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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

201–210 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#201
post #174
post #88

Calling it now, there will be a "Copilot considered harmful" post. If you need to go through the suggested code to ensure it's correct, you may as well write it yourself? If you glance at it and it looks about right, you can potentially overlook bugs or edge cases, you'll lose confidence in your own code since you didn't properly conceptualise it yourself. Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active exper…

Honestly, this attitude (dismissing the feature even without trying it out) comes across as insecurity and gatekeeping.

Nope, it's called wisdom. Not everyone on here is under 12.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#202
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up a really good point. I'm super curious what the legality and ethics around training machines on licensed or even proprietary code would be. IIRC there are implications around code you can build if you've seen proprietary code (I remember an article from HN about how bash had to be written by someone who hadn't seen the unix shell code or something like that). How would we classify that legally when it co…

I would argue that a trained model falls under the legal category of "compilation of facts". More generally, keep in mind that the legal world, despite an apparent focus on definition is very bad at dealing with novelty, and most of it will end up justifying a posteriori existing practices.

You might argue that, but you would likely be wrong.

Even a search engine is not merely a "compilation of facts". A trained model is the result of analysis and reasoning, albeit automated.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#203
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visited https://copilot.github.com/ , and I don't know how to feel. Obviously it's a nice achievement, not gonna lie. But I have a feeling it will end up causing more work. e.g. the `averageRuntimeInSeconds` example, I had to spend a bit of time to see if it was actually correct. It has to be, since it's on the front page, but then I realized I'd need to spend time reviewing the AI's code. It's cool as a toy, but I…

It has the ability to generate unit tests as well, which will help cut down some on the verification side if you feed it enough cases.

Well then you have to check the generated tests. That's just one more layer, isn't it?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#204

Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.

Has this been tested for accessibility yet, particularly with a screen reader?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously controversial, since we are thinking about how this could displace a large portion of developers. How do you see Copilot being more augmentative than disruptive to the developer ecosystem? Also, how you see it different from regular code completion tools like tabnine.

We think that software development is entering its third wave of productivity change. The first was the creation of tools like compilers, debuggers, garbage collectors, and languages that made developers more productive. The second was open source where a global community of developers came together to build on each other's work. The third revolution will be the use of AI in coding. The problems we spend our days sol…

I'm super interested to read more about your theory/analysis. Have you written on it in a blog or anything?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#206

Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.

Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action? - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as a team? - can Copilot copy…

You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I think it answers all of your questions: https://copilot.github.com/#faqs

Re: GitHub Copilot

#207
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It suggests code line by line, so yes

This is not true - and I've been using copilot for many months :) It suggests entire blocks of code - but not in every context.

My bad, you're right. I remember now that it suggested me entire code blocks from time to time.

Do you know in which "context" it suggests a block?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#208
So the AI doesn't actually understand the code does it? It only looks for similar things. So if I'm writing a game in Rust using the hecs ECS library, how is it going to help me? How many other people have written a game in that language using that library in this genre trying to do this task before? Probably very very few.

And yeah that's a niche example, maybe this is super helpful for writing a react app or something very library heavy. But gut feeling without trying it is that there's no way this could actually work on anything but the most common tasks that you can google and find solutions for already, just made easier so you don't actually have to google for it.

When I used tabnine which learned from you as you edit, it was fairly helpful for very repetitive code within the same project. But it was no where near "read english and write the code I meant for it". I'm curious to know how well this actually performs for non-common tasks, and whether it can understand ideas in your codebase that you come up with. If I make a WorldAbstractionOverEntities thing in my code, and then later use it in the project, will the AI be able to help me out? Or is it going to go "sorry, no one on github has used this thing you came up with an hour ago, I can't help you". An AI that could understand your own codebase and the abstractions you make and not just popular libraries would be infinitely more useful imo.

That said, I haven't tried this, maybe it'll turn out really good.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#209
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visited https://copilot.github.com/ , and I don't know how to feel. Obviously it's a nice achievement, not gonna lie. But I have a feeling it will end up causing more work. e.g. the `averageRuntimeInSeconds` example, I had to spend a bit of time to see if it was actually correct. It has to be, since it's on the front page, but then I realized I'd need to spend time reviewing the AI's code. It's cool as a toy, but I…

It has the ability to generate unit tests as well, which will help cut down some on the verification side if you feed it enough cases.

I think I'd love to use this to generate tests and then write the functions myself. Test generation seems like a killer feature.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#210
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We think that software development is entering its third wave of productivity change. The first was the creation of tools like compilers, debuggers, garbage collectors, and languages that made developers more productive. The second was open source where a global community of developers came together to build on each other's work. The third revolution will be the use of AI in coding. The problems we spend our days sol…

Let's solve the problem of replacing CEOs next. The above paragraph could have been written by GPT-3 already.

I think you’re looking at the problem the wrong way. This provides less strong engineering talent with more leverage. The CEO (which could be you!) gets closer to being a CTO with less experience and context necessary (recall businesses that run on old janky codebases or no code platforms; they don’t have to be elegant, they simply have to work).

It all boils down to who is capturing the value for the effort and time expended. If a mediocre software engineer can compete against senior engineers with such augmentation, that seems like a win. Less time on learning language incantations, more time spent delivering value to those who will pay for it.

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