Steve Sanderson from the GitHub Copilot coding agent team walks through the techniques and mental models that make the Copilot tools feel like a genuine part of a new engineering process. He shows the newest Copilot CLI features, but for me, the real value is in the principles that still matter when everything around us is accelerating.
After sharing tools and techniques Steve talks about one of my core uncertainties, that is…
The sheer rate at which code is created ... who is going to read it? How do we know it is actually correct? I do not think this is a solved problem ... we do not know the answer right now.
Later he touches on how these tools are reshaping the physical act of writing software.
Something that bothers me a little bit is when I go back into my IDE and I start trying to write code with my actual fingers, like an animal, it is a weird experience for me now. I am not sure what buttons to press and I just look at my hands and think, make the code come out of them somehow, and I am not sure how to do it. Genuinely my muscle memory is starting to change in some way and I feel that when I want a load of code to come up on the screen I should say it in English. It feels weird to type it out now. I am not proud of that.
I do not think that necessarily is a great thing. I do not know what to do ... is it a problem or not? Do I need to do some daily manual exercises to keep myself sharp or something? Or is there no point? I honestly do not know ... I do not feel qualified to predict the future so I am not going to. Despite all these unknowns I do not think I would be willing to let anyone take this from me.
He returns to the oldest part of engineering, the part that has nothing to do with typing or tooling and everything to do with reasoning.
We are still engineers. Fundamentally we are still doing the same job. We are still using our brains to make decisions about how to solve problems. There is still an almost infinite space of possibilities for what you could actually build.
So even as world is accelerating, I keep coming back to the same truth. The responsibility to understand what we are building still rests with us. That is the part of the craft that no model can meaningfully duplicate. Download the the GitHub Copilot CLI and the Copilot SDK, and take some time to watch the entire AI-Powered App Development NDC keynote here.
