GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens
259 comments
·February 6, 2025diggan
suyash
The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say
"We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests."
- Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear.
nozzlegear
> it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests.
I hope I can turn this feature off, i.e. that it's not a feature other users can use on my repositories. I'm already getting AI slop comments suggesting unhelpful fixes on my open source projects, I don't need "the anointed one" sending over slop as well – while replacing the work of real humans, to boot.
zzo38computer
I thought there are restrictions about who can assign issues and who they can be assigned to? So, I would not expect that other users would be able to use it on your repositories (unless an exception is made, but I think it would be better if an exception is not made, so that other users can't use this feature on your repositories).
throw83288
> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear.
Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement.
It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my entire field that I've dreamed about for the past decade isn't about to get torched. With the pace that this field is getting solved I probably won't even have enough time to "pivot" to anything before they also get solved or upturned as well.
Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve I've seen. 4 years ago these models weren't capable of stringing together a TODO app.
I really, really want to be wrong. I really do.
mywittyname
I've been in the industry long enough to have been around for a few crashes. My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever.
I don't think LLMs are fundamentally more threatening than off shore developers were. Sure, we lost jobs during that time, but businesses realized eventually that the productivity was low and they wanted low level people who were responsible.
I think that will continue. We'll all learn to control these agents and review their code, but ultimately, someone needs to be responsible for these agents, reviewing what they produce and fixing any shitshows they produce.
I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.
toprerules
This must be your first hype cycle then. Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before. There's always a 10% gap that makes it impossible to fully close the gap between needing a programmer and a machine doing the work. Nothing about the current evolution of LLMs suggests that they are close to solving this. The current messaging is basically, look how far we got this time, we will for sure reach AGI or full replaceability by throwing X more dollars at the problem.
mystified5016
It will be fine. It may not be what you expected, and it may be harder than you expected, but programming and software engineering won't go away. The job is changing and we all have to either change with it or find something else.
Typist used to be a career. People's entire jobs revolved around being able to operate a typewriter quickly. That skill became obsolete as computers were introduced, but the role didn't go away (for a long time anyway). Plenty typists learned to use computers and kept doing transcription or secretarial work like they always had done. Some refused to learn and took other career paths while a new generation of computer users came in.
This has happened quite frequently in this industry. The skills we use now are about to be made obsolete, but our roles will still largely exist.
The scary part is that we know right now that our skills are about to be obsolescent, but we don't yet know what the next thing is actually going to be. It's hard to prepare.
I'm still fairly early in my career. I plan to cope by learning how to use these new AI tools. My core engineering skills will always be useful to some degree, but I have to stay with the times to stay competitive. That's it, that's the plan. Learn about the new thing as it's being built and try to stay ready.
rurp
In addition to the good responses you've gotten about not overreacting to hype cycles I'll add that you should also try to spend less time worrying about the unknown. I understand the appeal of a straightforward career path of college major -> internship -> junior role -> mid-level -> senior all in the same field. That works out great for many people, but you should also be aware that there are a lot, and I mean a lot of people whose path ended up looking nothing like that and are leading happy comfortable lives.
Even if the worst case happens and the field gets wrecked by AI it won't be the end of the world. There will always be work for smart and reliable people. You might end up having to learn some new skills you weren't expecting to, but hey that's life. I have quite a bit of sympathy for someone with 30-40 years of experience who sees their career swiped away; retooling and getting hired in a new area can be quite hard at that stage. But for someone in their early 20s? There's absolutely nothing that can prevent you from adapting to whatever the new economy looks like in a few years.
konart
>Call me a doomsday prepper
>Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs.
Don't worry. As the other commenter said it: we've seen it all a few times already.
I clearly remember how some people reacted to Ruby on Rails as if it's going to replace them just because it provides... well a framework.
LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc.
People who's main job was creating landing pages and simple shops might be in trouble.
nickstinemates
If you want to thrive in this world you need to change your attitude ASAP. New tech waves happen all of the time. Embracing them is the path.
sangnoir
> Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve.
Are the current economics viable indefinitely? I think not. This AI investment exuberance will be curbed as soon as investors start demanding returns, and we've already seen harbingers of that (the Deep Seek market scare). What appears to be a quadratic growth curve inevitably turns out to be sigmoid.
Right now, the Hype train is at maximum speed and seems unstoppable. Despite the early hype, the Internet didn't replace colleges or brick and mortar stores[1], iPads didn't kill computers[2], and AI won't replace software engineers. This is not to say there will be no impact, but it's being oversold.
