9 ms·

Morally, I hope the FSF wins. Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their

Morally, I hope the FSF wins. Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids. The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!

lyptt 5y ago
I like the way you think
cblconfederate 5y ago
Nothing that another ANN can't solve. Humans need not program
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  I guess it's tongue-in-cheek. But you made me imagine the scenario for a movie : once humans start going down that rabbit hole, code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched.
  - stepbeek 5y ago
    Will machines even need clean code? The benefit to a human of clean code is readability. The all-coder will need no such luxuries.
    - worldsayshi 5y ago
      Clean code means fewer states to test to know if it's doing the right thing. Messy code should be more costly to analyze and test.
    - waterhouse 5y ago
      What happens when one all-coder needs to understand or debug another all-coder's code? The definition of "readable" may change, but I imagine there would still be ways of organizing the code that would make it easier or harder. The halting problem would seem to imply that, for any given all-coder, it's possible to obfuscate hard enough to frustrate that all-coder.
      - nonameiguess 5y ago
        Science. The universe has no source code for us to read, so we tinker and investigate, take our best guess, see if it holds up under the test cases we're capable of running, and update that guess whenever we encounter edge cases the last guess can't explain. We've gotten quite far without perfect understanding.
        waterhouse 5y ago
        I have a feeling that the distribution of complexity in the laws of the universe is likely to be very, very different from the distribution of complexity in code created by an extremely intelligent being (with machinelike memory) that isn't optimizing for simplicity.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Verifiability. I have no source for this, but on a basic level it makes sense that a clean implementation will be easier to verify over an ad hoc spaghetti code doing the same thing.
  - meowface 5y ago
    >code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched If one were to "decompile" an existing artificial neural network model, is this basically what it'd look like inside? Or is it too crude of an analogy / a category mistake?
  - notpachet 5y ago
    > no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched. I think many companies are already in that exact scenario.
    - bottled_poe 5y ago
      If I wasn’t laughing I’d be crying.
- nix23 5y ago
  >Humans need not program But how do you tell the machine what your problem is? It's just another abstraction, a bit like manual milling vs CAM.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    The machine decides your problem for you
    - nix23 5y ago
      Ah yeah the famous "Facebook Factor" ;)
moksly 5y ago
> The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative! Maybe, maybe not though. From the perspective of a non-tech enterprise organisation we’ve moved to more and more standardised software that is “good-enough” to avoid dealing with the delays, going over budget, not quite what we wanted and expensive support of specialised software companies. Office365 has basically replaced half our software suite, and while we do still by some extensions for them from 3rd party companies, Microsoft is simply getting more and more of our business by simply being good enough at a low enough cost. I’m not going down on some conspiracy path here by the way. If anything, Microsoft is simply using this project to get free research for their Azure Automation services that are currently taking over all the RPA business from their much more expensive competitors. This needs janitors, but not well paid ones.
- dangerface 5y ago
  Yes this happens all the time the client asks for the world but really just wanted an improvement. The client has a problem and asks us for a solution. We suggest a simple cost effective solution, client insists on custom software developed to their spec they have "perfected". Client lists all their nice to haves as must haves so they get their moneys worth, not realising I just charge more for more work. The software is delivered to spec, then the client realises that their spec doesn't work in the real world because they just assumed the best and forgot about edge cases. Non-tech companies just don't get tech, instead of seeing building software like building a house they view it more like a wizard does magic then a website appears.
maxwoj 5y ago
I fully agree, yet I see this tool as a mere prelude to a world where we, developers, we're gonna be obsolete. At first, the AI will produce some mess and fixing it would be lucrative. In the long run, the AI will create software based on paradigms we human couldn't understand. I'm in the industry since 20 years and gradually at the spare time I'm learning skills in house renovation. I think in the next 10-15 years I'll loose my job as software developer do to AI and will resort to some manual labor. Hoping I'd survive till retirement
- ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
