans aren’t reading the code, then the only thing that matters is correctness. Correctness may be an easier problem to solve than readability and refactorability.
This seems like a gross simplification. We want factorable code because that helps with DRY. DRY code is more portable and the end product is smaller in size. Also, there's performance considerations.
I'll be surprised if there's a tool like copilot anytime soon that can identify need for memoization, for example, and implement it.
Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?
#10How does copilot fair in a language where correctness or at least well soundness is more transparent, for example Haskell (eg at least making sure all the types are correct, actual logic on the other hand seems harder, but maybe the declarative style helps)? I imagine in a less strict language you can generate garbage more easily.