Link to original article: https://gabriellazcano.com/blog/my-thoughts-on-github-copilot/
There has been a lot of controversy and I should say fear since the announcement of Github Copilot. The common concerns are that it’s going to take jobs from programmers or that it’s going to make a generation of coders that don’t know how to code and solve problems.
Regarding the first point, I don’t actually think it’s going to take jobs from established programmers but that it will make junior programmers' life harder. As the most basic things are being automatized they will have learn much more than before to make a living of programming. We are seeing this trend with tools like webflow for creating landing pages and other simple applications instead of requiring a junior programmer for that matter.
Returning to my first idea, automatization helps more senior developers with more mundane and repetitive tasks. This will make coding be faster, more effective and productive. And while Copilot seems to have really advanced capabilities, it seems to be lacking on using the context of your application as a whole, you will still be the one solving challenges. Solving challenges is why you are required and how you do it is secondary.
I believe Copilot is a more advanced alternative of what we have now, Stackoverflow. We are so accostumed to it that we don’t see that when we copy and paste code from Stackoverflow we are doing basically the same thing Copilot aspires to do but more effective, as I mentioned before. However, we don’t have to rely on either Stackoverflow or Copilot to do all the work for us. If you are a person that just copies code from other places and call it a day you must definetely be worried about Copilot taking your job but that is not certainly the case for most of us.
We have to stop fearing innovation and start embracing it, we humans have the same fears as thousands of years ago. Innovation could kill some jobs but create others, the first “computers” were people who were skilled with mathematics who were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations.
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