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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#531

Post by Hammershaft »

Joeri wrote: post #343
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?

Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far, although sometimes in a disruptive way. I consider this like the switch from instruction-level programming to compiled languages, a level of abstraction added that buys a large increase in productivity and makes projects affordable that weren’t affordable before. If anything this will probably lead to a boom in development work. But there’s a bunch of low ski…

> Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far

Do you have a source for this re the last 20 years? It seems to me automation has been shifting the demand recently towards more skilled cognitive work.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#532

Post by gonehome »

uticus wrote: post #509
gonehome wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have made some variation of this argument since the move from writing binary to writing assembly. With every new layer of abstraction there’s more power. The long term benefit of a tool that can do this well far exceeds what humans can do by hand, but that may not be true in the very short term. Either way, I suspect the benefits to be big.

I disagree with the comparison. This isn't abstraction, it is syntax completion. As if you typed the first four bytes and GitHub (mostly correctly it must be mentioned!) completed the remaining. Unlike an additional abstraction layer, the readibility is not increased.

The end goal of this based on what I've seen from Open AI examples and related beta projects is more high level language -> code.

"Write a standard sign up page" -> Generated HTML

"Write a unit test to test for X" -> Unit Test.

It's more than just syntax completion - I'd argue that's the beginning of a new layer of abstraction similar to previous new abstraction layers. The demo on their main page is more than syntax completion - it writes a method to check for positive sentiment automatically using a web service based on standard english.

This is extremely powerful and it's still super early.

I saw one example that converted english phrases into bash commands, "Search all text files for the word X" -> the correct grep command.

That is a big deal for giving massive leverage to people writing software and using tools. We'll be able to learn way faster with that kind of AI assisted feedback loop.

Similarly to compilers, the end result can also be better than what humans can do eventually because the AI can optimize things humans can't easily, by training for performance. Often the optimal layout can be weird.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#533

Post by chaorace »

itsoktocry wrote: post #366
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.

> 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, wh…

It may reduce the demand for the rank-and-file grunts, though.

Why would an architect bother with sending some work overseas if tools like this would enable them to crank out the code faster than it would take to do a code review?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#534

Post by ranguna »

smoldesu wrote: post #456

I'm willing to go all-in on something like this, only if I can get a promise that this will be an open project as time goes on. I'm not a fan of all of the "commercial" talk in this... if OpenAI is involved, and most of this can run locally, why can't it be fully open source?

Most of it can run locally? Please point me to a trained gpt 3 model, probably the main brains of this tool.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#535

Post by brundolf »

For a long time now I've thought that AI would have a really interesting role to play in developer experience, though this isn't really the form I think it should take.

I think it would make the most sense as a really advanced static-analysis tool/linter/etc. Imagine writing something like C where whole classes of errors can't be checked statically in a mechanical way, but they could be found by a fuzzy ML system automatically looking over your shoulder. Imagine your editor saying "I'm not sure, but that feels like a memory error". And of course you can dismiss it "no, good thought, but I really meant to do that". Imagine an editor that can automatically sniff out code-smells. But the human, at the end of the day, still makes the call about what code to write and not write; they're just assisted with extra perspective while doing so

Re: GitHub Copilot

#537

Post by manmal »

The real magic of writing code is the compound interest it pays - if you structure the lower level components well, then they can be combined into ever more powerful components, saving time and effort in an exponential way.

This product seems to encourage the complete opposite - hack together stuff without thinking about how it could fit into your accumulated Baukasten of components.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#538

Post by [deleted] »

croes wrote: post #354
Joeri wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far, although sometimes in a disruptive way. I consider this like the switch from instruction-level programming to compiled languages, a level of abstraction added that buys a large increase in productivity and makes projects affordable that weren’t affordable before. If anything this will probably lead to a boom in development work. But there’s a bunch of low ski…

I think you are confusing correlation and causation. Not automation produces jobs, more people and more income for that people produces jobs, because more people means more demand.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot

#539

Post by juancampa »

croes wrote: post #351
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…

Maybe it's just because humans are not as creative as they think. Whatever you do, thousands of others have done the same already. So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a mediocre one and the right AI assistant gives the same results.

Quite the opposite. Menial work will be automated away (e.g. CRUD) and only good programmers will be needed to do the more complicated work.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#540

Post by napolux »

ukoki wrote: post #161
napolux wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or broken code :D

The averageRuntimeInSeconds example does not check for division by zero so it creates broken code at least 20% of the time based on the examples on the homepage :)

nothing more than what I was expecting :D
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