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...
I could hire 50 juniors that can code tomorrow if I wanted to. But even with an unlimited budget, finding good devs that can make it through a 2 year project without coming out of it with a big ball of unmaintainable shit is difficult.
The gulf from beginner to expert is already big, and the more crutches you use early on, the bigger it's going to get. There's a lot of people that wash out of the industry before they reach the point of being able to comfortably build good software (and be solely responsible for it).
I think copilot is another item in a long list of things that's good for big businesses (who optimise heavily for getting passable results with 1,000 mediocre devs instead of 50 good ones) and terrible for individuals in the long run.