Even though a fellow developer argued this with him, stating, "And what about code done by humans? It's also full of bugs and takes a lot of time to be done", the prior is still not convinced.
He insists that "Code done by a human has a human paying attention as they go along and thinking things through." While this might be a very good point to reflect on, GitHub Copilot also allows checking the suggested code before adding it to your project.
Another serious issue GitHub Copilot is facing is security. On August 20, 2021, Cornell University published a paper titled "An Empirical Cybersecurity Evaluation of GitHub Copilot's Code Contributions." The authors of the report, Hammond Pearce, Baleegh Ahmad, Benjamin Tan, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Ramesh Karri, claimed that they "explore[d] Copilot's performance on three distinct code generation axes - examining how it performs given diversity of weaknesses, diversity of prompts, and diversity of domains."
Of the 89 scenarios and 1,692 programs generated, the team revealed that an alarming 40% of the code is vulnerable. The paper advised that developers using the GitHub Copilot take steps to minimize the introduction of weak code into their projects.
While some of the allegations raised against the Copilot may be valid, others are fueled by fear and uncertainty of AI taking over the developer’s job.
Sam Altman also tweeted: "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects."
Suggesting code snippets to developers as they write code invalidates the need for an assistant, and evolution might mean many things. However, chances that AI would replace the main developer are considered slim, in the nearest future, at least.
Even if this will be the case, the scope of programming is a dynamic and never-ending one making it almost impossible for any machine to single-handedly write code that can solve real-life issues, at least in the foreseeable future.
The GitHub Copilot is built as an advanced code suggestion tool to help developers write code faster and eliminate boring, repetitive tasks. It's still in its early stages, and there's still room for many improvements to be made to make it an acceptable and secure developer's pair programmer.