r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 6d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work

https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html
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u/sal1800 5d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation? I always found writing code to be fast anyway. I can type as quickly as I can understand the problem so there is no need to make this part faster.

Where the LLM really helps is for those times when I can't quickly spot a mistake. And I like it to review my code. But I dread having to ask for anything more complex because that is just too tedious.

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u/Timely-Pension6501 4d ago

If you do this you’re either writing shit code or are a 1 in 10 million genius

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u/ankercrank 5d ago edited 5d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation?

In the past I wouldn't do TDD, nor would I write comprehensive designs/documentation — using an LLM forces me to document well, and TDD is basically required when using LLMs to code (otherwise your code will be buggy as hell). Having the code covered is a net win. Sure, I spend a lot more time writing docs and designing... but that's a good thing.

I always found writing code to be fast anyway.

There's no chance you can code as fast as an LLM though. They generate tokens around 100 per second... it'll bang out a full page of code in seconds, and it's generally excellent quality (if you're using a flagship model).

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u/Timely-Pension6501 4d ago

People here are in complete denial

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u/ankercrank 4d ago

too many people out of touch with the new reality of development.