It's also the boring part, so we might aswell automate it, right?

I have no problem with that. But let's not kid ourselves that 'automating' a bit of typing elevates a developer to some godlike level. A good chunk of regular developers point and click their way through their day, use dogshit editors without knowing a keyboard shortcut beyond save/copy/paste/undo, and work with tech and codebases that they actively have to fight to be productive. They still exist despite all of the other productivity boons out there.

I'm not saying copilots aren't useful. I'm saying that this "you'll be left behind" rhetoric smacks of crypto esque hype.

it's already automated with a gizmo called "snippets".

Or “boilerplate generators”, I’m working on a laravel project and I think 90% of the code written so far is either generated or copy-pasted (from other files, from the css framework examples, from the docs). The trick is to know what to generate, what to copy, and keep it minimal. And that’s done by pretty much reading the entire docs and some of the framework’s code to understand how the pieces fit together. And what you need to replace/add on top to get your application.

I’m not tethering myself to a distant datacenter just to be able to write some code.

Yeah, not having to be attached 24-by-7 to some (pay-a-subscription) technology to just do a simple job is a great point.