Game over… GitHub Copilot X announced

Key Takeaways

it is March 23 2023 and you are watching the code report well another day another step towards the singularity GitHub just announced copilot X their next-gen coding assistant powered by Bard or no excuse me gpt4 and it makes the old co-pilot look like a child's toy these AI tools are like anabolic steroids the developers using them get a huge advantage and within the next two years nobody coding professionally is going to be Natty if you're someone who loves to code like me or a student learning how to code you might feel a bit pessimistic right now all of our open source code stack Overflow answers and tutorials have been used to build large language models that are now being aggressively deployed to automate white-collar jobs I drink your milkshake but programming is not dead personally I feel extremely grateful to be living through these times 150 years from now when our heads are stored in a jar of preservative jelly we'll be telling our great-great-great-grandkids how we lived through the great AI inflection point of 2023 resistance is futile if you want to survive you have to be optimistic these tools will only make us more powerful AI still can't deliver a great product to the end user and will need programmers who understand how to build these systems but now they'll be able to build them 10 times faster thanks to AI tooling it's a great time to be alive if you love building things the scary thing though is that Microsoft is single-handedly dominating the space they've been on a blitzkrieg attack this last week releasing product after product Bing chat co-pilot for office Bing image generator and now co-pilot acts you have to give Microsoft credit for not killing off Bing years ago despite over a decade of people trashing it they also acquired GitHub and took a major stake in open Ai and now in just a week's time all of their products look years ahead of the competition Saudia just gave us a free master class and business strategy case in point GitHub copilot X it's currently in technical preview so you can can't use it today but it has at least five game changing features the big one is its built-in chat window with this tool you'll be able to highlight a block of code and ask it for an explanation or ask it to refactor it or better yet have it generate some unit tests these are things you can already do today with chat GPT but now it'll be highly specialized for coding problems directly in your IDE but most importantly it'll have the context of your actual code base remember gpt4 can handle 25 000 tokens versus only 3 000 tokens in GPT 3.5 feature number two is copilot for documentation instead of going to the actual docs or stack Overflow you'll now be able to generate answers based on a specific library's documentation they're integrating the docs for react Azure and mdn allowing you to generate answers and tutorials on the fly a feature that terrifies me because it will make me obsolete as a programming instructor but feature 3 is the one I'm most excited about voice activated copilot the need to be an extremely fast typist who can churn out 150 words per minute in Vim will be far less important in the AI programming age after use your hands that's like a baby's toy it's now possible to control vs code and write code entirely from voice commands this is a feature I've always dreamed about because not only is it faster than typing but it allows you to write code when you otherwise couldn't like when you're running on the treadmill or on your commute to work the keyboard won't become obsolete but it'll revolutionize the way things get done in the same way Alexa changed the way people do things in the household feature number four is copilot for pull requests whenever I submit a pull request to an important project I have a nervous breakdown trying to figure out the description because why would anyone want to merge my garbage code well now copilot can generate that description for you based on the changes that you made to the code which were probably made by AI anyway and finally we have feature number five the copilot CLI AI autocompletion will not just happen in the text editor but also in the terminal there's no longer a need to memorize endless Linux commands you just tell it what you want to do with a certain Library like ffmpeg and it will generate the command along with an explanation from there you can run it or revise it if needed looks pretty awesome so when do I get to use it well that I don't know I would say it's at least months away from being ready for public consumption and that gives us a small window to write the worst code we possibly can and put it on GitHub do poison the training data so all of us HTML programmers can keep our six-figure jobs and lastly I would like to salute all the real programmers of the last 30 years who wrote the billions of lines of code that make this Beast possible the cruel irony is that many of them were Linux users who hated Microsoft but little did they know they were working for Microsoft for free the whole time this has been the code report thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one