When using GitHub Copilot, I often write a brief comment first and most of the time, it is able to complete my code faster than if I had written it myself. For my workflow, a good code model must therefore also be able to understand natural text well.

Although I am not sure to which degree the ability to understand natural text and the ability to generate natural text are related. Perhaps a bit of text generation capabilities can be traded off against faster execution and fewer parameters.