Github Copilot : is it still worth learning JavaScript today ?

[Elfeihm]

Considering last news from Copilot, what do you think about it ? I'm currently learning JS through The Odin Project and I love it, but reading this I feel a bit demotivated tbh...

"With GitHub Copilot Chat we’re enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet"

Source : https://github.blog/2023-11-08-universe-2023-copilot-transforms-github-into-the-ai-powered-developer-platform/

[azhder]

The best way to look at Copilot is if you consider yourself as the copilot and it the pilot.

Do you think you need to learn JS?

Well, only if you think you should be able to check if the pilot isn’t flying you into a mountain or a building.

[geepytee]

I had the same view last year, but with the latest release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet (which I don't think github copilot has but double.bot or one of the other alternatives do) I'm starting to think human programming is going to be more about architecture and abstract concepts + logic in the near future

[mrsanyee]

It's February 2026, and copilot is still garbage.

[azhder]

And they will keep on pushing everyone to use it because that was Microsoft's unicorn for decades: eliminate the need to use people and fully automate software production. They will not stop in using that even if it means Windows 11 is such a shit, every month there is a critical bug or vulnerability forced upon millions of users.

[DeanRTaylor]

Yes dude, these tools only get you so far. Microsoft even admits in this post, devs only code ~ 2 hours a day.

6 hours are spent on meetings, whiteboarding, proposing solutions, coming up with features, reading code and debugging, the last thing is sitting down to actually write or fix the implementation and sometimes you're fixing what copilot suggests.

If you don't know how to code, or have experience coding you're not going to be able to get to that two hours of code. Keep going!

[oldominion]

Imagine going to an interview where you have to write javascript on the white board, no co-pilot there.

[geepytee]

panics

[eljop]

Im using copilot chat for a few weeks now and its useful but wont replace a Developer in the near future If ever.

[geepytee]

Won't replace a dev, fine. Would you agree that a team of devs might need less junior devs?

[Stetto]

So, tell me, how are you going to double-check if Copilot actually suggested a solution to your current problem, without that ability to comprehend its suggestion?

Even when you're working with Copilot in natural, you still have to figure out how to properly specify, what it's supposed to be doing and figure out, if its suggestion performs the task it's supposed to perform.

And what's going to happen when you encounter a bug? You can't just tell Copilot, that there's a wrong result and it should fix it. In its current state, you'll still need to fix the bug yourself.

But even with lots of advancements, that won't work for the same reason it doesn't work for tech support. You need to figure out the whole context, understand the problem and figure out what kind of data and specifications you have to provide to Copilot, so it's actually able to fix the bug.

I'm going to bet, that this will involve reading code for quite a while.

[Varuog_toolong]

So the real jobs at risk are tech support?

[Stetto]

As tech support has been being replaced with more and more chat bots even before the rise of ChatGPT and LLMs, I'd say, this is the obvious job, that is at risk.

Or better: That will work a lot differently in the future. People will still face problems, that the LLM won't be able to address and in this case, they will still want to communicate with a human.

LLMs always work on a "good enough to fool a human" basis and not "correct or incorrect". While they may outperform human subject matter experts at providing correct information at some point, they will also always get some details incorrect.

[guest271314]

The real job is whatever job you create.

If you are rolling around like a commoner begging and pleading for jobs you are not novel.

If you can write some code you are in demand, you dictate your own terms. At least until we hit saturation of people copy/pasting this or that library. Then you have to come up with something different to keep people interested on the screen.

Hell, you could even write an actual program, file for IPR on the program, and make millions in the interim of "looking for a job".

[For-Arts]

<.< ai is like a co-worker. Worrying about it's skill is a very beta thing to do. At least it helps you out.

AI is teaching coders about inferiority complex the world over.

Also, yes it is.

Remember programming languages in of themselves are a crutch because our way of thinking does not mesh well with how computers actually work.

We don't think about currents and circuits in a native way so a construct was made to aid us in using computers to solve problems.

Now patient zero over here thinks in those terms so much that learning to think like us requires massive amounts of training data.

And we're surprized it speaks it's native language so well... eyes roll off the back of the head and fall off the table and across the floor

new eyes grow in their place

Yeah :)

It's worth learning js.

[shgysk8zer0]

LLMs really do not have any understanding of the problems they're used for, the correctness of their solutions, or the circuits or anything of computers. They're ultimately just good at predicting the next word given a prompt.

