GitHub Copilot — Crash, Boom, Bang!
I tried it, it’s not for you, and I have some very strong opinions on why that is…
Seriously. I cannot make heads or tails of this any more. Software developers all over the world write downright religious documents about clean code, software development paradigms, argue about the validity of an if statement and maps over for loops. Entire forests’ worth of books about virtually anything and everything to make writing code better, more efficient, easier to read, more accessible, more secure, etc. In fact, coding has now become a more popular term than programming, and yet, somehow, every year someone comes up with a project to automate coding.
This year isn’t any exception, either. This time, however, it’s not your average garden-variety WYSIWYG tool. Before you sigh with relief, hang on to it for a hot second, because this is even “better”. It’s an AI coding copilot developed by “every developer’s best friend”, Microsoft. Well, GitHub, but they’re owned by Microsoft now. It’s very intuitively called GitHub Copilot. I signed up for it as early as I could. Partially because I was curious what AI can code, but also because with that curiosity also came skepticism.
I always look at AI having a 50–50 chance of either becoming a tool or a…
