Many companies chose cheap coders over good coders, even without AI. Companies I heard of have pretty bad code bases, and they don’t use AI for software development. Even my company preferred cheap coders and fast development, and the code base from that time is terrible, because our management didn’t know what good code is and why it’s important. For such companies, AI can make development even faster, and I doubt code quality will suffer.

It depends. AI can help writing good code. Or it can write bad code. It depends on the developer’s goals.

By saying “boilerplate”, I mean constructors, simple methods and even small classes that have some “standard” implementation. Copilot easily writes simple constructors, class initialization and destruction. It can suggest small method implementation, right after I added its declaration to related interface. Anything, that can be done almost without thinking of how to do it because there are standard practices, is handled by Copilot. It’s not perfect, it can write a whole method at a time, or only line by line, or refuse to suggest any code. But it often writes valid code.

Copilot shines where snippets/templates don’t work or make no sense. It can write constructors, simple methods, and even simple classes if something similar is found in the solution.

GitHub Copilot became my daily helper at work. While I’m not 100% satisfied with its code quality, I must admit it’s very handy at writing boilerplate code. A few days ago, I had to write code without having internet access, and it was so disappointing to write boilerplate code by hand. It’s an easy task, but it’s time-consuming and unpleasant.