The End of Programming?

I tried Co-pilot and am neither impressed nor convinced. You get a super-amplified version of Garbage In / Garbage Out, and given where Co-pilot's data comes from, that's a whole lot of unvetted garbage. And you won't get anything with a security mindset unless you are ultra-specific in your prompt, because you get literally what you ask for, and nothing else. I tried adding security keywords to my prompts, and found it much easier to just write everything from scratch in that regard.

You'll also probably start to see lawsuits for all the plagiarism that is clearly coming out of it, as it is beginning with the Arts. An experiment I did was to try different versions of Hello World in different languages, and with differently worded prompts. I'm pretty sure I found every single tutorial on Github that put their name in place of 'World' that way.

I enjoyed Co-pilot as a toy, in the same way I enjoy Dall-e mini as a toy. But I (personally... its an opinion) would disallow it for any real coding project.

I did not upgrade my Co-pilot subscription, because I won't be using it. Other than for entertainment, I found it to be much too much hassle since you basically change yourself from coder to code reviewer and damn near have to rewrite everything anyway. It is literally as useful as Dall-e mini for making professional images. You get some good hits, but it comes with so much rubbish to sort through.

They're toys for now. People who are getting anything productive out of them are spending as much time and effort "tuning" it as if they just went ahead and got back to coding again.

In the words of the old saying: "There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".

Programming and programmers aren't going anywhere any time soon.

Personally, I'm skeptical. As amazing as DALL-E/StableDiffusion are, they require a lot of trial and error to generate the image you want. But this relies on you being able to look at the image and know what needs to change (and then asking for that change).

The problem with programming is that you may not be able to ask for a fix without understanding the program itself. And if you have to understand the program, then the AI is just saving typing.