1. Khan academy and Amazon notwithstanding. But physical retail stores are still here and doing okay, and have adjusted to leveraging the new paradigm.
2. Leading up to peak iPad, it was believable that the iPad would kill PCs - it was an unstoppable juggernaut lifting Apple profits to record heights https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-21/ipad-the-...
fhd2
I could tell you not to worry, but I don't think I will.
How about embracing it? Think it all the way through: If software development completely disappears as a profession, what impact would it have on other possible jobs, on society? What are the potential bad outcomes from that? What would that mean for your ability to survive and enjoy yourself? What would you do?
You'd find a way to make the best of it, I suppose. And the best is as good as it gets. Maybe this imaginary new world sucks, maybe not. You're young, from the sound of it. You get to be around for the future, when I'm long gone, that's kinda cool. I'm sure you'll find a way, you seem like a clever person.
I find there's something powerful about thinking the worst case scenario through, and feeling somewhat prepared for it. Makes it easier to focus on the present.
phil917
"Project Padawan" looks fairly similar to Devin, at least from a user experience perspective. From personal experience, Devin was pretty terrible so we'll see if Microsoft does any better...
nprateem
Cue a load of buggy code with tests modified to pass instead of fixing why tests fail.
Maybe they've just got an automatic prompt of "no dickhead fix the fucking code don't frig the tests"
827a
IMO: Copilot (and Devin) has always missed the mark. Its always been a lazy, bad product that feels like it was made by a team that doesn't even want to use it themselves. Going more agentic is only going to make it worse; Copilot's product leadership appears obsessed with more comprehensive replacement of their customer workflows, but ideal customers want deeper and more fluid integration into the workflows.
Its one of those facts that seems so obvious once you realize it, but no one at Github clearly does. Who is buying and using these things? Seriously, anyone at Github, answer that, not who you think is buying them, but who is actually buying them. The answer isn't CEOs or CTOs; its Software Engineers (or CTOs, for their Software Engineers). Github's leadership needs the answer to be CEOs or CTOs, because the scale of investment (to produce such a shit product) is so large that only per-customer revenue commensurate to the replacement of SE salaries justifies it.
I know of four companies (including my own) that had a corporate Copilot subscription for their devs, and over the past quarter/this quarter are replacing it with a Cursor subscription, at the request of their devs. I'm super bullish on Cursor and Supermaven.
- I think they understand their ICP way better.
- I think their ICP is actually excited to spend money with them.
- I think these new companies have demonstrated that they are more willing to build more than just a panel in VSCode; whereas Github is bogged down by legacy interests.
- I think this deeper level of integration into existing workflows is what pushes AI past the hump of "oh i want to use that". Speeding up existing workflows by 30% feels insanely good. It grows the pie. Smaller & smarter, not larger & derivative.
- I think, from a business perspective, MS/Github has and continues to royally screw up by literally subsidizing the cost basis of their competitors by building VSCode and hosting billions of lines of open source code competitor models train on. I love it as a user. But it costs them millions of dollars, and every dollar of that spend makes their competitors stronger.
cruffle_duffle
GitHub is way to established to course correct. Their entire sales channel is enterprise. They structurally can’t see what makes cursor and stuff so much better.
Plus I think they have to much money sloshing around to care. Unlike the scrappy startups they have beefy enterprise accounts as cash cows.
It’s a tail as old as time, really.
nonethewiser
I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers. And GitHub certainly isn’t saying the goal is to replace developers.
I accept that is how you are interpreting it and I can see the argument. But Github isnt trying to get one over in their messaging.
And besides I just dont agree with the idea that it takes the developer out of the loop. Whose controlling this better version of Copilot? Whose goals is it advancing? The developer.
jacobsenscott
The goal has always been to eliminate programmers.
Nobody wants to pay a bunch of desk workers six figures to make their business go brr, but they currently they have no choice. Trust me, every executive resents this to their core and they want all the programmers to go away - including github executives.
20 years ago you would hire a few expensive architects who would try and design the product in so much detail cheap jr programmers could build it. It didn't go well.
4GL languages tried to abstract away all the hard stuff - again it didn't go well.
"Low code" was big just before the AI thing. It didn't go well.
Attempts are outsourcing are constant.
