Github Copilot

I am really excited about GitHub Copilot, a AI code pair programming capability. While good editors do provide some inbuilt code completion features, this is the first one I used that leans on AI to suggest code completions.

I feel this is an untapped opportunity to assist developers in getting more productive. As with anything new it will take time to mature. The quality of the suggestions by the AI assist will depend on how widely uses the programming language is. As with anything else, you should review the code added thoroughly to make sure it is doing what you intend it to do.

Another evolution of this would be for suggested functions to have unit tests added automatically or the AI to suggest unit tests for existing classes or the AI being aware of the framework being used (say Spring or ExpressJS) and suggesting appropriate framework code. While this is not a low code solution, it is definitely building towards a future where an AI could write the code given a text description of the problem statement (NLP) or at least assisting with scaffolding an entire service (with all the required standards agreed by the team and telemetry built in). Excited to see the possibilities with this.