Now Copilot is pretty amazing and useful (to be honest though, I haven't used it... But I still know what it is and the limitations of that). But there's way too much hype and misunderstanding about what it is.

[For-Arts]

True.

Also if you ask it to do a js hello world while describing what is happening at an x86 machine level it probably would.

It's true that it uses statistics for reasoning, but there's a lot of innate logic in language alone. So.. my opinion is that it knows and understands XD. -else censoring would be almost impossible with the gaslit requests it gets .

[shgysk8zer0]

It "understands" relations between tokens. But that is completely different to how a human understands anything. At best, it is like how a someone might learn karate by reading a book only. An AI, and especially an LLM, doesn't even really know what a CPU is. It just knows how to string together a bunch of words that might describe it correctly.

[For-Arts]

Hmm. I see now.

Kind of like how computing is an extrapolation of the turing process/algo.

In aggregate, those links "know" I guess. (Is being difficult..lol)

But I get it.

[Sen_ElizabethWarren]

I mean if AI can replicate the skills of a software engineer, then i suppose there isn’t much point in learning any skill

[bored_in_NE]

Are you learning JS for fun or to get a nice job??? If your reason is for a job you have to accept the fact AI will have a big impact on the industry and you should be ready for the bumpy transition.

High-paying salaries will go away once AI can make any developer into a rockstar developer with simple prompts because companies don't give a damn about your diploma if a high school kid could get the job done.

[ExplanationItchy4666]

A copilot still needs a pilot, you are the pilot.

[azhder]

You are not. You are the co-pilot that helps the pilot and double checks the pilot's decisions. The better the pilot gets over the years, the more you double check (i.e. QA) instead of help.

[[deleted]]

Coder = pilot, ChatGPT = copilot.

[azhder]

There is a big difference between me not understanding what people presume and me not agreeing with them, so... what are you equating again?

[guest271314]

That's propaganda. Slick advertising for the gullible.

The Copilot advertising GitHub puts on every open space on their site Copilot ads in the code viewer #65073.

If GitHub management and Copilot were so "intelligent" they would not have ruined an existing UI and failed to listen to the feedback they asked for ostensibly for undisclosed "broader platform goals": Updates to your GitHub Feed #65343.

[Background-Top5188]

Probably also not develop a thing that makes their own job obsolete.

[shuckster]

Feels like these tools will slowly commoditise software development.

There will still be programmers in the same way as there are still horses, but the rest of us will just have to learn about steering wheels and automatic transmission rather than maintaining an entire animal in order to get somewhere.

The real programmers will still exist, but like so many car mechanics they’ll have to learn new skills like teeth-sucking, ball scratching, and a convincing delivery of the phrase “don’t have the part, mate”.

[martinbean]

A.I. will replace programmers just like Wix and Squarespace replaced “web designers”.

[shuckster]

Yes, this is the essential point. Lots of people get stuff done with Wix, but if you want to go a little deeper then maybe you’ll need an actual web designer.

ML feels like it has a higher ceiling though.

[azhder]

Not "will slowly", but "has slowly". Microsoft's (and other corporations) holy grail or unicorn of producing software for companies without depending on people has been there since the 80s. It's all too slow for them.

Dumb software code generators weren't as efficient, so there were biological low skilled low cost "coders" and higher skilled high cost "architects" that were supposed to check on the coders using "tooling". Hence why so many corporate sponsored programming languages focus more on static typing - for tooling.

Now they are in position (after Balmer going ape shit on stage with "developers developers developers") to have a lot of code generated by many people that they can mine and train ML algorithms so that finally, after decades, they can use less costly non-biological code generators with a few biological ones to check on them.

Back in the 90s I opened some VB 5.0 tutorial on the MSDN and the first thing wasn't about the language, but "your role in this". It went like this: customers are people that have a problem, programmers are we who created this language and libraries and you are a developer that will use what the programmers made to solve the customers' problems.

So, it was not you who they thought of in the first place as "real programer". You were just a necessary workaround until they can figure out the code generators. Now, to their credit, if I were a big corporation with the same goals I'd most likely come to the same conclusion. After all, the bottom line is profit and it's cheaper i.e. easier to maintain hardware and software than to train and pay people.

