Who Is The Better Half?

I have been itching to write this post for more than a month now but have been postponing it for a good reason. Before you get yourselves comfortable on your couch with a bowl of popcorn, I do want to clarify that this post is not about who is better among me and my wife ??. That is a universally foregone conclusion. This is about a futuristic code completion extension from GitHub which is currently in private beta testing (technical preview).?

Just reading about this brought in a flood of thoughts & emotions in my head taking me all the way back to my serious programming days. To me coding has never been only about creating some cool functionality, that is an eventual byproduct. It is always about the joy of formulating a piece of logic, hearing the sound of keyboard button clicks, watching the fingers trying to keep pace with the mind, and continuously refactoring the code to death.?

I have had the good fortune of doing pair programming with some of the best minds. In particular, I fondly recollect the times when I did pair programming with my German colleague. We worked together for a decade and had a good understanding of each other's strengths. We took turns at the keyboard while other was overseeing and implemented quite a lot of features in the product. My colleague was much senior to me with brilliant ideas and I was a disciplinarian with an eye for detail. Few things got accomplished in that process, the code written was creative, well thought through, reviewed, bug-free, and mostly worked the first time saving a lot of rework.

The learnings that I gathered from pair programming were stowed away in my memory to be referred to for years to come. The other source of learning I had was to go through the code written by my seniors in the team within the context of the product that we were building. This taught me an efficient & elegant way of coding logic which shaped my thought process ever since.

When I moved on to another organization I was in for a shock as it had a completely different culture. I seldom found anyone coding after 4 or 5 years of experience. People were made team leads after 4 years and were mostly given managerial tasks. Young programmers had no one to look up to and were turning to sites like Stack Overflow and tutorial pages for solutions & examples. As part of my responsibilities, I had to review the design & code of several applications. On one hand, I was frustrated looking at some bad code but on the other hand, had sympathy for the developers who implemented them. When I spoke to them, in many cases, what I figured is they didn’t really understand what the code was doing. They simply copied it to complete their work and that was all that mattered to them.

You might be wondering where I am going with this and getting digressed. Please stay with me as the idea is to set some context upfront for the arguments that I wish to make in the rest of the post. More on that shortly. Now some details on the extension in question and what it does.

Copilot is an AI-based advanced code completion tool from GitHub. It is built on codex AI system from OpenAI. It is being offered as an extension in popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Neovim. There are plans to offer it as API as well once the system matures. It has support for most of the popular programming languages out there.?

As programmers, we are quite familiar with the simple IDE-based code completion for things like try-catch blocks, loops, function & class definitions, and more. Consider Copilot as code completion on steroids i.e., implementing the actual logic within the skeleton above without the need to type a single line of code. Sounds too good to be true?

Well, it certainly piqued my interest when I read about it in multiple forums and made me share my thoughts. But as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the delay in holding on to this was not due to lack of time or interest but I felt it wouldn't be fair to give an opinion without getting one's hands dirty. Though I registered for the access more than a month back, I got the privilege only recently and hence the delay.?

Like an eager child unwrapping his birthday gift, I diligently followed the instructions to install the Copilot extension in VS Code and completed the authorization for GitHub to collect telemetry data. Created a new file named copilot.js and sat for a few seconds with the blank file open. Running out of intelligent problems to try I settled for the time-tested add function and typed "function add" and voila the following got splattered onto the screen as a suggestion. Upon pressing Tab the suggestion got added as actual code.

Buoyed by the sudden euphoria I started trying out a few utility functions like string manipulations, array operations, and date functions. Added to this, Copilot was able to suggest the first line of the code just by looking at the comment typed capturing the intent of the function; confirmation of which autocompleted the rest of the function logic. And to add icing on the cake it even offered to autocomplete the comment that I was typing to describe the function. At this point, I was almost expecting it to read my mind without even me tying anything. But I guess we have to wait for the next release for the brain interface support. That is not all, for any given suggestion if you press Ctrl+Enter it shows a number of alternative code snippets allowing the user to choose one from them.?

Basics out of the way I pressed on writing a comment to get the weather for a given city using a REST API and it actually suggested a fully working code from the Open Weather Map API complete with markers for passing the city name and API key. I mean what more can you ask for?.

I switched to Java and the suggestions for many of the functions were mostly comparable. There were also other cool capabilities like auto-creation of sample data i.e., arrays, lists. Creating a function immediately after that was even taking the contextual details while naming the function and variables.?

But when I tried something slightly complex the results were a standard two-line code that simply returned the parameter that was passed as an input. I guess this is a good juncture for me to stop on Copilot's capabilities as the intent of this post is not to delve into its detailed capabilities. There are several good articles and videos which does a good job on capabilities.

Under the hood, I guess Copilot is a combination of an NLP engine to determine the intent, a search/indexing algorithm scanning through GitHub's public repos, and an AI to rank the suggestions (and acceptances) before returning them. But of course, I am trivializing the complexity behind this powerful tool. Nevertheless, this has evoked a wide variety of views on the internet ranging from this being the next-best-thing-on-the-earth, to infringement of copyright, to an outright jobs killer.

But my take is about none of the above. I am more interested in the human experience and potential. It made me wonder whether this is a boon or bane for the young programmers? Will it help them to be self-taught or make them lazy dim wits? Will it aggravate the already existing problem of developers simply using aids for the sake of work completion?. Well, the answer is, it depends. It comes down to the individuals' perspective of how they will leverage it.

Having said that whatever I have seen so far doesn’t give an impression that this is a job killer, at least in its current state. It is good for creating utility functions and some well-published common functionality. In reality, the core of what gets built in real-world applications is much beyond this. What would really help is if the API, SDK, and integration providers package such capabilities as part of their offering so that programmers don’t have to unnecessarily spend time figuring them out. Today a lot of time is spent on figuring the documentation which in many cases is found wanting.

Before I closed this post I got my 15-year-old daughter, who has been taking Python programming in the last couple of years, to take a look at this cool tool. The disgust I saw in her face and in her own words "where is the fun if this does everything for me?" made me happy as a programmer (and as a father) which gives me hope that no matter how many such copilots emerge humans will always be the better half.