Amateur vs professional and novice vs expert are completely separate things.
You can be professional novice just as you can be expert amateur.
Now, the answer to your question is an obvious "NO". To be an expert you have to be a novice first.
The problem rather is "Are you making progress towards being an expert or are you just learning to more efficiently execute your novice workflow?"
> The way I see it, that happens because programming is still way more complex than it should be - and copilot will help with that.
No, it is just an illusion of help.
Just as your son may thank you for help when you give him an answer to his homework. From his point of view you have helped him, true, but from another point of view the point of the task wasn't to deliver answer to the teacher, it was to imprint something valuable on the mind of the child.
I understand your point about learning and getting better at it. All I'm saying is most of programmers won't become experts: the market doesn't demand that, and most just aren't able or don't want to.
No-code will make a huge impact in next decade imo.
In my specific case, I would be able to become an expert programmer but I don't intend to because I have other carreer choices. So I think copilot would be of great help.
For amateurs, the homework is a great analogy - they don't need a lesson, they need a calculator so they can get back to the professional work they are doing.
Here, the parts you have missed reading the post:
> Do you think only _experts_ should be programming?
> I've _hired around 30 different programmers_ in my life
Another way: copilot is a crutch. It may help you move about but if you get too comfortable with it you are never going to learn to run.
I love that software is an accessible discipline to hobbyists and that it empowers people. But it needs to be a discipline, top to bottom. We need deep understanding with security and robustness as fundamentals, good practices, and all of that baked into our tools.
Another parallel: language learning. You learn more by speaking and writing than merely reading and listening, because the former actually requires you to actively associate grammar rules to your physical actions, whereas consumption has a lower bar of effort since you can infer things from context, gloss over things, etc.