I’ve been using GitHub Copilot, an LLM that helps you write code.
I like it, and it’s useful. But I kinda hate it too.
Flow
A few weeks back they made a change, which made it so much worse. Previously it would leave you alone. You could type code, and it wouldn’t interfere. If you stopped typing for a few seconds, a suggestion would come up, and you could press tab to accept it.
They changed it (in VSCode at least), so that suggestions would come up if you stopped typing for a few milliseconds, so basically in the middle of a word. It would interrupt your thought process, and you’d lose your train of thought. As a developer, your train of thought is your job. That train can be quite long, and the longer it is, the better you are at your job. I looked around to see if it could be tweaked, and found a bunch of people with the same problem. There were some workarounds, perhaps, but I didn’t try any of them.
I started turning Copilot on and off. This was better, but not as good as before they made that change.
Cognitive Atrophy
I enjoy writing code. Why am I offloading a task I enjoy to a machine? And the more I do it, I become out of practice doing the thing I enjoy, which makes me more likely to offload it next time. Why am I doing this to myself?
Quality
I write better code without AI. Much better, really. 90% of the code would be the same. Maybe 95%. Maybe 99%. It’s the 1% of the code that matters.
It will solve a problem one way, and then next time it will solve that exact same problem a different way.
Future you will see that code, and wonder how these two problems, that look identical, must be subtly different. No, it’s just that the AI doesn’t care about consistency, or anything else.
Heat Death
AI will take your job. This is literally what it says on the tin. It is using fresh water for cooling, and driving up the cost of electricity, and PC components. It’s propping up a false economy, the US stock market only looks good because of AI companies, and the US Government is regularly skipping economy reporting. Can’t be a bad economy if you don’t report on it. It’s making rich fucking assholes richer. The good things are bad, and so are the bad things.
Gone
I cancelled my subscription to Copilot. Maybe some tasks will take me a little longer. Good. I’m going to savour every goddamn semicolon.