Most time coding is not taken up in writing code, but with designing, debugging, and maintaining code. When code is automatically generated, it’s easy to end up with a lot more of it....As a rule of thumb, less code means less to maintain and understand. Copilot’s code is verbose, and it’s so easy to generate lots of it that you’re likely to end up with a lot of code!
I can imagine code generation being useful for a solo project or prototype but it’s hard to imagine it being useful for code that has to be maintained over time, at least until we have AGI.
The fastai blog is linked in my post (it’s the url for “outdated”) since I tried some of the prompts from his blog (especially the first one when reading a file) and ended up with different results. It’s worth mentioning that he only talks about Copilot, not Codex, the latter being supposedly from a more advanced model.
On the amount of code generated, you could make the similar argument for Stack Overflow. If I were a SO skeptic I would say “back in my day people used to read manuals and use the right options for functions, now that they just copy-paste many paragraphs of code”. Codex is just SO on steroids, it’s the engineers’ responsibility to refactor, although I agree having auto-complete doesn’t help solve bad habits.
I also used to think it would be useful for API/glue code and [this](https://www.fast.ai/2021/07/19/copilot/) article persuaded me otherwise. The core of his argument is:
I can imagine code generation being useful for a solo project or prototype but it’s hard to imagine it being useful for code that has to be maintained over time, at least until we have AGI.
The fastai blog is linked in my post (it’s the url for “outdated”) since I tried some of the prompts from his blog (especially the first one when reading a file) and ended up with different results. It’s worth mentioning that he only talks about Copilot, not Codex, the latter being supposedly from a more advanced model.
On the amount of code generated, you could make the similar argument for Stack Overflow. If I were a SO skeptic I would say “back in my day people used to read manuals and use the right options for functions, now that they just copy-paste many paragraphs of code”. Codex is just SO on steroids, it’s the engineers’ responsibility to refactor, although I agree having auto-complete doesn’t help solve bad habits.