Now we have LLMs. So far this has come the closest to the dream of eliminating expensive programmers. We'll see how it goes.
tvaughan
Yup. Even in the 90s it was Microsoft’s plan to turn software development into just clicking buttons, e.g. Visual Studio. Just think of all of the business value the middle managers at a Fortune 1000 could produce with a bunch of cheap labor in some underdeveloped country with only three months of training (paid by them) to learn which buttons do which
nonethewiser
But who is copilot being marketed to?
diggan
> I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers
The blog post goes through more than what I mentioned in my comment. For example:
> When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add.
How is that not trying to replace at least a small section of junior/boilerplate developers?
The developer might be the one who listens to the product team, maybe even creates the issue and finally reviews the code before it gets merged. But I'm having a hard time imagining the flow above as "Pair programming" or a developer working with a "co-pilot", as they're trying to say it's all about.
scarface_74
> How is that not trying to replace at least a small section of junior/boilerplate developers?
This was a danger before AI ever became a thing. If that’s all someone is doing, there was always a danger of being outsourced to someone who would work for less than you would.
And today in 2025, ignoring AI, there are thousands of generic framework developers struggling to get a job because every job they apply to has thousands of applications and companies can choose any good enough developer.
It was always hard to break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle. Now it’s going to be harder.
The solution at least for awhile is to run closer to the customer/stakeholder.
rvz
This sort of obfuscation of Microsoft/GitHub's real intentions *IS* deliberate. Unfortunately it's not just them, but pervasive across nearly all AI companies.
> Are they maybe afraid of a potential backslash if it became more clear that they're now looking to replace (some) developers / the boring parts of development?
Did they care about the writers, musicians, artists, journalists that had their jobs displaced or currently reduced? I don't think so and they got away with it.
They don't care and in 2025, programmers of all ranks are next.
Look at their actions and don't fall for the blog posts or statements.
chipgap98
I don't think those are contradictory. The agent is iterating on the code it writes in order to be more useful.
diggan
> When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add.
This makes it seem like a very basic/rudimentary developer could be replaced by the new autonomous agent. Or am I misunderstanding what they're announcing here?
chipgap98
Ah sorry I missed that part. You are right that this sounds like more replacement for people
Tarucho
They are not going to say "we are making an agent to replace programmers. We will use their code and their guidance to train it"
someothherguyy
What else would the goal of agentic generative AI be other than to replace humans doing the same work?
diggan
For me that's a no-brainer also. I guess my question is more about why their messaging is so messy and direction-less. Why not just say outright what their plan is?
whilenot-dev
Backlash towards the direction off of GitHub? I mean GitHub has to be one of the biggest assets when it comes to training data for source code, no? Projects should have already moved off of it when Microsoft got in the drivers seat.
WithinReason
I don't see a contradiction
lolinder
They'd better get on the IntelliJ integration fast— if I'm going to switch editors in order to use an LLM coding assistant, I may as well just switch to Cursor, which has a strong head start on them on the assistant and also has a much better autocomplete.
I'm honestly surprised to see no mention here of them moving to replicate Cursor's autocomplete—IMO that is where Cursor's real edge lies. Anyone can wrap a chatbot in some UI that allows you to avoid pasting by hand, but Cursor's ability to guess my next move—even several lines away—makes it far and away more efficient than alternatives.
twistedgost
The feature you are referring to was also announced in VSCode and is called Next edit suggestions for Copilot. Currently in preview: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-02-06-next-edit-suggestio...
hassleblad23
Github has completely abandoned the Intellij Copilot plugin it seems. Even model selection is not supported. This is good for Jetbrains though because they have their own competing AI service. Jetbrains AI doesn't support multiline edits in tab completion or chat, but it does in the inline prompt mode (although its limited to the same file only).
armchairhacker
IntelliJ with Cursor-like autocomplete or Cursor with IntelliJ-quality general IDE tooling (lookup/rename symbol, diagnostics, and general UI) would be the ultimate editor.
IntelliJ’s autocomplete was really bad last time I tried it, and if it’s still only single line it’s still bad. Fortunately GitHub copilot in IntelliJ is good, maybe as good as Cursor except that it can’t delete/rewrite code or jump to different locations.
