It’s like having a senior software developer over your shoulder reviewing your code and making recommendations based on what you’ve written.
If it sounds like something out of c level contact list a sci-fi novel, it’s because it is, it’s software writing software. It’s not perfect, nothing ever is, but I can see copilot being one of the driving forces of the software development industry in the coming years.
What is Copilot?
GitHub Copilot is an AI tool that provides code suggestions based on comments and the context of the software you are creating.GPT-3 stands for the third generation of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer — a language model as basic as this example might be capable of generating sequences of text from simple prompts. Codex is capable of generating natural text as well as code for most programming languages, although it works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.If you’ve ever used GitHub with an open license, then part of your code exists inside Copilot.
Reshaping The Way We Develop
I can’t even begin to describe just how complex software development is. From a top-down perspective, you are building a series of interconnecting systems that have to communicate and share information with a limited amount of resources at your disposal.
From a coding perspective, every fax list instruction you are writing is both part of a bigger system and a puzzle unto itself. Translating stories into logical patterns requires knowledge, creativity, and more than a bit of insight.
Sometimes the instructions we write don’t yield the results we expect, other times our code executes, but takes longer and or consumes more resources than what we expected. Sometimes we just can’t find the right set of instructions to get the result we want.
Programming software is a balance between banging your head against a wall and jumping through hoops.