Comment by thejammahimself

2 years ago

> Github CoPilot? Great, now I have to perform the most mentally taxing part of developing software, namely understanding other people's code (or my own from 6 months ago...) while writing new code. I'm beyond thrilled ...

I think there's an argument to be made that AI is being used here to help you tackle the more trivial tasks so you have more time to focus on the more important, and challenging tasks. Albeit I recognise GitHub CoPilot is legally questionable.

But yes, I agree with your overall point that AI has still not been able to 'think' like a human but rather can only still pretend to think like a human, and history has shown that users are often fooled by this.

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thejammahimself

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exegete  2 years ago

I think the parent’s comment is probably referring to the fact if you use Copilot to write code then you have to go through and try to understand what it wrote and possibly debug it. And you don’t have the opportunity to ask it why it wrote it the way it did when reviewing its code.

  • brookst  2 years ago

    I think you’re right, but that just means parent doesn’t understand copilot and is off tilting at windmills.

    Copilot is amazing for reducing the tedium of typing obvious but lengthy code (and strings!). And it’s inline and passive; it’s not like you go edit -> insert -> copilot function and it dumps in 100 lines of code you have to debug. Which is what it sounds like parent is mistaking it for.

    I’m reminded of 1995, when an elderly relative told me everything wrong with the internet based on TV news and not having ever actually seen the internet.

  • evilduck  2 years ago

    But it's trickling in small chunks at a time unless you are just smashing tab repeatedly and don't look at what it did until the very end. You can also not accept what it offers and just continue writing code for yourself. If a dev submitted a bunch of Copilot code they don't understand and can't answer questions about you reject the PR outright and they eventually realize it didn't save them any time or effort. Copilot isn't the employee.