In terms of difficulty, writing code is maybe on average a two out of ten.
On average, maintaining code you wrote recently is probably a three out of ten in terms of difficulty, and maintaining code somebody else wrote or code from a long time ago probably rises to around a five out of ten.
Debugging misbehaving code is probably a seven out of ten or higher.
GitHub Copilot is optimising the part of the process that was already the easiest, and makes the other parts harder because it moves you from the “I wrote this” path to the “somebody else wrote this” path.
Even during the initial write, it changes the writing process from programming (which is easy) to understanding somebody else’s code to ensure that it’s right before accepting the suggestion (which is much less easy). I just don’t understand how this is a net time/energy savings?
now, instead of copying off stackoverflow, it's gonna be off copilot. It will enable a lot more people to code who otherwise would not. Whether this is a good outcome or not...
With googling for SO answers I have to parse the question, find a modern answer (because the accepted one is 10 years old and won’t work), parse that and adapt it to my problem. With documentation I just search for what I need and go straight to solving my problem and I’ve never felt more productive.
I feel like people new to programming focus too much on a specific problem at hand instead of learning the problem solving themselves. I wish I would’ve learned to figure out the issue myself from the start.
you got the importance and focus wrong. People don't care for problem solving skills - they care for the specific problem being solved. That's why they pay someone to fix it.
They don't want to pay someone to "learn" problem solving (because the stakeholder don't care).
Stackoverflow immensely helped this sort of use-case - may be at the detriment of quality - but i cannot deny that copilot is going to accelerate this use-case.