IMO agents aren’t nearly as important for either team to focus on, because they can be used outside of the IDE or in a separate IDE. I think the teams who develop the best agents will be big model-trainers and/or teams dedicated to agents, not teams writing IDEs.
ilrwbwrkhv
Try Augment https://www.augmentcode.com/
The IntelliJ integration works really well. Not sure why they aren't more widely known.
jghn
Yeah. I just wish that VSCode didn't feel so crude coming from 10+ years using JetBrains IDEs. Things I feel are table stakes like nice test run/debug functionality seem like big hurdles. Perhaps it's just a learning curve & I need to get used to it, but whenever I dive into how to replicate functionality I feel is important it seems the answer is at best "it's complicated".
It's a shame as this is by far not the only thing in which I have interest that seems to have fully shifted over to VSCode
petercooper
JetBrains has got its own version in the pipeline as well: https://blog.jetbrains.com/junie/2025/01/meet-junie-your-cod...
cruffle_duffle
I wish cursor was an extension of VSCode and not a fork.
diggan
Does is matter in practice? Is there stuff you can do in VSCode that isn't possible in Cursor? I'm not a user of either, so honest question.
gdhkgdhkvff
For one, you can’t debug c# code in cursor without using a hacky third party extension. Because the c# debugger is only licensed to run in official vscode instances. And only way you find out is you try to run c# and get a runtime error saying that it can’t run for that reason, you google/chatgpt the issue, find your way to some old GitHub Issues threads where someone mentioned that’s a possible solution.
machine_ghost
I don't know Cursor, but VS Code is a very full-featured editor with many years behind it; I rather doubt an upstart editor could achieve full feature parity with it so quickly.
But that's almost beside the point: even if it had perfectly identical functionality, people would still want to use VS Code, if only for its well-established ecosystem of extensions.
nsingh2
I read somewhere they had to make a fork because it wasn't possible to implement some features if it was an extension alone. Can't find where I read it though.
mohsen1
Yup. As an example extensions can not read the content of the terminal. The API is there but not allowed to be used in published extensions
theasisa
I tried Cursor a couple of years ago and wasn't impressed - has it improved a lot? I only use autocomplete, not the chat function and at the time found CoPilot superior.
baq
It has improved but you're missing out if you aren't using the big ticket features. I tab myself to solutions, too, but if there's a react view to do, I dish out the composer and am literally 10x faster - what would previously take a day now takes an hour. If there's an interface to create out of a json blob, I paste the blob and just tell it to make an interface, then clean up the types a bit, etc.
nirava
I'd written off AI autocomplete as pointless after trying GitHub Copilot's a year ago.
But Cursor's tab-autocomplete is actually really useful. It feels like it very much knows what I'm up to.
827a
Cursor is ten times better than VSCode and Copilot. Its extraordinarily good at reducing two-minute tasks to 10-seconds, and the more you use it the better you get at identifying these two-minute tasks.
Example (web dev): hit cmd+k --> "this is a two column layout. make sure the columns are the same size". It just does it. To do that myself I would have had to switch to a browser, google flex box, go to that classic flexbox cheat sheet that we all know and love, tweak around with the different values of justify-content and justify-self, realize that was the wrong approach, then arrive at the correct answer of making sure each column flex-grows identically. two minute task, now 10 seconds.
hit cmd+k -> "flow these columns one-after-another on smaller screens" done. thirty second task, now 10 seconds.
hit cmd+k -> "enable or disable the rendering of this component via props" done. new prop added, prop is flowed through to a `display` css property, easy.
The autocomplete is pretty good, but can get annoying. You definitely have to get used to it. However, the cmd+k quick fix thing is insane. Its literally made me at least 200% more productive, and I think that might grow to 300% as I learn to use it and it gets smarter (they just added Gemini 2.0 Flash; can't wait to try that out).
lolinder
I tried it last month on a medium size personal project and was blown away by the autocomplete. I'd previously staunchly refused to try it on the grounds that I'm too productive in IntelliJ, but at this point I'm most likely going to start paying for both.
I don't know if I'm ready to use it as a daily driver, but there are certain kinds of tasks—especially large refactors—where its ability to rapidly suggest and accurately make the changes across a file is incredibly valuable. It somehow manages to do all of that without ever breaking my sense of flow, which is more than I can say for Copilot's suggestions.
And yeah, I'm with you that autocomplete is the way to go. I think chat is a red herring that will have long-term negative effects if it's used extensively in a codebase. Autocomplete keeps you in touch with the code while still benefiting from the co-pilot, and Cursor's UX for that is far and away the best I've seen.
singularity2001
did you use intellij with copilot auto complete before that?
zn44
i've started using aider with https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html works great and you can keep using jetbrains IDEs
hidingOnBush
People are sleeping on codeium. I've found their AI assistant to be much better than cursor
thomasfromcdnjs
Cursor has obviously figured out marketing better.
