I've been thinking more recently about the see-through-ness of tools. Tools are see-through when the abstractions they provide don't unnecessarily cover up what's going on under the hood, i.e. when it's not too "magical" to be understood.
Often tools and abstractions (software libraries, algorithms) seem magical and easy to work with at first glance, but fall apart under its own complexity when you need to dig deeper into its inner workings to fix a bug or customize it to your specific usage. I think there are ways to design tools so that they're less susceptible to this kind of failure mode, though, where it's possible to peer beneath the abstraction layers provided by the tool without getting into a tangly mess you don't understand. I want to build more tools that empower users to peer inside and understand and modify, and fewer tools that operate only within the safety of its own walled garden.
At this point, I've been using GitHub Copilot at my day job long enough for me to feel used to it under my fingers, and have a rough sense of what kind of code Copilot is good at generating correctly. While writing some Oak code the other day in Vim (my editor for anything non-TypeScript/React), I even found myself missing Copilot's little grey type-ahead hints to stamp out some repetitive bit of code it surely would have written for me.
My current feeling on Copilot is that it doesn't really compete with me as a developer, but does make my job slightly easier, reducing a thousand very small paper cuts in a way that makes a difference in my work. At the best of times, it feels like pair-programming. At worst, I spend a few extra seconds code-reviewing and rejecting a suggestion. Contrary to what Hacker news seems to suggest, I've found the overall UX pretty solid and rarely distracting. Is it indispensable? No. But would I use it if given the choice? Sure.
My first update to the stream :)
Building this in pure Oak was not trivial — a good bit of yak-shaving writing a date/time library, polishing up various existing standard library functions for better performance and fit, fixing a couple of errors in the interpreter itself and the oak fmt code formatter... and some good old performance work. But I'm excited to start using it to share some real updates!