Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#301

Post by fzaninotto »

softwaredoug wrote: post #288
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…

It seems to replace/shorten the loop of “Google for snippet that does X” copy, paste, tweak, no? Which of course is super cool for many tasks!

It's smarter than that. It suggests things that have never been written. It actually creates code based on the context, just like GPT-3 can create new text documents based on previous inputs.

Edit: Check this screencast for instance: https://twitter.com/francoisz/status/1409908666166349831

Re: GitHub Copilot

#302

Post by the_arun »

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?

In addition, I would like to see GitHub reviewing my code & giving me suggestions on how I could improve. That will be more educative & a tool to ensure consistency across code.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#303

Post by maxpert »

Now I am gonna have an outage because co-pilot wrote some code that had an error. People have implicit bias of code being reliable that they don't write, StackOverflow snippets are perfect example for that.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#304

Post by mkr-hn »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #183
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.

Are those developers worried about having their jobs replaced by a code-writing AI? :) I mean... why would 95% of developer jobs exist with this tech available? You just need that 5% of devs who actually write novel code for this thing to learn from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

An Isaac Asimov story about someone who didn't take to the program and, as a result, got picked to create new things because someone has to make them.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#305

Post by amelius »

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…

Does Copilot phone home?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#306

Post by feross »

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…

I’ve also been using the Alpha for around two weeks. I'm impressed by how GitHub Copilot seems to know exactly what I want to type next. Sometimes it even suggests code I was about to look up, such as a snippet to pick a random hex color or completing an array with all the common image mime-types.

Copilot is particularly helpful when working on React components where it makes eerily accurate predictions. I see technology like Copilot becoming an indispensable part of the programmer toolbelt similar to IDE autocomplete for many people.

I also see it changing the way that programmers document their code. With Copilot if you write a really good descriptive comment before jumping into the implementation, it does a much better job of suggesting the right code, sometimes even writing the entire function for you.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#307

Post by pnt12 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #267

From the FAQ: https://copilot.github.com/#faqs >> How does GitHub Copilot work? >> OpenAI Codex was trained on publicly available source code and natural language, so it understands both programming and human languages. I want to propose a new Bingo style game where you get points when AI researchers (or rather their marketing teams) throw around big words that nobody understands, like, er "understands" with abandon.…

In AI research lingo "understands" really means "makes decent correlations".

Re: GitHub Copilot

#308

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> To be honest, I doubt that.

Okay, but that's...not much of a counterargument (to be fair, the original claim was unsupported, though.)

> 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

That's really not a counterargument. “Fair use” is an exception to exclusive rights under copyright, and renders the copyright holder’s preferences moot to the extent it applies. The copyright holder not being likely to want it based on the circumstances is an argument against it being implicitly licensed use, but not against it being fair use.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#309

Post by asdfman123 »

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…

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI.

Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#310

Post by fzaninotto »

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'm not sure I spend less time actually coding stuff (because I have to review the Copilot code). But the cost of the code I write is definitely reduced, because:

- the review from my peers is faster (the code is more correct) - I come back less to the code (because I have thought about all the corner cases when checking the copilot code) - As I care more about naming & inline docs (it helps copilot), the code is actually cheaper to maintain.

Post reply on HN