VS Code includes GitHub's CoPilot  and I just love it!

VS Code includes GitHub's CoPilot and I just love it!

With artificial intelligence, even a chicken can program now!

The year is 2021, and Elon Musk is so scared about AI and its danger to humanity that he is pushing to build big rockets 🚀 to land on Mars as soon as possible. And he has to know it, he is one of the investors in OpenAI, a company (largely owned by Microsoft) that has developed an AI program called GPT-3. This AI is now used by GitHub in Microsoft's editor Visual Studio Code to write code, based on comments we write in the document. To this day, most programmers do not use this technology to write their code. Everything is handwritten (more or less, or copied from somewhere on the net). I imagine that in the near future, we will smile about this as much as about programmers with real bugs and punch cards. 🤣

Punch card reader

So, why I am so excited?

I can imagine myself laughing at myself one day when I read this in the distant future, or I cry and say to my granddaughter "We used to write code by hand, and it was legible, clear and beautiful, not like what the AI does today."

When I tried AI for the first time, I was so amazed! One line after the other filled with meaningful content (aka code), and I just pressed the tab key, tab key, tab key …

Even a chicken can program in that way! Programmer chicken

If CoPilot where allowed to bring the sentence "From today's perspective, […]" to an end, it would write:

we can see the AI as a tool that can help us write code 
that is more readable, more maintainable, and more efficient.

Oh shit wait! It really completed the 🤖🤖🤖 sentence, and it is more readable, more maintainable, and more efficient! 🤖🤖🤖

AI fights back

STOP!! Go away! Arrrrgghhh!

The Sorcerer's Apprentice, (Göthe, Der Zauberlehrling, 1798)

I have need of Thee! from the spirits that I called Sir, deliver me!

Back now, broom, into the closet! Be thou as thou wert before! Until I, the real master call thee forth to serve once more!

copilots-never-die-downsized_large.gif


Note: The co-pilot usually sits on the right-hand side.