I switched to Windsurf 2-3 months ago, feels a lot better for me.
satvikpendem
I was looking at Windsurf and Cursor as well, what are the differences?
astrodude
Agreed. Windsurf is a lot better
michaelteter
Assuming windsurf.org is the correct website, I don't get a sense that it is legit or ready for prime time.
The FAQ link goes nowhere (afaik there is no FAQ), the page language selector is buggy - it randomly shows me other languages and is stubborn to accept when I switch back to English. Also, my first attempt to reach the main page was a 502 error.
Also, I don't see anywhere that tells me who makes this editor.
I'm supposed to trust some unknown group of people and install their software?
lolinder
I don't even know what windsurf.org site you're referring to—for me windsurf.org redirects to goaccess.org, which is a sports organization.
The link you're looking for is https://codeium.com/windsurf
lolinder
How's their autocomplete? I'm honestly not interested in tighter integration of chatbots. What blew me away about Cursor was how much better it was at autocomplete. I honestly probably would have tried it sooner if people emphasized that strongly enough in online dialogs, but it weirdly always seems to get relegated to an afterthought compared to the flashy chatbot, which was... fine, I guess?
TiredOfLife
The free Codeium autocomplete was what I was using for the past year and it was really good. And Windsurf added Supercomplete (basically Cursors tab tab compete), but only in paid version.
baq
Because the composer is actually the bees knees, especially on larger projects where you need to reference say 5 different files with interface definitions and 3 other libraries using them.
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aresant
“Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.”
… until we train our model on your usage data and totally replace you
threatofrain
If we actually could get to a world where programmers can be replaced, we'll also likely find that vast swathes of the population will be replaced. Then we'll need a totally new conversation on how society should look. That conversation is coming no matter what, because there will not be a global consensus to stop ML development, esp. on the war front.
johnfn
In a world where programmers can be replaced, it's less clear to me that plumbers, janitors, electricians, construction laborers, etc, are also all out of a job.
suyash
Here is a saying that I really think summarises "AI will replace white-collar jobs and Robotics will replace blue-collar jobs".
reducesuffering
Think secondary effects. What does a world in which almost every programmer can be automated look like? It looks like massive extremely fast technological development, how to build and program robotics will be solved almost instantly. With solved robotics goes every other labor.
We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, until they lose control of it too.
gokhan
As a programmer, I think it's easier to replace programmers than many other occupations. We work with generic DSLs called programming languages, which can be easily handled by AI. Most of what we produce can be easily parsed by an AI. We work in small, incremental tasks which is perfect for AI. Most of us use the same set of tools. What else? UI is similar everywhere, especially in LoB apps. What we produce is repetitive, most of us practically doing clever meshups of the code on the Internet.
Thank Crom I'm old. But I'm worried for my kids.
balls187
"The report of my death was an exaggeration." - Mark Twain.
I don't see it as "replacing programmers" but rather, trying to solve the types of problems that programmers solve, but more cheaply.
I'm not sure your age relative to mine, but I got my start a hair breath after 9-11 in the defense industry. I've experienced the "tectonic" shifts in programming since that time. In each case, Programmers seemed to shift away from the work that was being done more cheaply, to work that require more specialization that was harder to be done.
I see the promise of AI as a threat to my job, but the reality is likely more like what happened with automobiles vs horses. Less horse shoe makers, more car mechanics.
Some day, I may be too tired and too dumb to become a mechanic. But today is not that day.
myth_drannon
Cobol was also supposed to give power to business people so they could in plain English language, "program" the computer. It never happened but for sure advances in PL changed how programmers interacted with computer. We went from machine code to Python,React which is huge technological leap.
The same goes for all the AI agents, it will change how we work but will not make programmers obsolete. I'm more worried about 3 million engineering grads per year from India replacing me than CoPilot/CursorAI
ericmcer
Doing the small incremental tasks is the easiest part of programming. All the complexity lies in taking giant specs and breaking it into manageable goals and then small tasks. AI is still pretty far from doing that, but I agree, I would not want to be a teenager right now and face the prospect of entering the workforce after 10 years more of progress.
Unless work is a thing of the past by then, and we were the last generation of suckers who lived under the reality where 40hrs/week was just the way life is.
machine_ghost
In the long run, yes, but if programming were so rote and simple, we all wouldn't have jobs in the first place.
