A developer has a love-hate relationship with coding. If you are a coder, then you know the joys of coding and also the pains and frustrations associated with it.

Fixing a web page, a complex function, or a bug will bring great joy and a high like no other. At the same time, slower troubleshooting or writing repeated code becomes frustrating. Sometimes, it can take hours or days of debugging to find a wrong loop or misplaced braces.

When you work on time-bound projects, the ticking clock can be overwhelming. And it could take a mental and physical toll on your body.

Enter GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant. It’s changing how developers write code and solve problems.

Many in the industry believe that GitHub Copilot is the doom of coders and programmers. No longer will coders be required. This has created unnecessary panic among the developer community.

However, the fear is exaggerated. GitHub Copilot isn’t going to wipe out coding jobs but rather is going to make coding more enjoyable, rewarding, and less frustrating.

GitHub Copilot is not going to kill all the coding jobs.

You’ve probably heard of GitHub Copilot and its many features. It offers code completion, scaffolding, refactoring, troubleshooting, and NLP support. Plus, it easily integrates with IDEs like Visual Studio Code through extensions, giving users a great experience.

But if you haven’t heard about GitHub Copilot until now, then go ahead and look here for details.

What is GitHub Copilot?

Features of GitHub Copilot

Get started quickly with GitHub Copilot 101

Also, there are a bunch of courses on GitHub Copilot. You can go through them, and in a few hours, you should know enough to start using it.

How does GitHub Copilot Help?

But why do I say that it’s making coding more fun instead of killing jobs, and how does it really help?

1. More Focus on Business Requirements – If a developer is stuck on a technical issue, he is losing time. This time is needed to implement the core business logic. He compromises on code quality, testing, verification, and docs. With GC handling the basic coding tasks and troubleshooting, developers can focus on core business needs and code quality. This will lead to more robust, well-tested applications. Pro Tip: GitHub Copilot even takes care of writing the unit test cases and documentation for you, so there are more effort savings.
2. Pair Programmer – Pair programming is an old and proven concept. The practical problem was when the pair was not the right fit. Or one of the members wasn’t there late at night while the other one was stuck with a problem. GitHub Copilot (GC) is the pair programmer who knows the best practices, has a wide knowledge of coding practices, never gets tired, never takes a break, and can see the code issues clearly even late at night. So you no longer have to fight the coding battles alone.
3. Boilerplate Templates – Before boilerplate templates became standard, boilerplate code often came from existing projects or applications. No one ever coded the base project from the ground up. Then came the boilerplate templates in frameworks and libraries. Now, GC offers an easier way to start projects in the IDE. It adds dependencies and generates standard code.
4. Understanding the Code – Usually, when a developer is onboarded onto a project with an existing code base, he struggles to understand the code. The documentation standards of most projects are not up to the mark. Also, different modules are coded by different developers, some of whom have moved on. This makes life very difficult for the incoming developer, and his making any fixes to the codebase without understanding the context and impact raises the risks. GC now provides that help. No matter the coding style, naming convention, or complex functions, it can explain all the code. It can even suggest the impact in most places in the code.
5. Makes You a Better Programmer – There are 2 ways to become a better programmer: continuously practice and learn from the better ones. Not everyone has the luxury of having a good mentor or support system, and while coding, they don’t often understand if the way they are coding is the best or if there are better ways of doing it. GitHub Copilot helps here too. It can suggest different and better ways of writing the code. It has learned from some great online repositories and follows the best practices for coding. One can learn from the code snippets and changes suggested by it, and over time can start to incorporate them into their coding style.

GitHub Copilot: You Are Still the Pilot

GitHub Copilot is a great assist tool, and it should be seen as such. In the past few decades, coding has seen many innovations. These include server components, ready-made libraries, pre-built pages, frameworks, and no-code platforms. They can make some aspects of coding easier and faster. But they can’t eliminate the need for developers. They add value by addressing core business needs and using their real-world experience.

The key is to use GC as a tireless aid. It suggests the best approaches and can complete code snippets. But don’t rely on it completely. Whatever code is written by GC should be well understood by the developers and modified according to their needs. At the end of the day, you are still the code pilot.

Let me know your thoughts and experience with GitHub Copilot.