I love writing code to make things: apps, websites, charts, and evenmusic.
Its a skill Ive worked hard at for more than 20 years.
Copilot, which spits out code to order based on plain English descriptions, is a remarkable tool.
But is it about to put coders like me out of a job?
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Thats a lot ofifs andfors andprint(“hello world”)statements.
Copilot produces code from instructions in plain English (the pale blue text).
Based on theCodex language model, Copilot is the next step in a long line of intelligent auto-completion tools.
However, these have been far more limited in the past.
Copilot is a significant improvement.
However, were still alongway from Hey Siri, make me a million dollar iPhone app.
To understand the level Copilot is working at, imagine writing an essay.
You cant just throw the essay question at it and expect it to produce a useful, well-argued piece.
Depending on the bang out of coding Im doing, this can sometimes be a huge time- and brainpower-saver.
Biases and bugs
There are some open questions with these sorts of AI coding helper tools.
And will Copilot itself be able to suggest new and better ways to write code and build software?
We have seen AI systemsinnovatebefore.
Sometimes its trivial to see that Copilot has misunderstood my input.
Those are the easy cases, and the tool makes it easy to ask for a different suggestion.
The trickier cases are where the code looks right, but it may contain a subtle bug.
Another concern ispotential issuesabout licensing and ownership of the code Copilot was trained on.
The human coder is still a crucial part of the system, but as curator rather than creator.
Of course, you may be thinking thats what a coderwouldsay … and you may be right.
Copilot shows some of us in the tech industry are in the same boat.
Still, Im (cautiously) excited.
