https://github.blog/2021-06-29-introducing-github-copilot-ai-pair-programmer/
GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code and is significantly more capable than GPT-3 in code generation, in part, because it was trained on a data set that includes a much larger concentration of public source code.
Will Copilot or similar systems become ubiquitous in the next few years? Will they increase the speed of software development or AI research? Will they change the skills necessary for software development?
Is this the first big commercial application of the techniques that produced GPT-3?
For anyone who's used Copilot, what was your experience like?
If you go to the site, which the URL points to, you'll see that the docs give you the address which was used in your example. I tried sending a request to https and it works, but the certificate is expired. My guess is that this site hasn't been getting much attention from the administrators.
I don't know how the service determines what code to write. If you were telling me what you wanted to do, you might also need to tell me what sort of validation you would need. Are you placing this text in a database? Are you directly returning the text to the user to appear in a browser? Are you stuffing the text into a log file? Different uses may require different validation.
The service shouldn't stop people from reviewing the code. I suppose as with self driving tech, people will still shoot themselves in the foot.
The answer the original question, this is a trend which is only going to become more powerful and isn't going anywhere. Most programmers will likely need to set aside some time to see how this service works and how it may help.
At this point, I'm looking at this service as being another way to generate boilerplate code. But the caveat is that you'll have to spend more time reviewing code, as typical boilerplate is static. If you read the source of boilerplate generators, you'll know what you will get. Though you shouldn't trust any code you didn't write, you might be okay with somehow not looking closely at your generated code (validation and other security measures would likely still need to be added.)
I could see this service moving the line of quality of code to a higher level. Most programmers make worse mistakes than those you'll see from Google Co-pilot. Many of these programmers would benefit by seeing a generated second-opinion. At the top level of expertise, I doubt this would get much usage. Beginners use boilerplate. At the highest levels of expertise, boilerplate just gets in the way.