Re: [xml-dev] copilot

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> Interesting reading.
> 
> "a year after the tool's general release -- found that programmers
> accepted on average around 30% of its suggestions,"
> 

I probably accept a higher proportion than that of IntelliJ's suggested improvements to my Java code. It's very good at mechanical tasks like detecting near-duplicate code and generating a reusable method from it, an it's scarily good at guessing that if I want to initialise a variable called languageVersion then I probably want to get the value from getStaticContext().getPackage().getHostLanguage().getVersion(). It illustrates just how repetitive a lot of our coding is.

And of course, it's just like self-driving cars. When it gets it right 99% of the time, we'll start getting lazy and not notice when it's getting it wrong, with fatal consequences.

Michael Kay
Saxonica