[bmitc]

I don't really understand this. You're not coding directly in the language, but now you're coding in an implicit language provided by Copilot. From what I've seen on Copilot, although it is an impressive piece of tech, all it really points out is that code documentation and discovery is terrible. But I'm not for sure writing implicit code in comments is really a better approach than seeking ways to make discovery of language and library features more discoverable.

And I know it sounds silly and like "I had an idea like that once" (see Office Space), but I actually came up with the idea for or at least a similar one to Copilot in an off comment to a coworker back in like 2014 or so. The idea was that as you wrote code, it would display on the side similar code that had been written by others doing the same or similar thing, and then it would allow you automatically upload small processing functions to some sort of cloud library. Same thing for doing autoformatting, although that's less of a concern now that formatters are becoming popular. The context I was working in was visual languages though. I had even started writing a tool during an "innovation week" (that I never showed) that would start visually classifying whether code written in the visual language was "good" or "clean" or not. I never got anywhere with it and mainly just have some diagrams generated from that project that were buggy so that they kind of look like art.

[ShamelessC]

You "came up" with the idea for intelligent autocomplete? And are you aware that this project actually required big innovations in language modeling and a supercomputer? Because I would say that is far more central to the concept behind the tech than the interface.

[bmitc]

An idea is not an implementation, and I clearly mentioned it was an offhand comment in a casual conversation. My "idea" was exactly what I described above. Nothing more. I'm sure several had this idea, and Copilot was probably already in development. My comment was just a way to give a personal anecdote. I'm not sure what your point or complaint is. Did you somehow miss the reference to Office Space? It wasn't a serious claim. Just a segue to some thoughts I had.

[ShamelessC]

okay yeah - I apologize. In the context of other comments it seemed a little more dismissive of the tech itself. I see now that you were quite clearly going for humility. Should have caught it on the first read however, sorry again.

[bmitc]

Not a problem. :) Context and tone is hard in text. I felt silly saying that but I did have the idea I mentioned. I have a pretty good track record of having ideas I have no clue how to implement. Haha. Why the visual programming analysis project went nowhere. It's like tech and programming shower thoughts.

The Copilot tech is completely of my league.