401–410 of 1001 posts
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.
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It suggests code line by line, so yes
I guess I dont see the point if only 10% of the time it's exactly what you want and the rest of the time you have to go back and touch up the line. Does it train a programmer for accepting less than ideal code because it was suggested? Similar to how some programmers blindly copy code from StackOverflow without modification. Seems like there is a potential downside that's being ignored.
Maybe juniors, but I don't see this being likely for anyone else. I've been using TabNine for ages and it's closer to just a fancy autocomplete than a code assistant. Usually it writes what I would write, and if I don't see what I would write I just write it myself (until either I wrote the whole thing or it suggests the right thing). Of course, barring some variable names or whatever.
I don't have it "write code for me" - that happens in my head. It just does the typing.
For foss ones it could be great though.
I think the best part for me is that how it's going to introduce even more low code devs to the worker pool, which means I will be able to raise my price again. Last time this happens, when designers got to the backend, I got +30% in a year once my clients figured out the difference in output.
One example of where this can be a problem is numerics - most software developers don't understand it and routinely do questionable things. I'm curious what effort the authors have put in to mitigate this problem.
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Why would you say it's an error to use a float for currency? I would imagine it's better to use a float for calculations then round when you need to report a value rather than accumulate a bunch of rounding errors while doing computations.
Using float is perfectly OK since using fixed point decimal (or whatever "exact" math operations) will lead to rounding error anyway (what about multiplying a monthly salary by 16/31 (half a month) ?) The problem with float is that many people don't understand how they work to handle rounding errors correctly. Now there are some cases where float don't cut it. And big ones. For example, summing a set of numbers (with…
>>> from decimal import Decimal
>>> Decimal(1000) * Decimal(16) / Decimal(31)
Decimal('516.1290322580645161290322581')
>>> 1000 * 16 / 31
516.1290322580645
https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html
If it were me, I wouldn't go around bragging about how much money my software manages while being willfully ignorant of the fundamentals.
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Think of it as a junior dev working under you and doing the grunt work of typing in your ideas. Sometimes he can StackOverflow a better snippet than you can write on your own, you will probably learn a bit from it, but it won't surprise you. It is no different from a code review of another perhaps junior dev and only doing adding finishing touches. There is plenty of boilerplate you have to write, Intellisense/ Auotf…
Most people on HN will probably be fine for a while. This innovation though, once properly developed, could completely screw over anyone wanting to enter programming. Code completion might be the new "junior dev."
While sure purist view is not wrong that average quality of outcome has dropped since 70s-80s, the quantum of throughput meant that impact has been positive and immense.
Similarly I am expecting this kind of tooling would open up to more types of new developers.
[1] all the mathematicans thought similarly perhaps during 50s and 60s.
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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…