The Copilot Pause | Thomas Vogelaar

If you regularly use GitHub Copilot or another AI code completion tool, I want you to try something: just briefly turn it off and continue with whatever you’re programming at the moment.

It’s strange, isn’t it? There’s a moment there where your brain almost shuts off, as you stare at the screen waiting for something that will never arrive. After a couple seconds, you’ll snap back to your senses and continue typing. This will happen repeatedly, though less often over time. There’s a feeling of extra mental effort every time this happens, which is strange because you’ll usually encounter it when doing something incredibly mundane.

I’m certainly not the first person to talk about this, tech influencers like ThePrimeagen have discussed this repeatedly. However, I’d like to dig a little bit deeper into it. What I’m mainly interested in is how this changes the way we think about our code and improve over time.

As I mentioned earlier, it seems like most of the time when you encounter The Pause, you’re not doing something especially complicated. Examples include:

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