Unintentional copyright violations and “leaking” of secrets people accidentally committed to public repos aside, my main issue with Copilot is that I don’t think it actually makes coding easier.<p>Everyone knows it’s usually far easier to write code than to read code. Writing code is a nonlinear process: you don’t start from the first character and write everything out in one single pass. Instead, the logic of the code evolves nonlinearly—add a bit here, remove a bit there, restructure a bit over there. Good code is written such that it can be mostly understood in a single pass, but this is not always possible. For example, understanding function calls requires jumping around the code to where the function is defined (and often deeper down the stack). Understanding a conditional with multiple branches requires first reading all the conditional predicates before reading the code blocks they lead to.<p>Reading, on the other hand, is naturally a linear process. Understanding code requires reconstructing the nonlinear flow though it, and the nonlinear thought process used to write it in the first place. This is why constant communication between partners during pair programming is essential—if too much unexplained code gets dumped on a partner, figuring out how it works takes longer than just writing it themself.<p>Copilot is like pair programming with a completely incommunicative partner who can’t walk you through the code they just wrote. You therefore still have to review most of it manually, which takes much longer than writing it yourself in the first place.