So, you can at least make a theoretical argument for why self-driving cars can do a better job than humans: they are always alert and paying attention, and the

So, you can at least make a theoretical argument for why self-driving cars can do a better job than humans: they are always alert and paying attention, and the set of things they're trying to accomplish are concrete, can reasonably be presumed a priori and baked into themodel, and are reasonably well specified so that we hopefully don't need hard AI to be successful. By contrast, Copilot doesn't necessarily have any idea what you're trying to do. So it can, to an approximation, pattern match on what you've already written, and spit out valid code that is "inspired" by things it's seen in the past. But it doesn't actually know what you're trying to do. It doesn't know what your acceptance criteria are, or what invariants you're trying to maintain, or anything like that. And, at least in the places I've worked, most the interesting bugs (by which I mean, the ones that managed to cause trouble in production) happen when the programmer writing the code didn't have a firm idea of what they were trying to do. So, that's what worries me - I would fear that the spots where Copilot can't even theoretically be expected to do a good job happens to be exactly the kind of things for which people would tend to rely on it the most. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic? But that's kind of my job - I work in an area where "move fast and break things" is pretty antithetical. But it would still be a lot more compelling to me if I could see a paper demonstrating that a team using Copilot has fewer production defects than a team that's doing exactly the same work but without Copilot. Or alternatively, if it were repackaged as something that's a bit like a smarter version of IDE refactorings. "Hey, it looks like you're about to spit out a big old mess of boilerplate. Let us get that for you." Or, "Hey, some functions you called can fail, how about I go ahead and suggest a catch block so you don't forget to write one?" Basically, give me something that's a bit more smart cruise control and a bit less Autopilot.