  If your reality of not needing software developers comes true, so will the reality of robots will do all the manual labour. (Still learn to renovate as it is an awesome skill)
  - maxwoj 5y ago
    Of course the robots will take all the manual labor over. However, the machines will take IT jobs much faster. Most likely one or two decades sooner.
- xondono 5y ago
  I find that very unlikely. I think the result will be similar to what has happened to the electronics industry. For those who aren’t aware, PCB design used to be an automated task, done by software with minor tweaks. The thing is, complexity had a positive payoff, so soon we had trained technicians doing layout. Right now most PCB layout require so much technical knowledge most people working in layout are engineers with masters degree. Of course there’s also a lot of cheap electronics where complexity doesn’t payoff and cutting development cost it’s what matters, but it’s not most of the market. As long as you keep learning and improving, you are likely to see an increase of demand, not a decrease, although the job will be quite different.
  - testermelon 5y ago
    Now that you mention it. I have a Masters in electronics, and I did a lot of layouting in the last 3 years. Not that big or complicated, but it is becoming a significant portion of my engineering time. It is perceived to be cheaper to just do the layouting in house because our system is small and benefit from fast iteration.
CryZe 5y ago
Funnily enough I just used Copilot to write a reasonably huge PR (it did like 95% of the work), which was indeed mostly a copy paste job (the whole library is a SIMD library with lots of similarities between the different types and operations) and Copilot made zero mistakes when it didn't suggest something completely different whereas the human copy pasted code that was already in there had tons of mistakes that I noticed as I went through the library. So interestingly when it comes to code that is mostly copy paste, but requires some subtle changes here and there (based on the type and operation, ...), Copilot is much better at it than humans.
- harry8 5y ago
  That sounds like an ad. Funnily enough the only thing you can say is that you can copy and paste more successfully with copiolot than someone else who is unnamed and possibly unknown. The truth of it, whatever that may be will shake out.
- kangalioo 5y ago
  Interesting. Isn't that a good fit for macros though? Particularly for the future maintainers sake. With macros, future maintainers will only need to tweak macro invocations or macro bodies, instead of having to do a huge copy paste job all over again
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    possibly, I know in some industries you can't use macros due to security audits
  - asutekku 5y ago
    And then you have to waste couple of hours to do the macro which might or might not be used in the future.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Even when I have to look up all the weird syntax for a macro_rules! macro, they take like 10 minutes, tops. If you're taking much longer than that, you're probably trying something too ambitious: it should either be proper code generation (in Rust, a build script or proc macro) or a const fn, or a trait and proper generics. C's even easier; you just write the C code with parens around everything, then run it through cpp, then correct any divergences from the expected code. (It does take a bit longer, though, because the compiler waits until the last minute to shout at you if you make a syntax error.) I can see complicated C++ templates taking hours, but they're not really macros. (They're probably the correct tool for this, though.)
madeofpalk 5y ago
Morals/Ethics of code ownership aside, I think there's an interesting challenge there in developing a tool like Copilot but without developers falling into the blind "copy-paste" mode. I think there's utility there, but the execution isn't quite right with me for encouraging the right behaviours.
hippari 5y ago
I hope so, the pay rate for cleaning up per line of code better match per line of coke. Otherwise my sanity can't recharge.
Tenoke 5y ago
>Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. There's definitely other scenarios, like my preferred one of Copilot being legal itself but devs being responsible for using code generated from it, same as if they were using a more direct copy-paste or search tool.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  How could they, when they don't know the origin of the code? Copilot would have to provide them with all the licenses of all of the projects that went into producing that particular snippet of code, and I'm pretty sure that's impossible beyond just listing every license every time.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    Well, it's all from public repos that you can search and I imagine they can also include a tool that analyses how close to which repos the produced code is so you can check for yourself.
    - unparagoned 5y ago
      Knowing why and understanding how or why a machine learning algorithm did something is a much harder or just impossible.
meerita 5y ago
People said the same from GUI webtools, look where are we now. I think co-pilot works for some stages, cases, but for well established software projects we will be required a different extra.
- Agentlien 5y ago
