GitHub Copilot probably writes 30% of my code. In the future, it might even write more.
But what does that even mean? There are three sources of code in an end product:
- Your code
- Autogenerated code
- Other people's code
Most code is imported from someone else's open-source libraries. It's not uncommon for projects to import 100+ different packages.
Autogenerated code makes up a tiny percentage of code – mostly client/server stubs and schemas. But if you expand the definition to include code generated at runtime, the quantity is much larger. Languages create abstractions that generate more and more machine-readable instructions. Macros, syntactic sugar, and generics all generate code.
Today, Copilot helps us write code faster, but that's the tip of the iceberg. In the future, it will probably replace much of the autogenerated code. But it might help us solve the larger problem of sharing code.