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

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#361

Post by jostmey »

anthropodie wrote: post #335
asdfman123 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

I am blown away but not scared for my job... yet. I suspect the AI is only as good as the training examples from Github. If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. The AI is simply performing some really amazing pattern matching to suggest code based on other pieces of code.

But over the coming decades AI could dominate coding. I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost all coding competitions!

Re: GitHub Copilot

#362

Post by pfraze »

feross wrote: post #306
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 techno…

They finally did it. They finally found a way to make me write comments.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#363

Post by astrobe_ »

a-r-t wrote: post #246

One of the examples they provide on copilot.github.com shows a unit test for strip_suffix function. It does not test for a file name without a suffix, which the function would fail (it removes the last character instead): def strip_suffix(filename): """ Removes the suffix from a filename """ return filename[:filename.rfind('.')] import unittest def test_strip_suffix(): """ Tests for the strip_suffix function """ asse…

One should keep in mind that it is just "copy-paste" on steroids (ok, maybe a gallon of steroids), but users should be cautious about the false sense of irresponsibility.

Because just like when they copy-paste the top answer on SO, at the end of the day they are responsible for the code they ship.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#364

Post by croes »

gpm wrote: post #284
stefanos82 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - under what license the generated code falls under? Is it even copyrighted? Generally my understand is that to be copyrightable it has to be the output of a human creative process, this doesn't seem to qualify (I am not a lawyer). See also, monkeys can't hold copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

It is output of humans creative processes, just not yours. Like an automated stackoverflow snippet engine.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#365

Post by asdfman123 »

jostmey wrote: post #361
anthropodie wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

I am blown away but not scared for my job... yet. I suspect the AI is only as good as the training examples from Github. If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. The AI is simply performing some really amazing pattern matching to suggest code based on other pieces of code. But over the coming decades AI could dominate coding. I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost al…

I guess it's worth pointing out that the human brain is just an amazing pattern matcher.

They feed you all these algorithms in college and your brain suggests new algorithms based on those patterns.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#366

Post by itsoktocry »

anthropodie wrote: post #335
asdfman123 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

>Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world.

I'm skeptical.

The envelope of "programming" will continue to shift as things get more and more complex. Your mother-in-law is not going to install Copilot and start knocking out web apps. Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, which increases demand for the skills.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#367

Post by nonbirithm »

It sounds like this is similar to Kite, but actually competent as a service and not associated with a brand that has destroyed all trust. But it has to come with the same privacy caveats, right? Uploading your private code to a third-party server could result in business or regulatory violations.

And even if you're okay with sending your code, what about hardcoded secrets? What's to prevent Copilot clients from sending things that should never leave the user's computer? Heuristics? Will we be able to tell what part of the code is about to be sent? And is the data stored?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#368

Post by croes »

natfriedman wrote: post #345
stefanos82 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In general: (1) training ML systems on public data is fair use (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler. On the training question specifically, you can find OpenAI's position, as submitted to the USPTO here: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R... We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're eager to…

Fair use doesn't exist in every country, so it's US only?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#369

Post by dilap »

maxwells-daemon wrote: post #346

I'd rate myself as "above-average receptive" to ML-based tooling, but after trying two "AI autocomplete" tools (Kite and TabNine) I've decided it's not for me. The suggestions were usually good, but I found having complex, nondeterministic IDE commands pretty unsettling.

Could actually make you better at producing robust code, though. It's somehow always easier to spot someone else's mistakes than your own.

Or to put it another way: you know you can't trust the AI-generated code w/o convincing yourself it's correct. You think you can trust the code you wrote yourself, but you're probably wrong! :-)

Re: GitHub Copilot

#370

Post by timkam »

jostmey wrote: post #361
anthropodie wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

I am blown away but not scared for my job... yet. I suspect the AI is only as good as the training examples from Github. If so, then this AI will never generate novel algorithms. The AI is simply performing some really amazing pattern matching to suggest code based on other pieces of code. But over the coming decades AI could dominate coding. I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win almost al…

To generate new, generally useful algorithms, we need a different type of "AI", i.e. one that combines learning and formal verification. Because algorithm design is a cycle: come up with an algorithm, prove what it can or can't do, and repeat until you are happy with the formal properties. Software can help, but we can't automate the math, yet.
Post reply on HN