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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#291

Post by read_if_gay_ »

RivieraKid wrote: post #243
fzaninotto wrote: post #40

I'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…

What's your estimate of the productivity boost expressed as a percentage? I.e. if it takes you 100 hours to complete a project without Copilot, how many hours will it be with Copilot?

I tried TabNine and it wasn’t a huge improvement because what costs the most time isn’t typing stuff but thinking about what to type.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#292

Post by sergiomattei »

rglover wrote: post #213
arrayjumper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a copilot. You're still the pilot. To be honest this seems like it can definitely save me a bunch of googling and let me stay in the ide.

Tell that to the new programmer who builds a piece of software using this creating an absolute mess. The danger here isn't with experienced developers (this is, obviously, a tool with great potential for productivity). It's with people who just blindly trust what the robot spits out. Once code like that is implemented in a mission-critical system without discernment, all hell will break loose. Edit: worth watching th…

So? If you're making a mission critical system, don't hire subpar developers.

It's not Copilot's problem. Powerful tools can be misused by anyone.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#293

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

dang wrote: post #274
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the green ones always angry?

I suppose you know this, but green means the account is new ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ). Angry people sometimes create new accounts to vent. That's not a good use of HN, but let's not respond as if there's something wrong with new users coming to the community. We don't want this place to become insular and brackish. New users are the community's freshwater!

This is a great point. Do names turn from green to grey based on karma or time?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#294

Post by pnt12 »

dgb23 wrote: post #188
theden wrote: 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…

I honestly think this is solving a real problem with commonly used languages and their lack of syntax abstraction and expressiveness. I can imagine this being very useful in helping to type out what I consider to be „mechanical noise“: Things that you have to type out to satisfy an expression rather than to convey semantics. A good example of how this type of noise manifests: Observe two programmers, both being simil…

Couldn't disagree more:

Smart programmers are are not coding thousands of lines of code every day. There's so much more to in software engineering other than coding, that's why senior engineers spend less time writing code than juniors.

If a slow typer is using a auto-completer, he's not learning to type faster.

If auto complete fails, then the slow programmer will need to invalidate the code first, and then type it anyway.

All in all - maybe it's impressive AI research project, but I don't see it as a useful product.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#295

Post by fzaninotto »

hobofan wrote: post #266
fzaninotto wrote: post #40

I'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…

Have you used any intelligent code completion in the past? E.g. I'd really be interested how it compares to TabNine[0], which already gives pretty amazing single line suggestions (haven't tried their experimental multi-line suggestions yet). [0]: https://www.tabnine.com

I have used IDEs with good knowledge of the types and libraries I'm using (e.g. VSCode with TypeScript). They offer good suggestions once you start typing a function name.

But nothing gets close to Copilot. It "understands" what you're trying to do, and writes the code for you. It makes type-based autocompletions useless.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#296

Post by chuinard »

stefanos82 wrote: post #197
natfriedman wrote: post #60

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…

Some of your questions aren't easy to answer. Maybe the first two were OK to ask. Others would probably require lawyers and maybe even courts to decide. This is a pretty cool new product just being shared on an online discussion forum. If you are serious about using it for a company, talk to your lawyers, get in touch with Github's people, and maybe hash out these very specific details on the side. Your comment came off as super negative to me.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#297

Post by rowanG077 »

SCLeo wrote: post #148
natfriedman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea... In terms of the permissibility of training on public code, the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. We are certain this…

> ...the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. To be honest, I doubt that. Maybe I am special, but if I am releasing some code under GPL, I really don't want it to be used in training a closed source model, which will be used in a closed source software generating code for closed source projects.

That's the point of fair use. To do something with a material the original author does not want.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#299

Post by gumby »

Won’t be mainstream until it supports C++20 under Emacs.

(Yes that’s an HN-frowned-upon joke comment, but that is my dev environment)

Re: GitHub Copilot

#300

Post by sumanthvepa »

mdellavo wrote: post #193
natfriedman wrote: post #60

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.

What do you think about this being overall detrimental to code quality as it allows people to just blindly accept completions without really understanding the generated code. Similar to copy-and-paste coding. The first example parse_expenses.py uses a float for currency - that seems to be a pretty big error that's being overlooked along with other minor issues around no error handling. I would say the quality of the…

I use a similar feature in IntelliJ idea, and I've often found that first time I learn about new feature in the language is when I get a suggestion. I usually explore topic much more deeply at that time. So far from helping me copy-paste, I find code suggestions help me explore new features of the language and framework, that I might not have known about.
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