By Darryl K. Taft
Pushback on the Technology
However, as with any not-yet-fully-baked technology (it is in tech preview after all), contrarians are poking holes at GitHub Copilot. Some are calling it old wine in new bottles, and others are saying it’s the beginning of the end to mass employment for programmers.
Copilot is neither old wine in new bottles nor the end of human programming, Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at Intellyx, told me. It is more the next generation of autocomplete.
“In my opinion, the most interesting thing about Copilot is that it typically generates original code — that is, code that is not represented verbatim in the training data,” he said. “People have to remember, however, that it is entirely unable to write creative code. Creativity — for now — is still in the hands of humans. So, is using Copilot pair programming? Only if you don’t mind that one of the two programmers isn’t creative.”
