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This. If copilot suggests anything more than basic syntax or boilerplate I don’t use it. If it writes code I don’t understand or wouldn’t be able to write mysel

This. If copilot suggests anything more than basic syntax or boilerplate I don’t use it. If it writes code I don’t understand or wouldn’t be able to write myself I won’t use it. Why? Because at the end of the day it’s my code. In what world is a good engineer submitting a PR for coworkers to look over that isn’t their code? If this is a real issue the solution is not banning yet another tool. It’s education. Teaching engineers how to properly understand code attribution and licenses.

echelon 4y ago
Do you think we'll be writing software 200 years from now? 50? 25? I'll bet the people spinning cotton thought that would endure forever. (Sorry if my tone comes across as fervent. I'm excited to be displaced by this, because what follows is the stuff of dreams.)
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Whenever I watch Geordi and Data doing something in engineering, they’re often talking to the computer about constructing models and sims and such. To me this is the most ultimate form of declarative programming. Not that we will all be talking it out, but that we will explain in natural language what we’re after. It maximizes how much time we spend in the “problem understanding/solving” phase and minimizes the tedium of actually setting up the apparatus.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  The invention of the cotton gin simply moved people from spinning cotton to picking cotton. And increased demand for slaves. I'm not excited to be displaced personally, but I'm also not really worried about being displaced. If displacement is inevitable, I don't see how the average programmer is going to leverage this for the "stuff of dreams". Usually, tech advancements result in a greater consolidation of wealth into the hands of those that already own capital. Recent tech is no exception. Yes, there has been a lot of wealth created for regular people, but we're still working 40+ hour weeks, and earnings have not matched the increase in productivity. What I am concerned about is that our field is becoming increasingly arcane magic for the younger generations, especially the masses that are being completely and utterly failed by the education system.
  - bravetraveler 4y ago
    I apologize ahead of time for rambling, but I'm with you on this! In my coworkers and many of the applicants we see, there's a trend of over optimization. The common meme is the 'leet code' interview process. I suppose the best way I can convey this is... I think there's hyper focus on the mechanics of doing things. Making people not afraid of the code, unaware of the world around it Abandoning a lot of thought for process. Or even the physical systems it runs on. I recently learned about the term 'mechanical sympathy' Sometimes it's important to ask if you need the code or system at all! I know it's not fair to people but I groan any time I see a CS degree
- tines 4y ago
  I mean, yes? People will be doing math as long as there are people around to do it. It'll look different, sure. But there will always be problems, and math/programming is problem solving par excellence.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ben_w 4y ago
  Between 2016 and 2021, I've been of the opinion that I cannot make any reasonable forecast of even vague large-scale social/technological/economic development past 2030, because the trends in technology go all funky around then. Thanks to recent developments in AI (textual and visual), I no longer feel confident predicting any of those things past about the beginning of 2028. It's not a singularity, it's an event horizon: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singularity-but-an-event-horizon/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singu...
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  These assisted coding systems are tremendously exciting but they are only the analogue of moving from a shovel to a powered excavator; it still needs a trained individual who knows what the final result needs to look like to a fairly high technical level to be effective. So, yes, 25-50 years from now humans will still be be the principal element in writing software.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  I don't see a world where programming isn't the last thing to go. We pretty much have a general intelligence when a "programmer" is no longer needed. That doesn't mean programming will look anything like it does today in 200 years but will the profession, doing kinda the sameish thing, still exist? Absolutely!
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    It's interesting to think about. If programming can be automated away, then you can use that automation to automate away any job in the world that can be automated.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  Yeah, in the future there will be only AIs developing apps and AIs using apps. There won't be apps, actually, they'll do everything programmatically. And all humans would have been killed by then in an AI doom.
tevon 4y ago
Yes! Exactly. The article suggests that he wants to know "who wrote the code" if a senior dev he trusts submits a PR. He doesn't want to be surprised that "the AI" wrote some of this code. But its ALL written by the senior dev. If he trusts that dev, that means that dev has thoroughly read and tested his code! That's the important bit. Remembering proper syntax/imports/nesting levels is the tiniest piece of writing good code. And copilot can take that off our hands.
- falcolas 4y ago
  That's like saying that code copy/pasted from OSS projects on github was "written by the developer". Which is not true. The speed of your developer and the correctness and test coverage of your code doesn't matter when it comes to license compliance. And license compliance could cost your company 100x (if not more) the value of your best software developer - especially for the non-OSS licenses.
  - iceburgcrm 4y ago
    It was written by the developer. If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it. Whether I have the copyright to make money off of it or whether it is trademarked are different things. You could state they are not the first to write this which would be more correct.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      GitHub Copilot has been concretely demonstrated to emit significant chunks of OSS licensed code. Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it. EDIT: > If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it. Not from a copyright point of view. The rights to those lyrics belong to the songwriter. It's kinda like photographs. You don't automatically have the right to distribute a photograph of yourself that was taken by someone else.
viraptor 4y ago
> If it writes code I don’t understand or wouldn’t be able to write myself For me the bar is higher - it's not that I wouldn't understand it, it's that its easier to miss mistakes when reviewing than when writing from scratch. In the same way you may have ignored the typo in this comment and understood what I meant regardless of the mistake. But that doesn't work for programming - a mistake is a mistake and likely matters in edge cases even if it's not immediately obvious.

echelon 4y ago

Do you think we'll be writing software 200 years from now? 50? 25? I'll bet the people spinning cotton thought that would endure forever. (Sorry if my tone comes across as fervent. I'm excited to be displaced by this, because what follows is the stuff of dreams.)

