[constantcrying]

>Do you think that some form of AI will be able to do the job of an average programmer any time soon?

No. AI is not a greater threat than stack overflow.

The skills of a programmer are not generating 20 lines of code to solve a well known problem. And even a 99% AI is next to useless, since finding errors is exceedingly hard.

[mark_l_watson]

I respectfully disagree with you, based on my personal use of Copilot. I find that having boilerplate code for making web service calls, database connections, etc. is an overall time saver. A factor of 10X? No. Obviously not a silver bullet, but a real time saver.

For a while I only had Copilot configured for VSCode and PyCharm, but I mostly use Emacs. The day that I took a little time to configure Emacs to use Copilot, it really hit me how useful Copilot - once I always had it available. Also, the ability to tab through multiple code completions lets me choose what I think is a good completion in a few seconds, or hit ESCAPE to discard them. I have been programming since 1964 (my Dad gave me access to a timeshared BASIC when I was a kid) so I can read code very quickly from almost 60 years of work and play.

I also find Copilot works well with my own bottom up, and REPL based development style.

I understand that many developers don’t like Copilot, but, we are all free to choose our own tools.

Anyway, I appreciate your comment even though my experience is different.

[constantcrying]

I totally believe you that Copilot is useful, my contention is that it is useful in the same sense that stackoverflow is useful.

No developer is competing with stackoverflow. These tools are enabling developers to quickly generate code for certain problems, which works especially well for boilerplate. But this isn't actually the main skill of a programmer, it is just some mechanical neccesity to writing software.

Much of what developers do is modifying existing code, fixing bugs, designing architecture and solving novel problems. If an AI could reliably do any of these tasks jobs would be endangered, but certainly that is not the case yet and AI would have to come quite a far way before that.

[tekknik]

> I find that having boilerplate code for making web service calls, database connections, etc. is an overall time saver.

Why? If you setting up service calls correctly you have a client you instantiate and call some method on. Your service calling should be one line plus error handling (1-3 more lines). Databases are initialized once, again 2-3 lines of code.

If you think any of this is a time saver, or is difficult, your job is at risk from copilot. You are training your successor.

[mark_l_watson]

Well, I am in my 70s so job security is not really anything I think about.

Funny, but about 35 years ago I blocked my boss’s boss from buying a company that wrote an “AI coding tool”. I change my mind about things and what I found ridiculously simple and un-useful 35 years ago, is very different than Copilot.

I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to fully conceptualize how much AI tools will change knowledge work.

I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982 and I find it exciting how fast the field is now progressing. I worked as a consultant at Google in 2013 with their Knowledge Graph and that opened my eyes to the possibilities of so much structured and organized (they had a very good Ontology team) knowledge. Six years ago I managed a deep learning team at Capital One and mostly because of the strong team, I was surprised how effective deep learning is for practical problems.

One last example: in the 1980s I spent a fair amount of time trying to write code manually for anaphora resolution - a problem that BERT models now solve “simply.”

[tekknik]

> Well, I am in my 70s so job security is not really anything I think about.

Many of us are not 70, so we have to be concerned about this. You seem gleeful, I’m concerned. Concerned for everyone about to lose their job, concerned for the pay drop those that don’t lose them will see. All around I see this as a bad idea but then people like you come in and push it forward.