Research means more than fact-checking

When I first used GitHub Copilot, I said it “essen­tially tasks you with correcting a 12-year-old’s home­work … I have no idea how this is prefer­able to just doing the home­work your­self.” What I meant is that often, the focus of program­ming is not merely producing code that solves a problem. Rather, the code tends to be the side effect of a deeper process, which is to learn and under­stand enough about the problem to write the code. The authors of the famous MIT program­ming text­book Struc­ture and Inter­pre­ta­tion of Computer Programs call this virtuous cycle proce­dural epis­te­mology. We could also call it by its less exotic name: research.