“Copilot has dramatically accelerated my coding, it’s hard to imagine going back to manual coding,” writes Andrej Karpathy. There is a whole buffet of tools to choose from that can do the coding for you, but GitHub Copilot has become the grammarly for coding. It is used by more than 1.5 million developers of all calibres.
On the other hand, some might say that it is making programmers more lazy and incompetent. Unlike with Copilot where users can put in the requirements of what needs to be done and have someone do the job, using Stack Overflow requires understanding of the fundamentals and finding the right methodology from trial and error.
Code Whisperer recently released a customisation update to make this process easier by generating specific code based on their private repositories. This further makes the job easier requiring only users to only verify and check the generated code.
Arguably, these are just tools that have become more sophisticated to improve the efficiency in getting things done. It is much like moving from a paper map to the one on a smartphone.
Computer Education in the age of AI
In a research conducted by the University of San Diego, professors from universities across nine countries were interviewed to understand their approach to adapting courses as students increasingly use AI coding assistance tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot.
In the short term, they were particularly concerned about preventing cheating. Sam Lau and Philip Guo, authors of the paper wrote, “Professors worry that an over-reliance on AI tools could stop students from thoroughly understanding programming fundamentals similar to using a calculator in a maths class without understanding decimal points.”
A dependence on these tools saw users take to social media and complain they can’t work when ChatGPT was down last month.
After the initial scare that Copilot will take over the work of programmers, it became quickly apparent that these tools were nothing more than an autocorrect and that it boosts the performance of developers who know what they’re doing.
There is staggering evidence that AI tools help students learn programming better and faster than teachers. One study by the university of Toronto looked at students who are being introduced to programming. They found that AI Coding Assistants like OpenAI Codex allowed novice programmers to perform better and faster with less frustration when writing code and did not reduce their performance on manual code modification or in the subsequent absence of AI code generators.
David J Malan’s popular CS50 course announced in June that they’re integrating AI to grade assignments and teach coding. It isn’t only Harvard but other Ivy League universities are also adopting AI to improve not only the students’ but also to make it easier on the teacher.
Stanford developed an AI teaching tool that gives students feedback on their homework. Chris Piech, the assistant professor said, “The one thing we couldn’t really do is scale the feedback. We can scale instruction and content but we couldn’t really scale feedback.”
Boon or bane?
There still are concerns with AI coding helper tools. Some worry that they’ll introduce, and reinforce, winner-takes-all dynamics, very few companies have the data (in this case, the billions of lines of code) to build tools like this, so creating a competitor to Copilot will be challenging. Recently Zoho announced they’re building a similar ‘Programmer Productivity’ platform for code generation.
GitHub Copilot’s accuracy in its responses is around 26%, which is very poor if users don’t already have a good understanding of the basic concepts. ChatGPT has a higher rate of accuracy though it may contain subtle bugs that are missed by beginners.
These tools are more useful to learn and experiment with, as a reddit user puts it, “I’ve literally spent 30 minutes just asking it what does this do, why did you do that, why didn’t you do this and it’s like having a big brother programmer to explain everything.” Another benefit is that using AI tools makes it easy to learn new programming languages once you’re familiar with one.
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