I also agree that I’d never assume copilot is right when it blurts out code, and that “writing code” is not the hard part — but I’d note three things I found from using copilot pretty intensively over the past year or so:
1. It has shifted some of the code-writing I do from generation to curation.
Most of the time, I have to make some small change to one of the first options I get. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I get some cool idiomatic way of doing something that’s still wrong, but inspires me to write something different than I originally planned. All of these are useful outcomes — and unrelated to whether someone is “actually thinking about what they’re writing”.
2. It has changed my tolerance for writing redundant code, for the better.
Like many programmers, I tend to optimize my code for readability first, and then other things later when I have more information. Sometimes, my desire for readability conflicts with my desire for code that avoids redundancy (e.g., “oh but if I put these three cases into an array I can just use a for loop and don’t have to write out as much code” etc. etc.) — and my old bias was avoiding redundancy more often than not. But copilot is really great at generating code that has redundancy, which has often helped me write more readable code in quite a few cases.
3. I refactor code way more now.
In part this is because, given code that already works but is not ideal (e.g., needs to be broken into more functions, or needs extra context, or some critical piece needs to be abstracted), copilot does a fantastic job at rewriting that code to fit new function prototypes or templates. IDEs can help with this task, for a few common types of refactoring, but copilot is way more flexible and I find myself much more willing to rewrite code because of it.
Copilot is not what many people want it to be, in much the same way that Tesla’s Autopilot is not what many people want it to be. But both do have their uses, and in general those uses fall into the category of “I, as human, get to watch and correct some things instead of having to generate all things.” This can be very useful. (FWIW, it takes some time to adapt to this; I teach and mentor a lot and I found myself relying on those skills a ton when working with copilot.)
We shouldn’t discount this usefulness just because these systems don’t also have other usefulness that we also want!