Why CoPilot Is Making Programmers Worse

One thing that’s true for problem solving skills: don’t use it, you lose it.

I've worked extensively as a translator between different languages. As in, not programming, normal languages. The whole part about erosion in your core skillset and even erosion in your language happens even with normal languages outside of a programming context. When I spent more than a year away from my home country, I started having trouble with just retaining my vocabulary in my native tongue. Took me a couple of weeks of being back home before I was back to normal. It's totally a thing.

Anyone else enthralled by the way ThePrimeTime highlights everything in a paragraph except the first and last characters?

Breaking: When People Stop Exercising, They Lose Fitness!!

LLMs make pretty good rubber ducks. Surprised it wasn’t discussed at all.

The biggest trend in programming for the last 10 years was "Become a dev in 3 months", well, some people believed it, now they call themselves programmers, not copilot fault, this "downfall" has been happening for a long time before LLMs.

Knowing how to code vs. using Copilot is like speaking Japanese vs. using Google Translate.

In my team we have a copilot “license”. Juniors don’t get to use it, and frankly we often turn it off for parts of our work, it just doesn’t do an amazing job apart from boiler plate and data manipulation.

Before I was a coder I was an artist & designer. My graphic design class year was the last with all analog coursework. We had to hand set type, make marks with rapidiograph pens to 1/128” precision, and layout pages for prepress with razors & tape. I had been using Photoshop, Quark Xpeess, Aldus Freehand, and 3DS Max on my own for ~5 years as had most designers & publishers so I wasn’t pleased. Control Z is my friend and wubbie. Fast forward 30 years and all the cool plugins & most of the desktop publishing tools have become Adobe rentalware, but I learned theory & techniques used to make things making learning new digital tools pretty straightforward. Explaining why skeuomorphic icons look like they do to folks under 45 is fun too.

My coworker keeps in memory countless details about past projects, often even those he hadn't even been involved with directly. Meanwhile my brain tosses the info out the window after sometimes even 3 months. Add that to the 'skill' of which I also forget a good portion constantly.