Copilot Can Code for you, But It Can’t Learn for You

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When the coding assignments came during the bachelor’s, I was already stuck in the “why won’t this code run” phase. I spent hours trying to fix a simple Python loop and couldn’t figure it out. So I decided to turn on Copilot.

At first, it felt kind of magical. I would start typing something, and Copilot would just finish it for me. The code looked neat, and it even added comments. It was nice, like having someone like an assistant, who actually knew what was going on.

After a while, it started saving me a lot of time. I could ask for a small function, and it would write something that worked. I didn’t have to search Stack Overflow every five minutes anymore. It felt easier to focus on what I wanted the program to do. Sometimes, I’d finish an entire exercise in a fraction of the time it used to take me. I started to feel confident, maybe too confident. It was easy to forget that I hadn’t really written most of the logic myself.

But then I noticed something. I was finishing faster, but I wasn’t really learning. I’d look back at my code later and couldn’t explain why it worked. It felt like someone else had written it. During group projects, when teammates asked how I solved something, I didn’t always have an answer. That’s when it hit me, I wasn’t stuck anymore, but I wasn’t improving either.

Copilot makes the code run, but doing your own projects makes you understand why it runs. The small experiments, the bugs, the late nights, that’s what builds the skill, not just working code.

Copilot is great for the basics, loops, syntax, and formatting, but it doesn’t really teach you how to solve problems on your own. When I got to a harder project, I realized I couldn’t just let it do everything.

That’s when I figured out that Copilot helps you go faster, but it doesn’t make you better. You still have to learn the hard parts yourself — the thinking, the debugging, and the moments of frustration that actually make you understand what you’re doing.