Ride home, bus full, me and my groceries besides a married, middle-aged guy, hacking away on his laptop, staring intently through his designer glasses at his mac.

What a bright screen. What a clear view.

Within five minutes, I knew some of the company tools he was using and that he had just created a GitHub account. After two more minutes I knew he was the co-partner of a small SME providing some sort of digital (coding) business. All I needed were the names of the Slack instance providing the company name, his name brightly written on his GitHub billing page and a quick online search. According to the company website’s short reference list, the business is either new or does not disclose all clients.

On Slack they were deciding on IDEs for their devs and he checked out GitHub CoPilot.

I debated internally if…

“I think GitHub CoPilot should be used with caution.”

He jumped and I had to repeat myself until he realized I a) read his screen, b) had an opinion on coding.

He admitted, yes, but he had been using it for the last month and found it useful “to extract email addresses”.

“Yes, the regex isn’t so simple”, I replied, because I needed to implement the exact thing three weeks ago.

Unfortunately, he had to get out, otherwise he would have learned about screen shields. And that women love staring at screens too.

Image courtesy of Nightcafe.

Last modified on 2023-01-11