Github Copilot - Strengths and Weaknesses
Channel: Warwick RSE
Date: 2023-05-04

We've recently been playing around with Github Copilot, billed as an AI based pair programmer to help you with your development. We've found real strengths and some serious weaknesses in the system and in this quick video show one serious error in code that it generates that it will generate repeatedly, while also showing that it can automate busywork very usefully. 

Our general opinion so far? It is very helpful for writing code that can be validated for correctness easily but makes too many mistakes to use it to write code that would take a lot of effort to guarantee correctness of. We don't think that AI programming is going to replace humans for a long while yet.