What's wrong with Github Copilot?

For those unfamiliar with Github Copilot, this is an AI tool developed by GitHub for coding assistance. It was trained on the billions of lines of code from open-source projects.

This tool can increase your coding pace significantly by auto-completing your code or writing functions based on comments.

Sounds cool. Of course! But there is a problem that is not visible to the naked eye. Let's start by investigating the AI problem in general.

AI revolution and its impact on the job market

According to an IBM survey, Bloomberg reports that “more than 120 million workers globally will need retraining in the next three years due to artificial intelligence’s impact on jobs.”

It is our reality, and it can be perceived in different ways. Still, by and large, this will lead us to the appearance of new professions to solve other problems that artificial intelligence will not yet be able to solve.

While we are pretty much ready for the job market changes there is another problem that we'll encounter.

Does Artificial intelligence make us dumb?

I have been working with the Github Copilot since its beta testing, and I got used to it so fast that it seems a copilot was with me since the beginning of my programming career.

And just recently, I had to go through an interview for the position of backend developer. I quickly made a test task, trying to complete it as close to the ideal as possible. At the time of the code review, I knew the entire project structure perfectly and could explain any line of code. While there were no questions for my test project, I started having difficulty with the practical part as soon as I turned off the copilot. I struggled with primitive tasks like "create a function that checks a word for being a palindrome."

How not to become a victim of AI

The answer to this question is simple: code without any helping tools. Perhaps it seems counterintuitive because all kinds of tools can increase your productivity sometimes, but it is necessary to keep your knowledge fresh. For myself, I found a way out of doing pet projects without a copilot.

I hope this article will help you to avoid the situation that happened to me.

Don't hesitate to leave a comment. I'm interested in your thoughts.