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Why Copilot is Making Programmers Worse at Programming (www.darrenhorrocks.co.uk)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the past few years, the evolution of AI-driven tools like GitHub’s Copilot and other large language models (LLMs) has promised to revolutionise programming. By leveraging deep learning, these tools can generate code, suggest solutions, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time, saving developers hours of work. While these tools have obvious benefits in terms of productivity, there’s a growing concern that they may also have unintended consequences on the quality and skillset of programmers.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Anything that allows people to blindly and effortlessly get results inherently makes them more stupid. Your brain is like any muscle. You need to repeatedly use it for it to work well

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.

And when high-level languages started appearing.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago

This really isn’t a good comparison at all. One gives you a list of choices you can make, and the other gives you a blind answer.

If seeing what argument types the function takes make me a worse engineer, so be it, I guess

[–] MajorHavoc 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

They did.

And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.

Yep.

And when high-level languages started appearing.

And yes.

That said, if you believed my mentors, we were barelling towards a 2025 in which nothing running on software ever really worked reliably.

So they may have been grumpy, but they were also right, on that point.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

I mean with the "move fast and break things" mentality of most companies nowadays, I'd say he was spot-on

[–] u_tamtam 8 points 2 months ago

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

I'm sure many did, but I'm also pretty sure it's easy to draw a line between code assistance and LLM-infused code generation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

And they may have been right. But getting code is usually the end result, not proving you're some better programmer. And useful tools may be used to help you with the aforementioned goal.