GitHub Copilot

We like to think of coding as typing. It isn’t. Most of the time, we’re staring, stuck. Autocomplete shifts that balance. Instead of filling a blank page, we get nudged forward. AI (artificial intelligence) whispers the next word, the next function, sometimes the whole test case. She doesn’t always nail it. But she breaks silence, and that’s often enough.

What she does

GitHub Copilot is autocomplete on steroids. Start typing, and she suggests the rest. A for-loop, an API call, maybe a regex we’d rather not write ourselves. She doesn’t wait for us to ask. She just shows up. Sometimes she’s right, sometimes wildly off. That’s fine. Delete and move on.

Where she lives

She sits in our IDE, right where our cursor blinks. Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, even Neovim. No extra windows, no cut-and-paste gymnastics. She stays in context—our file, our project, our language. That’s the trick. She feels like part of the editor, not an add-on.

Why it matters

Typing less isn’t the win. Thinking less about boilerplate is. We save attention for choices that count. Do we structure the module this way or that? Do we test the edge case or ignore it? She handles the boring part, so we argue with ourselves about the interesting part.

The catch

She guesses. Guessing means mistakes. Wrong parameters, wrong imports, wrong assumptions. We have to check her. That’s work, but less than writing it all ourselves. The danger is getting lazy. If we stop reading carefully, bugs slip in dressed as help.

Us and her

We can’t outsource coding judgment. She’s a partner, not a replacement. Use her for the grunt work, keep the design decisions for us. That’s the line. When she writes code that we understand, we go faster. When she writes code we don’t, we stop and think. That pause is the point.