I think it would be interesting to see a study on memory retrieval for completing software projects with a dumb text editor with nothing enabled, an IDE, and an IDE with copilot enabled.
I learned to program using Python with Geany, no autocomplete, every single letter typed by my fingers; no auto-format either. I was doing some consulting (I got a cheap consulting gig as my first job) and wrote a daemon in Python, which ran for about a year, then hit an edge case where I had misspelled a variable. -_- After that it ran for several years, 24/7, no problem.
Now to my point: I learned Python far better than any other language I've ever used, I think because it was the first language I used seriously, but maybe it was because I never used auto-complete in those early days?
Or maybe because it is Python. I find Python to be a beginner friendly, easy to learn language that steers you in the "right" direction. I think it is the biggest factor that explains its popularity. It is not a perfect language, in fact, I don't like it that much, but you have to give credit when credit is due.
With C++, you can have decades of experience and be considered an expert, and yet, feel like a noob (my case). Perl, a language that shares many similarities with Python is also much harder to learn well. The "there is more than one way to do it" philosophy has value, but not for learning.
I might also depends for how long the developer has been using the tool. At university we first learned to program with pen and paper to develop memory and thinking habits before doing everything by hand with only vim and after that using and IDE after +6 months to let the habits develop.
Maybe if a developper starts learning straight with copilot, some habits will never form and things will never go into long term memory ?
i don't like _auto_complete, i find that the nondeterminstic text changes on the screen are pretty distracting. however, I do really like quick lookup of relevant names at my own will from the editor. this is possible with even e.g. ed and ctags.
i'd wager nearly every development environment is integrated to some extent, piping output in the unix shell is integrating.
