[popularonion]

Not sure why this is downvoted. People forget or weren’t around for the early 2000s when companies were absolutely preoccupied with code copyright and terrified of lawsuits. That loosened up only slightly during the GitHub/StackOverflow era.

If you proposed something like GitHub Copilot to any company in 2020, the legal department would’ve nuked you from orbit. Now it’s ok because “everyone is doing it and we can’t be left behind”.

Edit: I just realized this was a driver for why whiteboard puzzles became so big - the ideal employee for MSFT/FB/Google etc was someone who could spit out library quality, copyright-unencumbered, “clean room” code without access to an internet connection. That is what companies had to optimize for.

[int_19h]

It's downvoted because it's plainly incorrect.

[onemoresoop]

What part is incorrect?

[int_19h]

The claim that it's just spitting out code it's been trained on. That is simply not the case, broadly speaking - sure, if you ask it for a very specific algorithm that has a well-known implementation, you might end up with such a snippet, but in general, it writes new code, not just a copy/paste of SO or whatever.