  From someone who has never worked professionally with web development: where are we now? I tried my hand at Dreamweaver back in the day (approx. 2005) and didn't like what it generated. I've written a few pages manually (first when learning HTML ca 2004, then for a personal website in 2014) and it felt much nicer. I have made Windows applications with GUIs as part of my job and for that I've mainly used WPF written as a mix of XAML and C#, written by hand and inspected in the editor. There are graphical tools, but I've mostly found it more efficient to write what you mean directly. But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays?
  - machiaweliczny 5y ago
    By hand but there's a lot of ready-made components (React).
    - meerita 5y ago
      And developers use zillions of libraries too. In the end devs write less code.
  - 542458 5y ago
    Wix and Shopify are both multi billion dollar companies that give casual users access to websites that would previously require dedicated devs. This is done via elaborate WYSIWYG website editing. There used to be decent business in low-end web dev, banging out high volumes of simple websites and storefronts - but that market has been in large part taken over by WYSIWYG tools.
    - Jach 5y ago
      There's still decent business in sharecropping Wix/Shopify/Salesforce/etc. Very quickly companies find that the out of the box stuff doesn't do 100% of what they want, so they need to pay to get that last bit and develop custom components..which yeah, anyone can then drag onto the appropriate pages, instead of having to pay someone who happens to know how to FTP things onto a server.
goodpoint 5y ago
> The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates It's even worse. Copilot encourages boilerplate and poor abstraction by making it cheaper.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Exactly. As a freelancer, every time a client decides for a cheaper alternative, I make very clear I would be delighted to work with them in the future anyway. It rarely fails, one or more years later, the clients calls me back because their cheap alternative turned out to suck and be expensive eventually. Last month, a client from Luxembourg called after 6 years of total silence. They still had me in their listing. 3 years ago, one called me because 2 years prior, the 50k quote they rejected from me turned into a 400K bill from my competitor, and still no release yet. My rates have been steadily increasing for years thanks to this. Before, geeks were at a disadvantage because people didn't know better, and teams with a good marketing would destroy us. But now, they have been burned so many times. And it pays because more and more devs coming to the market are becoming dependent on their tooling. Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger. The HN bubbles tends to blind us to the reality of the corporate world. Yesterday I did a deployment, but was not allowed to touch the machine. Instead, they made me call a guy sharing a screen of a Vista machine, while he was sshing prod using cmd.exe, and I had to dictate him the instructions to debug the deployment on their custom linux setup. A near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers, pressing 30 times the up arrow to find a bash command in the history every time. He could click on WinSCP very well though. This 20 minutes job turned into an afternoon of billing. Though I suppose that's what I look like as a Python expert to an old timer from the 80s that can code in assembly, debug using strace and understand L1 cache :) People are scared we are going to get automatized by AI. I am preparing for the most lucrative decade I ever worked in.
- darkwater 5y ago
  > Near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers. Hey, I feel called out on this. I type with 2/3 fingers and I'm quite fast even if not like a full fledged 10 fingers typist. At my age I don't think I will ever learn typing with 10 fingers, but I think I don't need it either.
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    Have you ever taken the plunge though and really tried to go through with learning touch typing? You may not find it impossible after all. Then again typing isn’t really a huge bottleneck when it comes to coding.
edem 5y ago
I agree 100%. I can't wait to hear the cries of failing businesses because their no-code / low code developers can no longer understand how the system works. And while waiting I'm broadening my knowledge into the field of devops too, so I can understand the whole stack from top to bottom. That being said, if you are a reasonably skilled coder, Copilot can help you __a lot__. I've started using it a few weeks ago and it typed __a lot__ for me. The sheer amount of time I don't have to spend typing amounts to hours / week once you get up to speed with the tech.
deltasixeight 5y ago
This is a stepping stone for replacing developers all together. Conceptually that is the overall goal.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
This is like a dentist giving out extra sugary candy.
dangerface 5y ago
> Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids. It always amazes me how many people think in the future every one will know how to code, why? Every one has a car but not every one knows how to build a car, and why would they want to?

