Technologies like Copilot tell us two things:
1. How good AI is getting at reproducing and, in some way, abstracting patterns from a big corpus. GPT-3 and Copilot are stunning examples.
2. How much repetitive and empty of creativity most programming tasks are.
1. How good AI is getting at reproducing and, in some way, abstracting patterns from a big corpus. GPT-3 and Copilot are stunning examples.
2. How much repetitive and empty of creativity most programming tasks are.
Because while spectacular, Copilot has nothing to do with solving tasks; it's just producing obvious boilerplate stuff for us: things that humans need to write following certain API specifications, googling for the missing bits from StackOverflow pages.
Like certain manual jobs, that should be executed by humans only for fun, and not 8 hours per 5 days to pay the bills (and I hope they will get fully automated soon), something similar is happening with programming.
Many of us are no longer, for most part, following the steps of Wozniak writing the floating point math routines for the 6502. Funny example, right? But I think it is one that clearly shows what I mean: creativity, skills, craftsmanship.
Every task Copilot can do for you is a task that should NOT be part of modern programming, and a signal that our industry is broken and that programmers are the new blue collars.
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