I see co-pilot more as an intelligent suggestion engine or tab complete on steroids versus something solving all of my problems or absolving one of thought. Does pair programming result in junk code?
No, but not because there's a second person writing code, rather because there's a second person to think about it and think through how it works and interacts with the rest of the system.
As I said in another comment, actually writing code is only a small part of my work as a programmer, with pair programming, there is someone else who can do all the other things with me. Copilot cannot help with those things, certainly not in its current form.
The problem with Copilot as a fancy tab completion is that it can generate quite complex code, and, if code reviews are anything to go by, understanding other people's badly documented code is usually harder than writing your own. If its non-trivial, there's a strong urge to just accept it without really understanding all the details, because it appears to work. Or to just get a shallow grasp of it before deciding its good enough. Copilot will not help here, if anything, it makes it worse if it generates subtly broken code that otherwise looks correct and is too complex to really scrutinize and understand.
A better approach, I think, would be if you write unit tests and Copilot were to take them as input and write code to pass them. At least then it would be grounded in tests.
Right now, it seems Copilot shines for boilerplate code, but is possibly a net negative for anything actually complex (which it will still happily attempt to generate without warning you). A disciplined programmer will likely benefit from Copilot, but I shudder to think about what code a lazy, overworked or too-beginner-to-spot-problems one might let slip through (based on this recent article about copilot: https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/be18e11beb2e12433d93475d7...)
No, but not because there's a second person writing code, rather because there's a second person to think about it and think through how it works and interacts with the rest of the system.
As I said in another comment, actually writing code is only a small part of my work as a programmer, with pair programming, there is someone else who can do all the other things with me. Copilot cannot help with those things, certainly not in its current form.
The problem with Copilot as a fancy tab completion is that it can generate quite complex code, and, if code reviews are anything to go by, understanding other people's badly documented code is usually harder than writing your own. If its non-trivial, there's a strong urge to just accept it without really understanding all the details, because it appears to work. Or to just get a shallow grasp of it before deciding its good enough. Copilot will not help here, if anything, it makes it worse if it generates subtly broken code that otherwise looks correct and is too complex to really scrutinize and understand.
A better approach, I think, would be if you write unit tests and Copilot were to take them as input and write code to pass them. At least then it would be grounded in tests.
Right now, it seems Copilot shines for boilerplate code, but is possibly a net negative for anything actually complex (which it will still happily attempt to generate without warning you). A disciplined programmer will likely benefit from Copilot, but I shudder to think about what code a lazy, overworked or too-beginner-to-spot-problems one might let slip through (based on this recent article about copilot: https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/be18e11beb2e12433d93475d7...)