lyptt 5y ago

I like the way you think

cblconfederate 5y ago

Nothing that another ANN can't solve. Humans need not program

ArnoVW 5y ago
I guess it's tongue-in-cheek. But you made me imagine the scenario for a movie : once humans start going down that rabbit hole, code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched.
- stepbeek 5y ago
  Will machines even need clean code? The benefit to a human of clean code is readability. The all-coder will need no such luxuries.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    Clean code means fewer states to test to know if it's doing the right thing. Messy code should be more costly to analyze and test.
  - waterhouse 5y ago
    What happens when one all-coder needs to understand or debug another all-coder's code? The definition of "readable" may change, but I imagine there would still be ways of organizing the code that would make it easier or harder. The halting problem would seem to imply that, for any given all-coder, it's possible to obfuscate hard enough to frustrate that all-coder.
    - nonameiguess 5y ago
      Science. The universe has no source code for us to read, so we tinker and investigate, take our best guess, see if it holds up under the test cases we're capable of running, and update that guess whenever we encounter edge cases the last guess can't explain. We've gotten quite far without perfect understanding.
      - waterhouse 5y ago
        I have a feeling that the distribution of complexity in the laws of the universe is likely to be very, very different from the distribution of complexity in code created by an extremely intelligent being (with machinelike memory) that isn't optimizing for simplicity.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Verifiability. I have no source for this, but on a basic level it makes sense that a clean implementation will be easier to verify over an ad hoc spaghetti code doing the same thing.
- meowface 5y ago
  >code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched If one were to "decompile" an existing artificial neural network model, is this basically what it'd look like inside? Or is it too crude of an analogy / a category mistake?
- notpachet 5y ago
  > no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched. I think many companies are already in that exact scenario.
  - bottled_poe 5y ago
    If I wasn’t laughing I’d be crying.
nix23 5y ago
>Humans need not program But how do you tell the machine what your problem is? It's just another abstraction, a bit like manual milling vs CAM.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  The machine decides your problem for you
  - nix23 5y ago
    Ah yeah the famous "Facebook Factor" ;)

moksly 5y ago

> The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative! Maybe, maybe not though. From the perspective of a non-tech enterprise organisation we’ve moved to more and more standardised software that is “good-enough” to avoid dealing with the delays, going over budget, not quite what we wanted and expensive support of specialised software companies. Office365 has basically replaced half our software suite, and while we do still by some extensions for them from 3rd party companies, Microsoft is simply getting more and more of our business by simply being good enough at a low enough cost. I’m not going down on some conspiracy path here by the way. If anything, Microsoft is simply using this project to get free research for their Azure Automation services that are currently taking over all the RPA business from their much more expensive competitors. This needs janitors, but not well paid ones.

dangerface 5y ago
Yes this happens all the time the client asks for the world but really just wanted an improvement. The client has a problem and asks us for a solution. We suggest a simple cost effective solution, client insists on custom software developed to their spec they have "perfected". Client lists all their nice to haves as must haves so they get their moneys worth, not realising I just charge more for more work. The software is delivered to spec, then the client realises that their spec doesn't work in the real world because they just assumed the best and forgot about edge cases. Non-tech companies just don't get tech, instead of seeing building software like building a house they view it more like a wizard does magic then a website appears.

maxwoj 5y ago

I fully agree, yet I see this tool as a mere prelude to a world where we, developers, we're gonna be obsolete. At first, the AI will produce some mess and fixing it would be lucrative. In the long run, the AI will create software based on paradigms we human couldn't understand. I'm in the industry since 20 years and gradually at the spare time I'm learning skills in house renovation. I think in the next 10-15 years I'll loose my job as software developer do to AI and will resort to some manual labor. Hoping I'd survive till retirement