Waterluvian 4y ago
Whenever I watch Geordi and Data doing something in engineering, they’re often talking to the computer about constructing models and sims and such. To me this is the most ultimate form of declarative programming. Not that we will all be talking it out, but that we will explain in natural language what we’re after. It maximizes how much time we spend in the “problem understanding/solving” phase and minimizes the tedium of actually setting up the apparatus.
yonaguska 4y ago
The invention of the cotton gin simply moved people from spinning cotton to picking cotton. And increased demand for slaves. I'm not excited to be displaced personally, but I'm also not really worried about being displaced. If displacement is inevitable, I don't see how the average programmer is going to leverage this for the "stuff of dreams". Usually, tech advancements result in a greater consolidation of wealth into the hands of those that already own capital. Recent tech is no exception. Yes, there has been a lot of wealth created for regular people, but we're still working 40+ hour weeks, and earnings have not matched the increase in productivity. What I am concerned about is that our field is becoming increasingly arcane magic for the younger generations, especially the masses that are being completely and utterly failed by the education system.
- bravetraveler 4y ago
  I apologize ahead of time for rambling, but I'm with you on this! In my coworkers and many of the applicants we see, there's a trend of over optimization. The common meme is the 'leet code' interview process. I suppose the best way I can convey this is... I think there's hyper focus on the mechanics of doing things. Making people not afraid of the code, unaware of the world around it Abandoning a lot of thought for process. Or even the physical systems it runs on. I recently learned about the term 'mechanical sympathy' Sometimes it's important to ask if you need the code or system at all! I know it's not fair to people but I groan any time I see a CS degree
tines 4y ago
I mean, yes? People will be doing math as long as there are people around to do it. It'll look different, sure. But there will always be problems, and math/programming is problem solving par excellence.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ben_w 4y ago
Between 2016 and 2021, I've been of the opinion that I cannot make any reasonable forecast of even vague large-scale social/technological/economic development past 2030, because the trends in technology go all funky around then. Thanks to recent developments in AI (textual and visual), I no longer feel confident predicting any of those things past about the beginning of 2028. It's not a singularity, it's an event horizon: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singularity-but-an-event-horizon/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singu...
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
These assisted coding systems are tremendously exciting but they are only the analogue of moving from a shovel to a powered excavator; it still needs a trained individual who knows what the final result needs to look like to a fairly high technical level to be effective. So, yes, 25-50 years from now humans will still be be the principal element in writing software.
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
I don't see a world where programming isn't the last thing to go. We pretty much have a general intelligence when a "programmer" is no longer needed. That doesn't mean programming will look anything like it does today in 200 years but will the profession, doing kinda the sameish thing, still exist? Absolutely!
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  It's interesting to think about. If programming can be automated away, then you can use that automation to automate away any job in the world that can be automated.
rmbyrro 4y ago
Yeah, in the future there will be only AIs developing apps and AIs using apps. There won't be apps, actually, they'll do everything programmatically. And all humans would have been killed by then in an AI doom.

tevon 4y ago

Yes! Exactly. The article suggests that he wants to know "who wrote the code" if a senior dev he trusts submits a PR. He doesn't want to be surprised that "the AI" wrote some of this code. But its ALL written by the senior dev. If he trusts that dev, that means that dev has thoroughly read and tested his code! That's the important bit. Remembering proper syntax/imports/nesting levels is the tiniest piece of writing good code. And copilot can take that off our hands.

falcolas 4y ago
That's like saying that code copy/pasted from OSS projects on github was "written by the developer". Which is not true. The speed of your developer and the correctness and test coverage of your code doesn't matter when it comes to license compliance. And license compliance could cost your company 100x (if not more) the value of your best software developer - especially for the non-OSS licenses.
- iceburgcrm 4y ago
  It was written by the developer. If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it. Whether I have the copyright to make money off of it or whether it is trademarked are different things. You could state they are not the first to write this which would be more correct.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    GitHub Copilot has been concretely demonstrated to emit significant chunks of OSS licensed code. Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it. EDIT: > If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it. Not from a copyright point of view. The rights to those lyrics belong to the songwriter. It's kinda like photographs. You don't automatically have the right to distribute a photograph of yourself that was taken by someone else.

viraptor 4y ago

> If it writes code I don’t understand or wouldn’t be able to write myself For me the bar is higher - it's not that I wouldn't understand it, it's that its easier to miss mistakes when reviewing than when writing from scratch. In the same way you may have ignored the typo in this comment and understood what I meant regardless of the mistake. But that doesn't work for programming - a mistake is a mistake and likely matters in edge cases even if it's not immediately obvious.