The Quality of Auto-Generated Code

Kevlin Henney and I were riffing on some ideas about GitHub Copilot, the tool for automatically generating code base on GPT-3's language model, trained on the body of code that's in GitHub. This article poses some questions and (perhaps) some answers, without trying to present any conclusions. First, we wondered about code quality. There are lots of ways to solve a given programming problem; but most of us have some ideas about what makes code "good" or "bad." Is it readable, is it well-organized?