OODLER oodler577

Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot

0xabad1dea, July 2021

this is a rough draft and may be updated with more examples

GitHub was kind enough to grant me swift access to the Copilot test phase despite me @'ing them several hundred times about ICE. I would like to examine it not in terms of productivity, but security. How risky is it to allow an AI to write some or all of your code?

Ultimately, a human being must take responsibility for every line of code that is committed. AI should not be used for "responsibility washing." However, Copilot is a tool, and workers need their tools to be reliable. A carpenter doesn't have to

	# RedBlack tree mockup for Corinna, modeled after https://metacpan.org/pod/Tree::RedBlack
	# It is not guaranteed to work

	use feature 'class';

	# we really want this to be a private class, but we can't yet
	class RedBlack::Node {
	field $key :reader :writer :param { undef };
	field $value :reader :writer :param { undef };
	field $parent :reader :writer :param { undef };