Look, technology has always replaced jobs, throughout history (how many of you know professional lamp lighters, elevator doormen, or switchboard operators?) But the thing is, tech has always replaced the jobs that are easiest to automate ... not the "intellectual work".
I would be far more worried about being a real estate agent, food preparer, or heck, even a lawyer (for some specialties at least). I think they're all at more risk than programmers.
username223
Sure, programmers work in formal languages, but they can't make mistakes. If your marketing copy contains a few lies or your hero image has a guy with six fingers, the recipients will still infer the intended meaning (or ignore it). If your program has a subtle bug, the computer will faithfully do the wrong thing.
LLMs are great for tasks where small mistakes don't matter, and useless for ones where they do. Generating a 10,000-line Rails app where 10 of those lines are wrong is not very useful.
bluerooibos
I mean this is literally happening as we speak - the process has started and it's accelerating.
Governments need to be talking about this like yesterday, and very few are from what I'm seeing.
AI companies and others using AI are going to profit from this massively, at the expense of many more. We need a better tax system to redistribute these profits across society as a whole.
The issue is capitalism but AI exploding is going to exacerbate wealth inequality like nothing else.
rvz
They are not hiding it anymore and are testing as to how much they can get away with total job displacement. First artists, then musicians, then writers and now programmers.
Better prepare for 2030 then as I am already doing so [0].
But from this year and in the next 5 years I'd also read this very carefully [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42563239
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
JohnnyMarcone
Care to share how you are preparing?
baq
Save as much money as possible and start tinkering with hardware is my approach. Not sure if the right move isn’t tinkering with water and sewage pipes at this point…
hirako2000
More time for the things I do?
All AI tools I've used turned my daily into fighting the agent.
While LLMs can save time on tedious repetitive tasks, they are atrocities in producing bug free code. Even if they reached 99.999% accuracy without, they wouldn't be worth it: If I wrote a function and it turns out buggy, I can, even months later, investigate and find the culprit.
If an LLM introduces a bug, I would rather scrap everything. That is, every piece of code the thing produced for a given project.
If my boss tells me my job is to provide a patch, I quit.
And, LLMs have proven so far that they can't produce innovative solutions.
makerdiety
If LLMs could produce innovative solutions, they wouldn't be large language models. They'd be valuable and indispensable software engineers to covet instead.
Don't you agree that having a free artificial junior developer at your beck and call is better than not having freely and quickly produced code that can help point you into the direction your engineering needs to go in?
As a senior developer, don't you also fight with managing your subordinates? Don't you have to solve the management problem and do leadership tasks?
As a senior developer, don't you also have to deal with code that is not bug free, as you yourself don't always produce bug free code? Especially on the first try.
Maybe your approach to LLMs is wrong? Maybe you expect one shot solutions when that is not how LLMs are supposed to be used? Instead, you could invest in working with this new tool and then see phenomenal productivity gains. And also maybe grow a new capability in software development with the use of LLMs in your engineering.
hirako2000
I wouldn't agree to call any of that a developer, adding junior to the term doesn't move the needle.
I wouldn't call a calculator a mini accountant. These things can operate much faster than an army of mathematicians but they remain tools. Of course l, tools humans can leverage. Productivity gains are phenomenal.
Perhaps my input to the topic wasn't clear. I use LLMs. I use LLMs in the context of software engineering. I don't treat them as my peers. I don't dream of a future where this tech can solve more than its often misunderstood scope.
We are letting ourselves be confused by those who do have an interest in, or can't do better than, up selling.
Engineers are already having to deal with very difficult to reconcile side effects. Maybe you aren't seeing it yet, or your comment would have at least recognized and touched on those.
shaneofalltrad
If they don't, it will be Cursor, Trae, Cline, Roo Code or Goose? Seems this is coming this year in a big way regardless if Copilot does it or not. I'm guessing we all have to pivot how we work or get left behind?
amelius
If they really put the human at the center then they'd contribute back and publish the weights so that we can run this locally and build our own AIs on top, etc.
brianmcc
Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages."
Not wanting to come across all Luddite about it, but we really ought not to stumble blindly into all this.
That said, I remain sceptical. The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.
ALittleLight
True, but if the coding becomes trivial then you'll be replaced by a good PM who can work with an agent team.
skydhash
Coding was always trivial (see code generators, snippets, templates). The issue is making all the little pieces work and adjust them as needed.
gopher_space
No-code database work was solved with Filemaker Pro decades ago. It turned out that you also need an attention span and an interest in the subject.
