[avl999]

I can't speak for Github CoPilot as I don't use it nor intend to ever use it but I find this article extremely unconvincing. He is basically considering an IDE as an autocomplete suggestion automaton. For me the features of an IDE that I use and value (fast code browsing both across my code and the code of my dependencies, refactoring support and taking care of mundane stuff like code formatting and import statements) have very little to do with autocomplete method suggestions.

I also find the workflow that author is describing where people blindly probe around until autocomplete suggests them a method that does what they want extremely unrealistic. Most developers will look up various libraries and options to accomplish a thing, indeed the only way you can get autocomplete to even work is if you kinda know what library/tooling you want to use.

For example if you want to use a b-tree for something the IDE can't read your mind, you're gonna have to go on the internet and see the options available in the language of your choice, weight them out, decide on one, add the library to dependency management file in your language and only then will the IDE be able to provide any help.