The truth about Github Copilot

Is Github Copilot going to replace developers? Is AI going to replace developers in the future? Well, sure it will!

After the trial release of Github Copilot this topic started to get on fire in social media as the question/fear of replacement attacked the developer’s world. We are living in a world full of demand for developers! We cannot be replaced! I think we were so settled that this news moved the ground below us.

The world is always pushing evolution forward.

After all, not very long ago, people lived with kerosene lamps in their houses, had to do the harvest manually and factories were full of people working by hand.

Many jobs disappeared but new ones were created, remember, not even computers existed less than a century ago, but that our job as developers is young doesn’t mean it is not vulnerable to evolution.

Is this replacement going to happen in the near future? Probably not. AI has a long journey in front and there are many easier things to automate that haven’t been automated yet.

Let’s remember that development is a creative job. Nobody of us creates serial software, it is a pretty handcrafted job, and that’s why Github named it “copilot”, letting us now clearly that we are the pilots of this trip.

So, as this moment eventually will come, is there a way to be prepared for this? Yes, obviously, it is a simple advice

Keep learning new things, and most importantly, assure your children have what they need to learn new things.

Hands are being replaced by brain, so it is important to prepare ourselves and our children for brain jobs. Countries that are not taking this into account are in a big problem as they will not be able to recover quickly investing in machinery to generate jobs and make people hired as they may could in the past. In the future, people will need to be more qualified, and that’s a challenge that has to be addressed now.