[natefinch]

There's a setting on GitHub that blocks any suggestions that exactly match code in the training set. I doubt you'd ever get in trouble for code that was similar in structure but different variables etc from existing licensed code (especially since most small snippets of code are not terribly unique to begin with).

[grayclhn]

I mean, it's nice that they have a setting for the bare minimum a lazy undergrad would do to avoid getting caught for plagarism — replace some of the words in the copied paragraph with replacements from a thesaurus. It's not something I'd personally expect to hold up under real scrutiny though.

[biztos]

AFAIK that's not enough, for instance see the long-standing industry practice that people working on the Important Stuff are not allowed to ever look at the source code of the Direct Competitor; or clean-room reverse engineering, etc.

I guess time will tell how much acquiring companies (my worry) care about Copilot. Given the difficulty hiring good devs, and the productivity level of body-shop devs, I see it getting a whole lot of use very soon, acknowledged or not.

[natefinch]

There's a big difference between reverse engineering (i.e. intentionally writing software that behaves identically to another piece of software), and writing your own code to solve your own problem that may superficially contain small portions of the similar logic as some other project. Copyrighted code has to be sufficiently creative and unique to qualify, otherwise after the first person wrote code to parse json from a web request, no one else would be able to do the same thing.

[skjoldr]

Then Microsoft should write this as a legal statement on their part that they will take responsibility for. But I doubt they will ever do that.

[naikrovek]

Microsoft is not the author of the software that copilot helps produce. the person sitting at the keyboard using copilot is the author.

[yucky]

It does sound like the value of code creators is going to soon see significant downward pressure.

[natefinch]

I'm sure that's what people said when they went from punch cards to assembly, and from assembly to C, and from C to Java.... and yet, here we are. Tools that let us write higher level code faster, just allow us to create more complicated software in a reasonable amount of time.

[janosdebugs]

The hard part about writing code isn't "how to write a for loop" and similar trivial things. Copilot make this process faster, but the hard part is still organizing your code so that it doesn't become a steaming pile of cowdung a few iterations down the line. That Copilot does not do for you.

So, unless you are a code monkey punching code into autogenerated skaffolding all day, your job is safe.