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This is really dangerous and shows a vital flaw in capitalism. People will probably adopt AI for programming even if it means using proprietary software, meaning the industry will become under the control of people who have the massive resources to build those AI tools. Rejecting them forms a prisoner’s dilemma because you need to sacrifice short-term dollar-gains for the long-term survival of programming as an open, accessible industry. The people who use them will contribute to damaging the ecosystem but get more money while doing it.
And of course, remember that GitHub/Microsoft are creating these automation tools based on your own code. They are selling open source back to us and putting us out of a job while doing it. People really, really, really, need to stop engaging with Microsoft.
To play the devil’s advocate, most professional development happens on proprietary IDEs but software development isn’t under their control. AI assisted intellisense isn’t much different. The nature of our work will become more abstract as our tools improve. There are at least some open LLMs. One of them might surface as the alternative.
I don’t think this was always true. If it is now, that’s a bad thing.
In the article they proudly report that less experienced devs are “getting much better productivity gains” (by accepting more copilot suggestions).
As a natural-born cynic, I instead would say that maybe: “less experienced devs lack the experience to know why some copilot suggestions have unintended consequences / are a bad design choice”.
Alright, guess I’ll reiterate my usual beats here. AI code assistance is interesting, and I’m not against it. However, every current solution is inadequate, until it does the following:
Given how unstable and user unfriendly computers are now, just imagine a future where programmers know even less about what they’re doing.