This is my thought as well. I get the "make productive engineers even more productive" angle, but productive engineers' bottleneck isn't coding. Sure, coding up a boilerplate Go web server is tedious, but I have done it so many times that it takes me two seconds now.
On the flip side, coding can be the bottleneck for the worst kind of coder. When I first started coding, coding was hard simply because I had very little reps and was just learning to understand how to code common solutions, data structures, libraries, etc. Fast forward a few years and, if I were still struggling to understand these concepts, Copilot is a lifeline.
I’m gonna have to disagree - coding can and does take significant amounts of time even when I know exactly what problem I am solving.
I admit that at many organizations there are so many other factors and bottlenecks, but it’s not uncommon that I find myself 8+ hours deep into a coding task that I had expected would be much shorter.
On the other hand, usually that’s due to refactoring or otherwise not being satisfied with the quality of my initial solution, so copilot probably wouldn’t help…
On the flip side, coding can be the bottleneck for the worst kind of coder. When I first started coding, coding was hard simply because I had very little reps and was just learning to understand how to code common solutions, data structures, libraries, etc. Fast forward a few years and, if I were still struggling to understand these concepts, Copilot is a lifeline.