GitHub’s CoPilot AI Can Render Coders Jobless in the Future: Reports

Enterprises fear that GitHub's CoPilot AI might make coders jobless.

GitHub's CoPilot AI is an Artificial Intelligence tool that can suggest lines of code and even complete functions to the programmer to make it more efficient.

But the notion that coders can be jobless is not true. It is important to understand the essential difficulty of developing software is not in programming a function or even all the functions automatically, but in determining which functions or classes should be created, in what order they should be called, what each of them should do, etc., that is, in designing a solution to a problem. This is the Semantic part of the problem, the AI-based GitHub cannot do this. The complexity of developing a complete software solution is beyond the current capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.

However, this tool will be the perfect copilot for the coders, true to its name. It will help the developers to a great extent by supporting them with the syntactic part of the coding problem. In this way, coders will get more time and energy to explore the unknown regions of the semantics of artificial intelligence.

About the Tool:

GitHub's Copilot AI gives code suggestions based on context. It is currently open for technical preview to a small group of testers. To complete its tasks, Copilot uses OpenAI's Codex, which can translate natural language into code.

Copilot does much more than just give suggestions for the autocompletion of a developer's code. It can make use of the provided context to produce matching code. It can do this by translating comments into code. If you provide the logic via comments Copilot can autogenerate the code. It can also autofill repetitive code and autogenerate automated tests. It can also suggest alternative implementations of code fragments to allow you to pick the best one for your needs.

Some of the aims of Copilot are to allow you to write code regardless of your experience and allow you to be able to easily fix bugs and learn new languages and frameworks, without having to spend time going through all the documentation.

Copilot can handle the majority of languages and frameworks. However, at the current stage, it works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.

How are People Reacting to the Tool?

GitHub's former CEO Nat Friedman said the new AI system represented a breakthrough in the third revolution of software development. However, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has words of warning on behalf of the new Copilot. He directly mentioned the tool citing it as a signal that all firms better be prepared for AI in their world. Even if not making big investments today in AI, business leaders must understand the pace of improvement in artificial intelligence and the applications that are coming or they will be "sacrificing the future," he said.