How Github Copilot effects Developers?
“Github copilot” is a trending topic among developers these days. Are the Software developers at risk? Will this reduces the opportunities for the developers in the industry? What actually the Github copilot is all about? If you are curious to know; this particular article is just for you😉! Sit back relax you developers are not at risk as you think ;) Let's dig in💨
Programming, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) are the terms that people are most likely to make arguments around, and the less they understand these terms, the more they like to make theories around them, and AI is the least understood of these terms, so all the conspiracy theories usually revolve around it. The term AI is an excellent tool for product promotion on which algorithms can be taught to obtain a kind of reasonable outcome. But to be honest as of my knowledge, programmers don’t always get decent results in AI. AI is simply combining a little bit of data with a little bit of mathematics to produce results that can be good, sometimes other way around.
So, to get to the point, what is GitHub’s co-pilot? In a nutshell, GitHub Copilot can quickly propose individual lines and complete functions based on a programmer’s codes and comments. GitHub has released a preview of a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can make suggestions to developers as they’re coding, allowing them to generate better code with less effort. Simply its a code suggesting platform powered with AI with the help of all the code that are on github.Right now the most occuring question, “will this take your oppotunities?”. Come on…. It’s almost as if we’re saying, “The complete code is on Stack Overflow”, we can just copy and paste these codes, why do we need programmers?” If you can do it, you’re welcome to do it, and you’ll soon realize how difficult it is to simply copy and paste code from Stack Overflow. And you may know the circumstances in the process.
It can take days to actually just nicely fit in that code, which is already freely available on Stack Overflow. Programming is not just about injecting code, it’s about fitting code, solving a problem, and if you’re that concerned about this nice piece of tool coming out, you should be much more concerned about without code stuff or no code.
Okay, so how does GitHub copilot work? There is no access granted as of 06th July 2021. Eventually, it will be rolled out to everyone, but as the website states, it will be given to you as a simple VS code extension, and you will have to write some meaningful comments, after which GitHub copilot will automatically suggest you some methods based on the code it has gotten from your GitHub accounts and the Stack Overflow. So is this 100% accurate Obviously not. That’s why they provide you many suggestions, and once you’ve chosen the one that comes closest to solving your problem, you manipulate it just like you would code from Stack Overflow; it’s now a kind of clipboard provided by the copilot. That is a fantastic approach, in my opinion.
Copilot was the first to come up with this idea and carry it out? No its a big no.There are existing companies with the exact same concept that are somewhat more popular or less popular. Kadota and kite are some AI Powered similar examples.
So, rather than claiming that AI will take over the oppotunities , a better issue could be whether or not to use this product. As per my knowledge and as the personal view we should use this product because it’s almost like a walkthrough. There was a time when people said that you shouldn’t use Sublime Text or IntelliSense and that you should write all your code in the text pad because the text pad gives you more clarity and knowledge about the syntax. Yes there is a true behind that for the developers who are getting in. Having said that the industry is moving fast and the faster you produce the products more the attractive ness comes in; obviously the quality matters.
Github copilot will assist programmers in writing code more quickly, but these suggestions will sometimes never be useful, and they may even cause more confusion in your code. So you’ll need a little more intellect and programming knowledge to make sure that you’re cleaning up all the messes that these AI are making. Naturally, others would argue that Microsoft could not have done this because they used all of our open source code and trained their model on it. Surely, they have trained their models with the open sorce code that are available, and according to me it should be taken as a positive factor going ahead with the technology rather than making argivements.
Have you heard of Hasura, a comparable technology that allows you to build a database’s model and it provides all of the basic functions as well as a little extra via GraphQL? They could have gotten a lot more attention if they had used the same word AI that we are using to generate all these, but they didn’t. So accept the idea that programming will continue to evolve in order to provide you with new tools to help you create even more fantastic products.
So, rather than going into full conspiracy mode, consider it as a useful tool that will assist us in the future.
Conclusion
You shouldn’t be concerned about losing your oppotunities in the industry because of no code, AI, copilot, or any; they are simply tools to assist you in doing your regular work; you shouldn’t go into conspiracy mode; and as of my view giving all of these tools a try and seeing how well or poorly they perform is of course the better way.
Motivation : Go ahead and push more code to GitHub, so that Microsoft can get more data to train their model thus, we could get good suggestions from the appliacation and code as quickly as possible.
