By Inapps.net
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.”
Stephen O’Grady, another RedMonk analyst agreed, noting that Copilot is indeed the natural evolution of code generation. First, the GitHub team started with syntax autocomplete, moved on to code completion, and now to AI-based generative solutions trained on enormous bodies of public code, he noted.
“While it is, according to the outsized public reaction to it at least, a big deal, Copilot is very far — in my opinion — from the beginning of the end for programming jobs,” O’Grady told me. “It can only work off what’s existing — novel solutions will still require people.”
Indeed, much like Ruby on Rails once made developers more efficient by automatically generating a lot of boilerplate scaffolding from web projects, Copilot should save developers time by reducing or eliminating their ability to reimplement basic building block features, which in turn helps them move more quickly, O’Grady said.
