GitHub Copilot: Your AI Pair Programmer

Dupe, see main discussion at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266

After seeing the demos my biggest question is: how will this not lead to people just accepting whatever GitHub Copilot suggests while introducing subtle yet catastrophic errors? Basically, how is this not going to become an alternative to just copy-pasting StackOverflow answers without verification? Especially given the IDE integration…

And to at least partially answer my own question, straight form the FAQ:

> Can GitHub Copilot introduce insecure code in its suggestions?

> There’s a lot of public code in the world with insecure coding patterns, bugs, or references to outdated APIs or idioms. When GitHub Copilot synthesizes code suggestions based on this data, it can also synthesize code that contains these undesirable patterns. This is something we care a lot about at GitHub, and in recent years we’ve provided tools such as Actions, Dependabot, and CodeQL to open source projects to help improve code quality. Similarly, as GitHub Copilot improves, we will work to exclude insecure or low-quality code from the training set. Of course, you should always use GitHub Copilot together with testing practices and security tools, as well as your own judgment.

Basically, they seem to hope that people will either be really careful about the suggested code or have existing code analysis workflows that would catch errors

Other discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266

I'm being a little facetious here because the fact Copilot can generate something that I can complain about is truly amazing, but the suggested code for the 'calculate days between two dates' example is really horrible. It's going to go quite wrong any time the two dates cross a Daylight Savings Time boundary, or if the Date objects are using two different timezones, or if either date isn't a Date, etc.

    function calculateDaysBetweenDates(date1, date2) {
      var oneDay = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
      var date1InMillis = date1.getTime();
      var date2InMillis = date2.getTime();
      var days = Math.round(Math.abs(date2InMillis - date1InMillis) / oneDay);
      return days;
    }

It's definitely as good as the code I was writing for the first few years of my career though, and I can see that it could improve significantly with more data. I'm absolutely looking forward to seeing where it goes.

> Code confidently in unfamiliar territory

Hmm... this looks like it could be a useful tool but I'm wary of its use devolving into an all-purpose hammer.

This looks cool but also feels like the wrong way to reuse code. It is a form of automated intelligent copy pasting. Good code reuse is done by using nicely packaged libraries, not by duplicating code across projects.

I would be interested in trying this but I use Sublime Text and Sublime Merge.

So it seems like we'll have to change what we do from writing code to reading code and fixing it..