Most of the flowchart automation software I've been playing around with is already good enough. The Python ecosystem is good enough. Ollama is good enough. The small, purpose built models people seem compelled to make are good enough.
If I can replicate your SaaS business model by crawling your site for a description of services, what does that do to the landscape?
Almondsetat
And that's why software engineering =/= coding
mercenario
> Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages."
You know that your job as software engineer is automating tasks that other people could be doing manually, right?
rybosworld
> The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.
Even so, is there any reason to believe that the other 90% won't also be automated?
As you said, the goal of these systems is to replace wages.
brianmcc
I'd describe a lot of my job and my team's job as "figuring out what to do". Lots of talking to people, debating options, weighing up trade-offs.
Customer support, "pre sales" stuff too.
Distilling complex situations involving tech but also people into bullet-point reports for management.
To reference another one of these neat little phrases: building the right system != building the system right. The former is hard to automate, the latter is indeed more open to AI involvement.
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dabinat
I use Copilot and it’s a game-changer for my productivity, but I really wish it was capable of natural language searching. So for example I could ask it “show me all places in the code where x is assigned a value but a flush() command is not immediately issued afterwards”.
simonw
I answer those kinds of questions by piping my entire codebase into a large context model (like Claude or o3-mini or Gemini) and prompting it directly.
Here's a recent example:
files-to-prompt datasette tests -e py -c | \
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp -u \
'which of these files contain tests that indirectly exercise the label_column_for_table() function'
dplgk
Your code is pretty small if it fits within the context if any major LLM. But very nice if it does!
mohsen1
https://github.com/bodo-run/yek
This is more sophisticated for serializing your repo. Please check it out and let me know what do you think?
blah2244
Yek is fantastic -- I've converted my whole team to using it for prompting. As input context windows keep increasing, I think it'll just keep becoming more and more valuable -- I can put most of my team's code in Gemini 2.0 now.
singularity2001
doesn't it get very expensive quickly if you don't use prompt cashing
simonw
I've had the occasional large prompt that cost ~30c - I often use GPT-4o mini if I'm going to ask follow-up questions because then I get prompt caching without having to configure it.
skydhash
> So for example I could ask it “show me all places in the code where x is assigned a value but a flush() command is not immediately issued afterwards”.
Could this not work? (with wathever flag to display the surrounding lines)
ripgrep 'x =' | ripgrep 'flush()'jgilias
I think Cursor can do this, if you @codebase, isn’t there something similar in copilot? E.g., your codebase being vectorized, indexed, and used as an embedding?
shaneofalltrad
I have had Cursor review all my file content solving similar things, but I would think it's limited to VSCode search capabilities and IMHO it's not great. I love how Pycharm handles indexing so search is fast and accurate. If they ever get agents going at the same quality as Cursor I would probably go to Pycharm for that advantage alone.
wrs
Cursor implemented their own code indexer so its RAG is not limited by VS Code search.
ai-christianson
Very cool! I'm working on a similar agent, but FOSS (https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid) --It'll be really interesting to see how the GitHub agent works.
On first impressions, it looks like they are taking the route of integrating tightly with VSCode, which means they'll be competing with Cline, Cursor, and Windsurf.
IMO it might be good for them to release this on the web, similar to the replit agent. Integration with GitHub directly would be awesome.
spiritplumber
Very neat!
bramhaag
It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them
why-el
> "ask you"
I get the concern, however. But, short of nuking the actual .git directory, the upsides are worth it, in my opinion. Cursor offers filtering via a mini-prompt in its YOLO mode, so does Windsurf. The idea is killer, it allows it to progressively build and also correct its own errors. e.g. Cursorrules can be told to run tests after a feature is generated, or typecheck, or some other automated feedback-loop your codebase offers. That's pretty neat!
Better yet, setup a dev container first. Then, at most, your local DB is the only concern. If still paranoid (as you should be), suspend your network while the agent is working. :D
conradfr
That's why you need Jetbrains local history feature.
ddalex
nuke a project or root is the best case scenario
snapcaster
The likely case is that it almost never does anything harmful. I've never once seen an LLM tell me to run rm -rf /
indymike
yet
phil917
I feel like anytime I try these "agentic" programming tools they always fall on their face.
