There are several ways of seeing life: with the anxiety of what will happen tomorrow or with confidence in a total letting go.
And today, I have both good and bad news. You have surely followed the progress of deep learning, particularly with regard to the generation of text using the GPT-3 algorithm from OpenAI.
Many projects are being built around this, and one of them called Copilot may make you tense up a bit if you are a developer.
Developed by GitHub, this tool uses OpenAI algorithms and is a Visual Studio Code extension capable of writing code for you. It’s like auto-completion, except that instead of finishing your words, it will actually write complete functions for you.
To achieve this feat, Copilot was trained by absorbing billions of lines of code from public GitHub repositories in languages such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Typescript, among others.
Obviously, GitHub is not claiming that this tool will put developers out of work. At the moment, it is indeed an excellent assistant that will help you code more efficiently.
Copilot is also useful for exploring different possible approaches to writing your code, integrating unit tests seamlessly, transforming comments into code, and even generating repetitive code such as the following:
The more code Copilot is trained on, the more relevant it will become. I believe that in the long term, tools like Copilot will be integrated into NoCode services, which already allow people to create applications without needing to know how to code. This will produce quality and optimized code in most cases, without the need for specialized training in software development, which is exciting.
However, it’s true that some developers may face disruption as a result of these developments. But rest assured, you still have many years ahead of you before your boss comes to you and announces that they will replace you with a NoCode service that costs $12.99 per month.
So it’s important to think about and prepare for the future by developing new skills and staying up-to-date with the latest technologies.
Currently, Copilot is in private beta, but you can sign up for the waiting list to test this extension by visiting this website.