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
If your reality of not needing software developers comes true, so will the reality of robots will do all the manual labour. (Still learn to renovate as it is an awesome skill)
- maxwoj 5y ago
  Of course the robots will take all the manual labor over. However, the machines will take IT jobs much faster. Most likely one or two decades sooner.
xondono 5y ago
I find that very unlikely. I think the result will be similar to what has happened to the electronics industry. For those who aren’t aware, PCB design used to be an automated task, done by software with minor tweaks. The thing is, complexity had a positive payoff, so soon we had trained technicians doing layout. Right now most PCB layout require so much technical knowledge most people working in layout are engineers with masters degree. Of course there’s also a lot of cheap electronics where complexity doesn’t payoff and cutting development cost it’s what matters, but it’s not most of the market. As long as you keep learning and improving, you are likely to see an increase of demand, not a decrease, although the job will be quite different.
- testermelon 5y ago
  Now that you mention it. I have a Masters in electronics, and I did a lot of layouting in the last 3 years. Not that big or complicated, but it is becoming a significant portion of my engineering time. It is perceived to be cheaper to just do the layouting in house because our system is small and benefit from fast iteration.

CryZe 5y ago

Funnily enough I just used Copilot to write a reasonably huge PR (it did like 95% of the work), which was indeed mostly a copy paste job (the whole library is a SIMD library with lots of similarities between the different types and operations) and Copilot made zero mistakes when it didn't suggest something completely different whereas the human copy pasted code that was already in there had tons of mistakes that I noticed as I went through the library. So interestingly when it comes to code that is mostly copy paste, but requires some subtle changes here and there (based on the type and operation, ...), Copilot is much better at it than humans.

harry8 5y ago
That sounds like an ad. Funnily enough the only thing you can say is that you can copy and paste more successfully with copiolot than someone else who is unnamed and possibly unknown. The truth of it, whatever that may be will shake out.
kangalioo 5y ago
Interesting. Isn't that a good fit for macros though? Particularly for the future maintainers sake. With macros, future maintainers will only need to tweak macro invocations or macro bodies, instead of having to do a huge copy paste job all over again
- gmadsen 5y ago
  possibly, I know in some industries you can't use macros due to security audits
- asutekku 5y ago
  And then you have to waste couple of hours to do the macro which might or might not be used in the future.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Even when I have to look up all the weird syntax for a macro_rules! macro, they take like 10 minutes, tops. If you're taking much longer than that, you're probably trying something too ambitious: it should either be proper code generation (in Rust, a build script or proc macro) or a const fn, or a trait and proper generics. C's even easier; you just write the C code with parens around everything, then run it through cpp, then correct any divergences from the expected code. (It does take a bit longer, though, because the compiler waits until the last minute to shout at you if you make a syntax error.) I can see complicated C++ templates taking hours, but they're not really macros. (They're probably the correct tool for this, though.)

madeofpalk 5y ago

Morals/Ethics of code ownership aside, I think there's an interesting challenge there in developing a tool like Copilot but without developers falling into the blind "copy-paste" mode. I think there's utility there, but the execution isn't quite right with me for encouraging the right behaviours.

hippari 5y ago

I hope so, the pay rate for cleaning up per line of code better match per line of coke. Otherwise my sanity can't recharge.

Tenoke 5y ago

>Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. There's definitely other scenarios, like my preferred one of Copilot being legal itself but devs being responsible for using code generated from it, same as if they were using a more direct copy-paste or search tool.

wccrawford 5y ago
How could they, when they don't know the origin of the code? Copilot would have to provide them with all the licenses of all of the projects that went into producing that particular snippet of code, and I'm pretty sure that's impossible beyond just listing every license every time.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Well, it's all from public repos that you can search and I imagine they can also include a tool that analyses how close to which repos the produced code is so you can check for yourself.
  - unparagoned 5y ago
    Knowing why and understanding how or why a machine learning algorithm did something is a much harder or just impossible.

meerita 5y ago

People said the same from GUI webtools, look where are we now. I think co-pilot works for some stages, cases, but for well established software projects we will be required a different extra.

