The Copilot Pause

With the rise of LLMs and AI assistants, people recently have been discussing a phenomenon called the Copilot Pause. If you've used GitHub Copilot before, you might catch yourself making a small pause after typing a keyword to wait for the suggestion of GitHub Copilot, even if you already know what you wanted to code.

People fear that we are acquiring a learned helplessness where we at some point forget how to write basic code without the help of Copilot. I noticed myself that I was forgetting basic keywords and syntax when I was coding without assistance.

Consequence

As a consequence, I've currently disabled GitHub Copilot when coding. Nevertheless, I believe AI and LLMs are here to stay, and it is important to learn to work with these kinds of tools. I suggest thinking about your motivation for coding. Do you code for work or to learn?

Coding for work

If your goal is to build some feature as fast as possible, of course you should use what makes you most productive—including Copilot.

Coding to learn

However, if you are a student and coding to learn, or trying a new language in a side project, I propose you to turn off your AI assistant and learn your language properly. As long as job interviews require you to code on a whiteboard or in basic online text editors, you need to remember your basics.