Hey DEV.to community!
It's been a while since I've written on DEV.to but here I am again :)
GitHub Copilot is one of the most discussed matters in programming universe nowadays and I've finally got my hands on it.
During the time I've spent testing this awesome miracle I've thought about many things simultaneously and once I was thinking straight again I got frightened. It is a strange feeling how much programming has evolved since the days I've begun to program, how much the tools advanced, how much the frameworks and libraries became more efficient and made programming more enjoyable and easier. But then comes this revolutionary revolution! I know there were other AI code assistants before GitHub's Copilot but this one is really something else.
Imagine how computers are made. They are just from simple material (exaggerating a bit :)) and yet they can do so much work that living without them or even thinking about living without them for humanity is considered almost impossible. From bare zeroes and ones to assembly languages and so on we are here working with high-level languages such as JS and Python. These languages were made for many purposes but most important of them can be being easier to write and getting things done faster by not thinking much about code, compared to low-level languages, but thinking more about the approach and the need. Yet, with all these ease, humanity was still searching for a way to make it easier! Here comes AI to help us code, which itself is a code indeed! A programmer helping programmers write code by their code. That just sounds crazy.
For more than a decade we've been asked that is it possible to describe something and then computers do it for us and write the code to do so for us? I always answered yes but deep inside my mind it was almost like a dream and here we are now. The dream came !false.
Thinking about how things are working is easy compared to actually engineering them. With Copilot it is a strange feeling. It almost seems like you have someone by your side telling you how to do things. If you are stuck with this thought it is good for you. But realizing that, that somebody isn't real and is just a piece of code makes me crazy and frightened.
I don't know how we've reached this point but I'm both happy and scared in this situation. It is awesome and awful at the same time. There are dozens of pairs of adjectives that are antonyms and I can use them here.
From now on, there will be new questions and new challenges for developers around the world such as "Why should we pay you to do something that a robot can do?", "Out company decided to ban Copilot because of something." and so on. Are they wrong or right? It depends on many situations. Is Copilot actually safe? Is our code safe in GitHub?
Moving on, there are some serious problems. New programmers won't be able to learn properly if they use Copilot consistently to write their code for them and the average quality of code will decrease tremendously just as frameworks and libraries impacted the learning path for new joiners.
I am not saying that Copilot is bad, it is just like a knife. Can be used for cooking or hurting!
I believe Copilot is going to make development faster but at the cost of real understanding of algorithms and techniques used in development. I am not scared of job opportunities fading away (which won't :)) like many people would ask, I am just afraid of the path that development stepped in which looks like a very dark one.
I've seen many videos on the internet discussing about the security of Copilot which seems suggested many peoples private keys and many other things. I know that storing such things is not a good practice but that's how people do it anyway sometimes. This brings a huge problem about the safety of data on GitHub.
What do you think about GitHub's Copilot?
BTW! Check out my free Node.js Essentials E-book here:
Oldest comments (3)
As a learning Dev. I have been having the concern that; What is going to happen by the time I,m ready to get to work and then there is no more work available. I think that is the biggest worry for most people.
But you say not to worry ?
Please State your reasons.
As per the pic of the little DEV skipping steps. How would you elaborate on that one ? Is it wise or not ?
I have been learning HTML CSS and JS what is your view.
It's scary in the sense that they let you pay a subscription for it and it's total shit.
Lol, I'm 13 years in the field and never saw a more scrawny fad.
Maybe Copilot X will blow my mind and be something that will actually change the way I work, but for now Copilot is a tool for junior dev to learn to type some basic code fast. I tried in both VS Code and Visual Studio 2022 and it was a dumpster fire. It coulnd't figure out simple functions based on other classes and it was inventing from scratch most of the code and it did that even when I have gone in greath lengths explaining him what to do as almost I'm teaching to a junior dev how to write that function and giving him code samples.
Result?
It got it all wrong and invented a baffling quantity of fields in the base classes that didn't exist and populated them with invented fields from another data source.
Basically it couldn't figure correctly even how to map 2 basic C# classes.
Lol, you want an advice, get on the train when this stuff is mature and not now. You will be a guinea pig like me and you also get squeezed out some money.
The most scary thing we saw about copilot is that even at the date I'm writing, which is almost 2 years after this post, copilot is still utter trash
Awesome stuff. Its a relief.... wheeew !!!!
So far so good!!!
It is unfortunate you had to pay for it.
I am sorry for your experience. But you can imagine that most of us have been learning for a while and are scared that at some point the A.I is gonna get to terminator level and we are gonna be redundant and useless before we can even start getting work and being productive and getting paid for it.
Your paying for it is not in vain. Do more experiments and videos and review it and put it on youtube. And maybe you can get your monies back.
Make it worthwhile for another children.
Maybe you can even ask them for a refund.
But all in all thanx and sorry for your experience.