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Comment by throwaway675309 | Hacker News Reader

"Notably, Microsoft doesn’t claim that any of the code Copilot produces is correct. That’s still your problem. Thus, Copilot essentially tasks you with correcting a 12-year-old’s homework, over and over. (I have no idea how this is preferable to just doing the homework yourself.)"

Sidestepping the whole license violation issue, using GitHub copilot is the equivalent of using an IME to type Chinese - I may not remember exactly how to write the character but I'll quickly recognize it when I see it. It's the difference between being able to write traditional Chinese versus the ability to read the characters.

Anytime that I don't have to context switch and alt tab to look something up on MSDN or in Stack overflow is an absolute freakin win for me as a developer.

It kills me that people can't seem to comprehend this.

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>It kills me that people can't seem to comprehend this.

because it's not a good comparison. Code is not language because language need not be syntactically correct, and people generally can infer correct semantics even from badly mangled communication.

These automated coding solutions generate syntactical and semantic errors that another machine will not understand, and even more importantly, it generates kinds of errors that people are not accustomed to.

Copilot is more like an automated car that goes off into random directions in ways that even human drivers would not, and you never know when. And when humans have to interact with black boxes whose behavior they cannot anticipate, small errors are not merely small errors, they create significant tension and uncertainty that requires almost constant attention.

I found that the code copilot generated was so close to correct that my skim reading saw it as correct but it usually wrong in the smallest details with mistakes I’d never make myself.

That’s more just a product usefulness complaint rather than any kind of ethics. If it’s working for others, that’s good.

Yeah, maybe for 10x types it’s different but for normies like me checking code is 10x faster than writing it.

Especially when 90% of code is either glue or boilerplate, and having something semi-intelligently suggest which API calls to use and how to structure a call to them will save you most of the time you'd otherwise have to spend dredging through documentation and/or stackoverflow.

One of the hardest things to come to terms with as a budding young software dev is that most real world code is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle, and the occasions where it's harmless (let alone actually helpful) to be clever are few and far between.

it's basically just an example of dan luu's developer velocity article.

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