GitHub Copilot currently is a wonderful educational tools to help make programmers language agnostic.

I autogenerated a NextJS application with TailwindCSS recently. Much to my dismay, the project was generated in TypeScript, something I had been putting off learning. I decided to put it off for the day and work on other parts of the code.

The next day, I installed GitHub Copilot out of curiosity. For those unfamiliar, GitHub Copilot is an AI code competition tool. Simply specifying a plain English description is often enough for GitHub copilot to write an entire method.

As I started using it to write TypeScript (with no prior knowledge of the language on my part), I was able to pick up the fundamentals without having to leave my editor.

Transferring programming knowledge between languages and frameworks is one of the most frustrating parts of programming. I know exactly what I want to do. I do not know how to do it in that particular language or framework.

Using Copilot, I was able to see how pages were generated and the TypeScript’s syntax. Furthermore, I was able to see NextJS specific syntax.

Though I ended up using Copilot less and less as I became more familiar with TypeScript, Copilot nearly eliminated the dreaded “how to do {x} in {y}” Google searching which so many programmers are familiar.

So, while I do not think Copilot could take our jobs yet, Copilot currently allows programmers to spend more time programming and helps reduce the burden on programmers to learn the seemingly infinite set of new libraries and languages.