It's like copying from StackOverflow while ignoring upvotes, comments, and anything but the first revision ;=)
Also the problem isn't code that's obviously wrong when you read it. The problem is when code looks OK, but is subtly wrong. Which keeps happening - as we know today, at least two examples featured on Copilot homepage have this problem. To make this work, you have to read each snippet super carefully - which defeats the whole point.
It's all well and good to say there should be something better than just discipline but there's no idiot-proof way of writing programs.
1. As a way to specify a problem and get a suggested solution (or a selection of them), to use as a starting point.
2. As a way to specify a problem, get it solved by the AI, and consider it done.
I'd expect that any developer worth their salt will do 1. I expect that of myself. I also worry this is so streamlined that people, including myself, will naturally shift to doing 2 over time.
This is similar to the problem with self driving cars - you can't incrementally approach perfection, you have to get it right in one go, because the space between "not working" and "better than human in every way" is where self-driving is more dangerous than not having it. When it works most of the time, it lulls you into a false sense of security, and then when it fails, you aren't prepared and you die. Similarly, Copilot seems to be working well enough to make you think the code is OK, but it turns out the code is often buggy in a subtle way.
> familiarity with language ecosystem
This is an interesting angle to explore the topic. Familiarity is a big factor when inspecting such generative snippets. For example, I'm really familiar with modern C++, and I'm confident I could spot problems in Copilot output (if and when it starts producing C++), maybe 50% of the time. If it's a logic issue, or initialization issue, I'll spot it for sure. If it's a misuse of some tricky bits of the Standard Library? I might not. I make enough of those mistakes on my own. Or, I know enough JS to be dangerous, but I don't consider myself fluent. I'm definitely going to miss most of the subtle bugs there.
On your other point, it's true that if you're working in an unfamiliar ecosystem, spotting subtle issues will be harder. But I think getting automatic suggestions that are probably idiomatic in that language will be more helpful than hurtful.
That still doesn't _necessarily_ imply that 'partially self-driving cars' are worse than actually existing humans. Really, anything that's (statistically) better than humans is better, right?
I don't think it's reasonable to think that even 'perfect' self-driving cars would result in literally zero accidents (or even fatalities).
As others have pointed out, at last Stack Overflow comes with context, the ability to rate and comment on suggestions, or even have a discussion about an approach. With this you take it or leave it. Saying you should already know what you need to do and what the tradeoffs are and how to evaluate the quality of the suggestion is basically saying this should have no value to you, and any consequences are all your fault if it does.
If you're using it to create something you don't know how to do then yeah you're in for a world of disappointment.
HN seems to be of the hivemind that random Joe Nocodes will be firing up VSCode and asking it for a custom version of Uber which.. yeah is laughable and honestly seems pretty obvious that that wont work.
Interesting metaphor. Notice how the Bash tab completion is a great tool, that increases people's productivity by a large amount, and receives only complements from anybody you ask. At the same time, the newish Windows cmd tab completion is a great productivity destroyer that gets mostly only criticism and you will find way too many people blaming it for losing data.
Do you know what is the difference? The bash tab completion is always correct. If it can't be correct, it gives you as much of a correct answer as it can, and leaves the rest up to you. The cmd tab completion doesn't care at all about being correct, it will always give an answer, no matter what you ask for.
If autocomplete on IDEs were that respectful, I'd like them too.
(But I also have no interesting in using Copilot myself, tho maybe I should try it myself now, if only on some toy side project.)
The problem with Copilot is that it works just enough to be dangerous: it streamlines copy-pasting of unchecked code, but the code it offers has subtle bugs. It's even worse than copy-pasting from StackOverflow, because code on SO got at least a passing review by someone who understands it. Here, you get code generated from ML models. Unlike generating pictures of faces or kittens, when an occasional artifact doesn't matter much, an "artifact" in code that you won't notice will still make the code wrong.
> Don't put it in hand of non programmers
Putting it in hands of programmers isn't really any better. To make it work, you need programmers to be disciplined - more disciplined than they were when copy-pasting from SO.