Agentlien 5y ago
From someone who has never worked professionally with web development: where are we now? I tried my hand at Dreamweaver back in the day (approx. 2005) and didn't like what it generated. I've written a few pages manually (first when learning HTML ca 2004, then for a personal website in 2014) and it felt much nicer. I have made Windows applications with GUIs as part of my job and for that I've mainly used WPF written as a mix of XAML and C#, written by hand and inspected in the editor. There are graphical tools, but I've mostly found it more efficient to write what you mean directly. But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays?
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  By hand but there's a lot of ready-made components (React).
  - meerita 5y ago
    And developers use zillions of libraries too. In the end devs write less code.
- 542458 5y ago
  Wix and Shopify are both multi billion dollar companies that give casual users access to websites that would previously require dedicated devs. This is done via elaborate WYSIWYG website editing. There used to be decent business in low-end web dev, banging out high volumes of simple websites and storefronts - but that market has been in large part taken over by WYSIWYG tools.
  - Jach 5y ago
    There's still decent business in sharecropping Wix/Shopify/Salesforce/etc. Very quickly companies find that the out of the box stuff doesn't do 100% of what they want, so they need to pay to get that last bit and develop custom components..which yeah, anyone can then drag onto the appropriate pages, instead of having to pay someone who happens to know how to FTP things onto a server.

goodpoint 5y ago

> The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates It's even worse. Copilot encourages boilerplate and poor abstraction by making it cheaper.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Exactly. As a freelancer, every time a client decides for a cheaper alternative, I make very clear I would be delighted to work with them in the future anyway. It rarely fails, one or more years later, the clients calls me back because their cheap alternative turned out to suck and be expensive eventually. Last month, a client from Luxembourg called after 6 years of total silence. They still had me in their listing. 3 years ago, one called me because 2 years prior, the 50k quote they rejected from me turned into a 400K bill from my competitor, and still no release yet. My rates have been steadily increasing for years thanks to this. Before, geeks were at a disadvantage because people didn't know better, and teams with a good marketing would destroy us. But now, they have been burned so many times. And it pays because more and more devs coming to the market are becoming dependent on their tooling. Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger. The HN bubbles tends to blind us to the reality of the corporate world. Yesterday I did a deployment, but was not allowed to touch the machine. Instead, they made me call a guy sharing a screen of a Vista machine, while he was sshing prod using cmd.exe, and I had to dictate him the instructions to debug the deployment on their custom linux setup. A near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers, pressing 30 times the up arrow to find a bash command in the history every time. He could click on WinSCP very well though. This 20 minutes job turned into an afternoon of billing. Though I suppose that's what I look like as a Python expert to an old timer from the 80s that can code in assembly, debug using strace and understand L1 cache :) People are scared we are going to get automatized by AI. I am preparing for the most lucrative decade I ever worked in.

darkwater 5y ago
> Near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers. Hey, I feel called out on this. I type with 2/3 fingers and I'm quite fast even if not like a full fledged 10 fingers typist. At my age I don't think I will ever learn typing with 10 fingers, but I think I don't need it either.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  Have you ever taken the plunge though and really tried to go through with learning touch typing? You may not find it impossible after all. Then again typing isn’t really a huge bottleneck when it comes to coding.

edem 5y ago

I agree 100%. I can't wait to hear the cries of failing businesses because their no-code / low code developers can no longer understand how the system works. And while waiting I'm broadening my knowledge into the field of devops too, so I can understand the whole stack from top to bottom. That being said, if you are a reasonably skilled coder, Copilot can help you __a lot__. I've started using it a few weeks ago and it typed __a lot__ for me. The sheer amount of time I don't have to spend typing amounts to hours / week once you get up to speed with the tech.

deltasixeight 5y ago

This is a stepping stone for replacing developers all together. Conceptually that is the overall goal.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

This is like a dentist giving out extra sugary candy.

dangerface 5y ago

> Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids. It always amazes me how many people think in the future every one will know how to code, why? Every one has a car but not every one knows how to build a car, and why would they want to?