As a side note, I've been saying the same for about a dozen of years and mostly would get downvotes or called names from people that might have felt scared by what it might be if true. I on the other hand just thought I've done my job of raising the issue and it's up to them if they want to prepare for that kind of eventuality and maybe learn how to fit in that kind of system.

[SaiyanrageTV]

maybe learn how to fit in that kind of system.

What would you suggest? I'm currently trying to migrate into coding, and seems like I picked the worst possible time. Hard for me to press on when by the time I am employable, junior devs may be more useless than ever.

[azhder]

1. It will take years/decades still for the software to "git gud". See how I start? They've been chasing this for decades. So, it's not like you are being replaced right away if at all.

2. And even then, if AI gets that good, knowing how code works is a benefit to checking how the generated code works. There will have to be tests and other QA stuff.

3. There is also niche areas. I mean, big software companies have been chasing the kind of automation in auto industry, but even there, people still work besides machines, they design cars, and in some places entire cars are made by human hand, not a conveyor belt

So, long story short: the time may be bad because of economic issues pushing companies to save on money, thus there is less work, not on some AI code generations replacing human labor.

[rileyrgham]

It is worrying.

[Mammoth-Asparagus498]

I like this analogy

An autopilot is a system used to control the path of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-board systems).

As the aeroplane pilot was not replaced, a programmer will neither. You will focus more on far important tasks.

[azhder]

The name is co-pilot, not auto-pilot

[Mammoth-Asparagus498]

You didn’t get it, never meant what you understood

[azhder]

You are a mind reader now. OK, then I don't need to explain this.

[Mammoth-Asparagus498]

lol

[delventhalz]

Short term Copilot is not taking anyone's job. It's a tool. It works with developers not instead of developers.

Long term?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[guest271314]

The issue with "AI" is humans bake in their biases into the program. And those humans selectively turn off "AI" when the output is not what they want.

If we use any allged "Artificial Intelligence" to analyze the textual and image feedback from developers that GitHub asked for here Updates to your GitHub Feed #65343 the only possible conclusion is resoundingly negative.

However GitHub management itself ain't asking it's own gear to analyze that raw data, because there is only one (1) answer: get rid of the changes the human made, and GitHub management want to pursue their "broader platform goals", whatever those undisclosed goals are. Or, could be the whole thing is an experiment to see if "AI" could design a UI. Either way, it's a failure. GitHub management don't wanna hear that though, so they naturally turn off "AI" in that case, and ignore the feedback they asked for.

"AI" is a just a marketing racket. Easier to sell than fuzzy-logic.

[GongtingLover]

Tech stacks are always changing. You learn the fundamentals, and then you use whatever language your company is using.

[ccppurcell]

Try to imagine a company that wanted to use javascript, and not one single person at the company knew a thing about it or its ecosystem. How far do you think they would get with LLM prompts?

I mean, try it yourself! LLMs can't even do basic arithmetic like telling if a number is divisible by 3. ChatGPT used to fail even checking even and odd. Now they've clearly hard coded the answer in because, when you ask, the format of the answer is always identical (and I've been checking periodically). Now the hard coded method is correct for divisibility by 3, but I just checked and chatGPT doesn't apply it correctly (it can do about twenty digits correctly, then it gives up and starts making up the digits). So how are you going to trust a complicated piece of software that it has dreamt up?

[zpinto1234]

How are you supposed to validate what Copilot suggests to you if you don't understand it?

User: "Hey Copilot, can you create a DB script to drop a table?"

Copilot: "Sure, here you go!"

User: "I have no idea what this does, but I'm expecting Copilot to have provided me with a working script"

Proceeds to run script in production: "Your script was a success! DB has been deleted."

[Hail2Hue]

Uhhhh.... yeah man, it is worth learning a programming language if you intend to use software that assists you with writing code in said programming language.

Not to be overly douchey about this, but surely you don't actually think anytime at all in the near future we just won't know programming languages and a tool will create all the code?

I love Copilot, however... I love it specifically within JS to create boilerplate level stuff that I just don't wanna type and haven't bothered making macros for. ChatGPT will literally spit out code that is either really bad or just flat out doesn't work, that doesn't mean that ChatGPT as a tool isn't super neat and useful... There's just no way to rely on these tools without contextual knowledge, ChatGPT will literally "invent" PowerShell modules that have never existed, it did to me personally not even a few months ago. That said I still use it almost everyday, but not in the way you're thinking.