Recently Github starting to send out invites for Copilot. It’s a AI assisted code generator for several different languages. For python, it will generate efficient code according to docstring the programmer wrote. For other languages, it will infer from the function declaration. I tested on Leetcode, and the time and space complexity is quite good. Although it struggle with some of the hardest tasks, it’s fulfills the promise it claims to do.

Should you use it though? The way the model is trained, it uses docstring and public available code. There is the obvious licensing issues. Can you use someone’s code, if they did not explicitly state it’s open source, even if it’s a public repository. There have been cases already discovered that have personal info in the comments of code, or in the embedded HTML. That makes people think twice about using it if they might sued later.

Another point is should you use it even if it’s legal. For now, it only generate a single function. I haven’t seen it write a complete class or generate scripts with folder structure. When the program gets more complicated, a lot of the higher CS concepts like cohesion, coupling, and usage of design patterns are more import than writing an efficient function. Therefore, I would put this as a tool for beginner to learn programming than an actual tool for advanced programmer to deploy. I have been learning and debating about when to use object oriented programming and when to use functional programming. I found the following resources to be helpful. For now, I’m still in the camp of learning better structure than blindly using Copilot to generate programs.

#ArjanCodes channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsvftkbbrR0&list=PLC0nd42SBTaNuP4iB4L6SJlMaHE71FG6N&index=7

Python 3 Objecte Oriented Programming (book): https://www.packtpub.com/product/python-3-object-oriented-programming-third-edition/9781789615852