Devin was pretty bad and honestly soaked up more time than it saved. I've tried Cursor Composer before and came away with bad results. I tried Copilot again just now with o3-mini and it just completely hallucinated up some fields into my project when I asked it to do something...
Am I taking crazy pills or do these tools kinda suck?
jetpackjoe
You might be asking it too much, or not giving it enough context.
I've found the Cursor Agent to work great when you give it a narrow scope and plenty of examples.
phil917
Perhaps, but at that point I feel like I'm spending more time feeding the tool the right prompt and context, going back and forth with corrections, etc... when I could just write the code myself with less time and hassle.
I've definitely had far more success with using AI as a fuzzy search or asking it for one-off pieces of functionality. Any time I ask it to interact directly inside my codebase, it usually fails.
crakhamster01
I keep going back and forth on whether Agents are good for the software development discipline.
While I think it's extremely short-sighted that we continue to push full steam ahead on AI automating away jobs, I can't deny that LLMs have given my development flow a decent productivity boost. 80% of the time, my workflow with Cursor looks similar to the golden path depicted in this blog post - outline the changes I want made -> review the code -> suggest edits/iterate -> ship it. There's undoubtedly a class of problems where this feature can slot in and start chipping away immediately.
The other 20% of the time, Cursor will hit a wall and is unable to complete the task through just prompting. It will either introduce a subtle bug in its logic, or come across an error that it incorrectly diagnoses. These stumbles can happen for a variety of reasons:
1. Poorly documented code - the LLM infers the wrong responsibility for a piece of code, or is led astray by old comments
2. Misleading or unhelpful errors from 1st/3rd party libraries
3. Task is too complex - perhaps I asked for more than I should have
I guess going back to my initial point, it feels like the easy answer is that Agents are good if you're a senior/experienced developer. This means that in the short-term the demand for junior engineers will dry up, since we have Agents to do the rote work, but doesn't this mean that we're effectively choking out the pipeline for experienced devs? Though they're low in complexity/value, the tasks we will handoff to Agents are immeasurably useful for building software fundamentals.
It seems like in 2025 we've suddenly forgotten about "teaching a man to fish"...
RobinL
Can anyone speak to weather it's worth going back to co-pilot from cursor. On the face of it $10 a month for unlimited messages looks compelling. Is it really unlimited? From these videos it's starting to look pretty similar to cursor...
dedene
I want to know as well. For me, everything I tested so far still can’t beat the autocomplete of Cursor both in speed as intelligence…
alach11
I've been switching back and forth a bit at work recently, and I find Cursor still has a slight edge.
debian3
I use both too.
1 year ago Cursor was way ahead. Copilot had only one model and it was 4k input 4k output and it was forgetting about the previous reply. It was horrible.
One year later, the input context is at 128k token if you use vs code insider (64k for stable). You have multiples models, etc. they still cut corner like o1 barely answer (I guess they severely restrict the amount of output token) but sonnet 3.5 works surprisingly well.
They do have rate limit, you can check their issues tracker on GitHub, there are complaints about rate limits every day.
All in all, for $10 it’s good value. Cursor is also great for $20 and you get more models and more features.
Copilot is catching up fast, but they are not there yet. But they finally woke up.
mohsen1
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-02-06-next-edit-suggestio...
Next Edit might finally compete with Cursor Tab. I have not tested it yet though
RobinL
Thanks - having tried Co-Pilot again today after a 6-month Cursor hiatus, I think this is a good summary
tarrrooon
[dead]
RobinL
Update: I have used co-pilot agent mode for a couple of hours today.
It's definitely catching up with Cursor but not there yet. In particular: - Edits take quite a bit longer to apply, breaking flow - Autocomplete predictions (equiv. of Cursor Tab) not as good
But in the past 6 months or so it's gone from being pretty hopeless to very useful. If I was forced to use it instead of Cursor it wouldn't be a huge deal any more.
> When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write better code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer.
Later:
> GitHub Copilot’s new agent mode is capable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically.
Is this Microsoft/GitHub acknowledging they initially missed the mark, except they aren't really clear in the post that they're abandoning the approach of "AI pair programmer / not replacing the developer"? Seems really strange to re-iterate their "clear goal" and then in the next paragraph go directly against their goal? Are they maybe afraid of a potential backslash if it became more clear that they're now looking to replace (some) developers / the boring parts of development?
I have no opinions either way, but the messaging of the post seems to go into all different directions, which seems strange.