• Kissaki@programming.dev
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    7 hours ago

    It’s a tool that adds yet more complexity to our profession. More choice, more cost-benefit-analysis, more risk assessment, more shitty stuff to inherit and fix, more ability for shitty code producers to hide incompetence, more product and data policy analysis, more publisher trustworthyness and safety analysis, more concerns regarding what tooling sends into the cloud and what it can access and do locally, a significant “cheap and fast solution” you will be compared against requiring more communication, explanation, justification, new attack vectors to protect against, …

    My team and some others [can] use Copilot at my workplace. I haven’t had or seen significant gains. Only very selectively. Some other senior devs I trust are also skeptical/selective. We see the potential opportunities, but they’re not new solutions. Some other colleagues are more enthusiastic.

    What it does is make me question bad code from review request authors. Whether they missed it, are this unobservant, or incapable, or used AI. Quality, trustworthyness, and diligence are concerns anyway, but now I can’t really assess how much care and understanding they actually take, if they’re misled, take shortcuts, and how that changes over time - other than asking of course.

    I’m not scared for my job. It already changed the field and industry, but not in a net quality productivity gain. And will continue to in one way or another. There are many parts of and surrounding software development that it can’t do well.