Posts
Comments
It gets people used to ignoring laws,
I wonder if this is a good thing though? The greatest horrors ever committed in the world have been done by people following the laws and orders governments set out for them. Having an obviously insane law that people experience on a daily basis might encourage some critical thinking about which laws are reasonable and which are not.
Hard to test one way or the other but I still here people saying "It's against the law" as a self-evident reason not to do something far more often than I am comfortable with.
I also used to think it would be useful for API/glue code and [this](https://www.fast.ai/2021/07/19/copilot/) article persuaded me otherwise. The core of his argument is:
Most time coding is not taken up in writing code, but with designing, debugging, and maintaining code. When code is automatically generated, it’s easy to end up with a lot more of it....As a rule of thumb, less code means less to maintain and understand. Copilot’s code is verbose, and it’s so easy to generate lots of it that you’re likely to end up with a lot of code!
I can imagine code generation being useful for a solo project or prototype but it's hard to imagine it being useful for code that has to be maintained over time, at least until we have AGI.
.