GitHub Copilot Agent Mode in VS-Code and VS2022 has become a reality and is available for trial. Microsoft is intensifying its marketing and information campaign for its new product. To all interested in AI-powered coding, I recommend the video ([1]):
GitHub Copilot for Skeptics Who Still Think AI is Overrated
https://youtube.com/watch?v=anI4Hr-ag80&embedable=true
If you're a developer curious about the future of AI-powered coding, you definitely want to see latest things that Microsoft has developed for us. And get your own opinion on it.
That said, I watched it with a healthy dose of skepticism — and here are my very personal impressions:
- Let’s be real — the main mission of these two guys on stage is to sell us the GitHub Copilot tool in the state it’s currently in. It’s a one-hour talk, and the most complex thing they showed was adjusting an HTML header. There was a lot of talk about automating workflows like GitHub and Jira, but in real life, problems are way more complicated. Based on past experience, their demo success doesn’t give me much confidence in the tool’s usability in the real world.
- Presentations like to show Gen-AI "solving and creating" short and deep coding C# problems like Factorials or Fibonacci numbers, but I think that AI thing has huge memory of solved problems and fast retrieval ability, so in such a demo, you do not see problem being solved, you see AI thing pulling from its memory solved problems code. They probably know they are misleading you… They just want to sell what they have NOW, because they have put huge money into it…
- To be honest, that Burke Holland guy came off a bit rude to the other presenter. He communicates his points clearly, but something about him wasn’t very likable. The whole show felt kind of strange — like, is he a comedian who writes code? As for the content, I feel like I need to try it all myself. I don’t trust public presentations anymore. GitHub Copilot has already wasted a lot of my time with verbose, off-topic answers. It often spits out more text than I can realistically read during a workday. Sometimes it's brilliant, but other times is useless.