Indeed, I was quite sceptical of all of this until I actually tried Co-pilot. Sure you can characterise it as “just autocomplete” but that autocomplete has saved me a bunch of typing and thinking.
Typing is pretty easy and not the bottleneck of software development. That's why readable variables are better than abbreviations.
Judicious use of abstractions helps with that as well.
I think where things like copilot might shine is being a JIT educator of coding practices but they should be part of your thinking process and not replace it.
The risk with over relying on crutches is substituting the knowledge and intentionality of development.
There's a balance, and one that needs to be sought.
I'm not sceptical about the power, but I am about the claims of people who want to cash in or simply say "it's awesome" and allow no discussion. That means that you get to detail projects trying to use GPT models as some sort of authority that doesnt need to justify why it's better than some alternative. If you argue against it you're "not seeing the opportunity".
It's not a new battle, fighting hype and separating the actual capabilities of a tech and the lies or misconceptions. It's hard to get people to see short Vs long term.
The other day I let it autocomplete methods in a public interface and it was literally ideating feature ideas for me.
Sure there’s overblown hype but there is also real value here.
I'll try it for the sake of this conversation but I think it still doesn't change my point about being intentional and thinking.
I'd like to see examples of those tests. After many years of software development and seeing how many people produce buggy services that create a lot of maintenance burden or simply solve the wrong problem, I firmly believe writing is a minuscule part of the day and it's mostly about thinking enough and communicating well with the human interfaces of your project.
Writing is easy. You can get fast with touch typing or autocomplete features (including the copilot one) but that's not the most important thing.
Knowing why you do something and being able to analyze that decision after a period of time and evaluate how "right" it was, is not something that can be done for you.
For quick brainstorming it can be great but we should be careful with the authority we assign it to, when we can't really explain its thought process
Actually no. I have a limited lifespan of which I've already burned half and have to spend at least another 1/3rd of the remaining lifespan sleeping. Not even counting making money to feed and shelter myself.
GPT is already a better translator than I'll ever be in far more languages then I'll ever know. To get better than GPT at any one of these things will require a massive amount of dedicated time for me to do so. It is already superhuman in this sense with capabilities well past all but the most unique translators.
This is the story of John Henry again. Yea, humans are still exceptional and can beat the machine at things, especially if they've had any training in doing so, but we're not sticking with the same steam-powered hammer, we're spending billions on building newer, bigger, faster ones. More and more of humanity will fall behind the machine every day.
Tongue in cheek of course, but if you think like that, nothing is "worth" doing - why learn languages, why run, why climb a mountain...