LLMs and the rise of the AI code generators
When I wrote about GitHub Copilot in November 2021, Copilot was one of only a handful of AI code generation technologies available. I tested it as a Visual Studio Code extension. At the time, Copilot didn’t always generate good, correct, or even running code, but it was still somewhat useful. The great promise behind Copilot (and other code generators that use machine learning) is that it was designed to improve over time, both by incorporating user feedback and by ingesting new code samples into its training corpus.
As of May 2023, there are hundreds of “AI” or “code generation” extensions available for Visual Studio Code alone. Several of these might save you some time while coding, but if you believe their generated code without reviewing, testing, and debugging it, I have a bridge to sell you.