Thoughts
I'm very interested to see GitHub Copilot on the top of HackerNews, and surprised at the glowing comments.
There's a quote that goes, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” Even supposing that GitHub could auto-generate a perfect solution to the problem for me, it's more difficult (even if it's not more time consuming) for my mind to parse, read, and verify that code works, than for me to come up with the solution myself.
I guess, people are comparing this to an improved, complicated, tab-completion. I use tab completion very rarely. In the last year, I've written more code in Vim (with minimal plugins) than IntelliJ. So a lot of the arguments come back to that, whether any sort of assistance is a good thing. My stance is that if your language or library has so much boilerplate that autocomplete is useful, then your language/library is bad.
I don't know, I'm tempted to download VS code and give it a shot, because I do want to write code quicker. I guess what I'm saying is that my bottleneck is not the speed of my keystrokes, so I don't know if this will speed anything up. On the other hand, GitHub claims that working with this assistant is a good way of learning an unfamiliar language.