Game over… GitHub Copilot X announced

it is March 23 2023 and you are watchingthe code report well another day anotherstep towards the singularity GitHub justannounced copilot X their next-gencoding assistant powered by Bard or noexcuse me gpt4 and it makes the oldco-pilot look like a child's toy theseAI tools are like anabolic steroids thedevelopers using them get a hugeadvantage and within the next two yearsnobody coding professionally is going tobe Natty if you're someone who loves tocode like me or a student learning howto code you might feel a bit pessimisticright now all of our open source codestack Overflow answers and tutorialshave been used to build large languagemodels that are now being aggressivelydeployed to automate white-collar jobs Idrink your milkshakebut programming is not dead personally Ifeel extremely grateful to be livingthrough these times 150 years from nowwhen our heads are stored in a jar ofpreservative jelly we'll be telling ourgreat-great-great-grandkids how we livedthrough the great AI inflection point of2023 resistance is futile if you want tosurvive you have to be optimistic thesetools will only make us more powerful AIstill can't deliver a great product tothe end user and will need programmerswho understand how to build thesesystems but now they'll be able to buildthem 10 times faster thanks to AItooling it's a great time to be alive ifyou love building things the scary thingthough is that Microsoft issingle-handedly dominating the spacethey've been on a blitzkrieg attack thislast week releasing product afterproduct Bing chat co-pilot for officeBing image generator and now co-pilotacts you have to give Microsoft creditfor not killing off Bing years agodespite over a decade of people trashingit they also acquired GitHub and took amajor stake in open Ai and now in just aweek's time all of their products lookyears ahead of the competition Saudiajust gave us a free master class andbusiness strategy case in point GitHubcopilot X it's currently in technicalpreview so you can can't use it todaybut it has at least five game changingfeatures the big one is its built-inchat window with this tool you'll beable to highlight a block of code andask it for an explanation or ask it torefactor it or better yet have itgenerate some unit tests these arethings you can already do today withchat GPT but now it'll be highlyspecialized for coding problems directlyin your IDE but most importantly it'llhave the context of your actual codebase remember gpt4 can handle 25 000tokens versus only 3 000 tokens in GPT3.5 feature number two is copilot fordocumentation instead of going to theactual docs or stack Overflow you'll nowbe able to generate answers based on aspecific library's documentation they'reintegrating the docs for react Azure andmdn allowing you to generate answers andtutorials on the fly a feature thatterrifies me because it will make meobsolete as a programming instructor butfeature 3 is the one I'm most excitedabout voice activated copilot the needto be an extremely fast typist who canchurn out 150 words per minute in Vimwill be far less important in the AIprogramming ageafter use your hands that's like ababy's toy it's now possible to controlvs code and write code entirely fromvoice commands this is a feature I'vealways dreamed about because not only isit faster than typing but it allows youto write code when you otherwisecouldn't like when you're running on thetreadmill or on your commute to work thekeyboard won't become obsolete but it'llrevolutionize the way things get done inthe same way Alexa changed the waypeople do things in the householdfeature number four is copilot for pullrequests whenever I submit a pullrequest to an important project I have anervous breakdown trying to figure outthe description because why would anyonewant to merge my garbage code well nowcopilot can generate that descriptionfor you based on the changes that youmade to the code which were probablymade by AI anyway and finally we havefeature number five the copilot CLI AIautocompletion will not just happen inthe text editor but also in the terminalthere's no longer a need to memorizeendless Linux commands you just tell itwhat you want to do with a certainLibrary like ffmpeg and it will generatethe command along with an explanationfrom there you can run it or revise itif needed looks pretty awesome so whendo I get to use it well that I don'tknow I would say it's at least monthsaway from being ready for publicconsumption and that gives us a smallwindow to write the worst code wepossibly can and put it on GitHub dopoison the training data so all of usHTML programmers can keep our six-figurejobs and lastly I would like to saluteall the real programmers of the last 30years who wrote the billions of lines ofcode that make this Beast possible thecruel irony is that many of them wereLinux users who hated Microsoft butlittle did they know they were workingfor Microsoft for free the whole timethis has been the code report thanks forwatching and I will see you in the nextone