- Coding alongside an AI co-pilot is a “minds merging,” says a former Facebook executive.
- Aditya Agarwal explained his Copilot coding experience in a post on X on Thursday.
- “The line between creator and tool will become blurred,” he writes.
A former Facebook executive has extolled the genius of AI, likening the ability to code as a co-pilot for the technology to a religious experience.
X's Thursday post, Aditya Agarwal I tried to explain the feeling of coding with the co-pilot of a large language model.
“It's as if someone has supercharged your abilities and made you completely mentally in tune with what you're trying to do,” he writes.
Agarwal was one of Facebook's earliest engineers and served as the company's director of product engineering from 2005 to 2010. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was a key contributor to the development of Facebook's most popular features, including search, the news feed and Messenger.
After leaving Facebook, Agarwal co-founded collaboration startup Cove and later served as CTO at file-sharing and storage startup Dropbox for over six years. He is currently a partner at SouthPark Commons, an entrepreneurial incubator that provides funding to seed-stage startups.
In a post on Thursday, Agarwal said it was hard to explain the feeling of coding alongside an AI co-pilot, but likened the experience to working with a “demigod” who “amplifies your abilities and predicts your every move.”
“This is a level of comprehensive synergy that is hard to understand unless you experience it firsthand,” he wrote.
Several technology companies developing artificial intelligence have developed Copilot tools that act as AI assistants to help users with various tasks. He declined to disclose which tools they are using.
Agarwal said the power of the tool goes beyond just autocomplete: By utilizing large language models like GPT-4, AI Copilot can “predict the actual intent of the user and foresee what they're going to build,” he added.
“Coding is clearly the cutting edge here, and the creative activity most clearly incorporated into the LLM,” Agarwal writes, “but this is the direction in which many creative pursuits are heading.”
The future of AI assistant tools lies in “co-creation,” Agarwal said.
“The line between creator and tool will become blurred,” he added.
Agarwal did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for further comment.
The introduction of AI tools into professional workplaces has raised concerns about the future of work across all industries, and BI's Aki Ito reported last year that the transition could be particularly difficult for programmers, as they will inevitably lose their jobs and be forced to adapt to the new normal.
But artificial intelligence will also make programmers' jobs easier, allowing them to focus on higher-level tasks, BI previously reported.
