Sounds like a big distraction.
GitHub Copilot
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot
#62IMO a potentially more interesting application of this technology would be a learning system that is able to learn your coding style. You give it access to the codebase and it reformats all files on save according to your likings, perfectly. Obviously a program that is able to write actual great code reliably would be spectacular, but we aren't there yet, I don't think Copilot presently is able to make me meaningfull…
Formatting code according to a given style is a much easier task than what Copilot does.
Apparently not that easy[0]. Depending on one's priorities formatting/pretty-printing code can be trivial or very difficult. Doing that dynamically based on a user's individual preferences or even their existing codebase's style is probably much harder.
I don't doubt Copilot is also quite a problem to solve, most likely indeed harder, though in that case at least there's an abundance of training data.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#63So this is what happens when you're owned by Microsoft who has an exclusive contract with OpenAI.
A couple weeks ago I ran a few experiments with AI-based code generation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27621114 ) from a GPT model more suitable for code generation: it sounds like this new "Codex" model is something similar.
If anyone from GitHub is reading this, please give me access to the Alpha so I can see what happens when I give it a should_terminate() function. :P
Re: GitHub Copilot
#64I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…
How big/complicated are the functions Copilot is autocompleting for you? I'm thinking perhaps reading 10 potential candidates is actually slower and less instructive than trying to write the thing yourself.
It shows the suggestions line by line, and only shows the best guess. It's not more intrusive than Intellisense.
You can actually see all the code blocks Copilot is thinking about if you want to, but that is indeed a distraction.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#65It's funny that GitHub ships their own text editor, Atom, but the second example (under the "More than Autocomplete" header) on the Copilot website is clearly using VSCode.
I don't know if they've officially said anything on this, but since the MS acquisition it feels like Atom is on life support. Github Codespaces is built on VSCode, and there's a lot of effort from Github going into their VSCode extension for things like PR review.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#66So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?
No, a model trained on text covered by a license is not itself covered by the license, unless it explicitly copies the text (you cannot copyright a "style").
There will almost certainly be cases where it copies exact lines. When working with GPT2 I got whole chunks of news articles.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#67So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?
No, a model trained on text covered by a license is not itself covered by the license, unless it explicitly copies the text (you cannot copyright a "style").
Well, it probably is explicitly copying at least some subset of the source text - otherwise the code would be syntactically invalid, no?
Re: GitHub Copilot
#68[deleted]
Re: GitHub Copilot
#69I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…
do you still go over the generated code line by line and touchup in places where it did not do a good job?
It suggests code line by line, so yes
Re: GitHub Copilot
#70I wonder if there's any potential for Copilot to suggest malicious code because it's been trained on an open source projects containing intentionally malicious code.
or broken code :D