I haven't tried Copilot, and based on what I've read, I don't think I'd want to use it in its current form, but I'd love for software development to evolve to the point that I never have to write any boilerplate code again. Even with DSLs, code generation, autocompletion, snippets, and countless libraries and frameworks to draw upon, the bulk of what I do as developer is write the same boring code over and over again. I welcome the day that a predictive IDE allows me to focus on the interesting aspects of problem solving without having to do all the tedious bits, while still allowing me to inspect and modify the tedious bits when needed.

I am eagerly waiting the day an AI will collaborate with me like that. You want one for writing the tedious bits of code, I want one for managing information in a research project, others want one to automate tasks RPA-style.

This will make you less valuable, unless there’s enough interesting problems coming down the pipe to keep us all employed. And then once they expand copilot to also solve the hard problems then what’s the use for you anymore?

This very much seems like cheering on the destruction of your career.

The boilerplate problem has been solved decades ago. You can use macros or code generation. Letting Copilot do that for you seems a bit like an ugly workaround. We sometimes need those, but at some point we should be taking a step back and design a program instead of hacking away.

Copilot can already write your boilerplate for you once it has a single example of how to do it.

It's not that far off today from how junior engineers treat stack overflow. There's just fewer intermediate steps.

I think we all cargo-cult our way into programming and then over decades get better and better understanding of what we're doing and why.

I remember being 7 years old and not really understanding the AppleSoft BASIC manual. I memorized the variable names in the code examples, not realizing I could name variables whatever I wanted. A$, B$, LEFT_FOOT$. The latter was there to be obvious that one could name variables whatever one wanted, but 7 year-old me didn't understand. I remember talking to an older kid on the school bus whose father worked for IBM, and the confused look on his face when I started rattling off my list of memorized variable names. I can still picture his face, but I forget his name. I'm pretty sure he was Mike. Thanks for straitening me out, Mike (Schmidt?).

At least we're getting more effective cargo cults.

This maps to my experience as well. Think many senior engineers forget what it's like to learn programming. It is, in fact, incredibly hard.

Just bill yourself as an artisanal developer and 5x your rates

You can ask copilot to do it for you!