The Github Copilot Effect

Yash Deshpande Written on April 14, 2024 2 min read

I have been using Github Co-pilot for around 6 months and I have a love hate relationship with it. It’s great because it helped me in filling out boilerplate code and simpler code snippets. It’s bad as well due to it auto-filling the logical aspects of my code and it deciding the logic and me just brushing over the snippet once and calling it a day. As a software developer, I have to keep in mind of many things that should affect the logic, the context that Co-pilot doesn’t always have.

For those living under a rock, Github Copilot is an AI pair programmer that writes code with you. Its basicaly ChatGPT but for code in realtime on your editor.

So Github Co-pilot is good at filling basic boilerplate code when making a project, but for complex projects, I tend to disable it. When I was using it for the more complex projects, I noticed my increasing dependance for it and having that Co-pilot pause which is me stopping for it to complete one liner code that i could have written very easily but I didn’t. It sort off took the joy away from programming for me.

When making a new project you sometimes find yourself smashing your head over a piece of code, scouring Stackoverflow, Github issues, some random forums just to notice you did not put the comma at the end of your SQL code. This silly mistake could be easily fixed by Co-pilot, but then I wouldn’t have learnt my lesson on how not to write shitty code. There is a certain satisfaction in solving a issue closing then million tabs regarding that issue which Co-pilot takes it away. I feel it is a mistake giving Co-pilot for free to students as they will get a huge dependency and without it, they will be cripple.