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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#621

Post by TheRealPomax »

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

This ignores the ladder of abstraction, which you apparetly need to be reminded of exists. Not all programmers need to work at the same level of abstraction: some programmers need to write original code all day long because their subject field is close to the metal and there are no premade solutions. For those folks, the idea of copy-pasting from SO is pretty ridiculous, although SO might have questions and answers that allow them to write their own code solutions based on the insights of others. Because we're not going to dismiss highly respected experts in our fields just because they helped answer good questions with good detailed answers on Stackoverflow, are we?

A few rungs up on the ladder we still have programmers but now the kind whose job it is to write as little code as possible, where their worth comes from knowing exactly how little code glue is needed to, necessarily and sufficiently, make other people's libraries work together to functionality that is larger than the sum of its parts. These folks aren't solving unique problems, they make things work with as little code as possible, and copy-pasting from SO for problems that have been solved countless times already by others is 100% fine: their expertise is in knowing how to judge other people's code to determine whether that's the code they need to copy-paste.

And then, of course, there all the folks in between those two levels of abstraction.

The biggest mistake would be to hear "programming" and think "only my job is real programming, all those other people are just giving me a bad name". Different horses and different courses, and different courses for different horses.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#622

Post by inimino »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #454
inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

I mean you say this, but you and most likely the majority of programmers rely on dozens of repositories, packages and libraries with likely zero deep understanding of it (and at the very least haven't read the source code of ) so I don't really understand the difference here. The advantage of something like this is that instead of having to go to stack overflow or any number of reference sites and copy pasta it can j…

You don't see the difference between relying on a few battle-hardened libraries, and copy-pasting into your own code some mishmash of code that looked similar that other people wrote and is probably something like what a machine learning model thought you probably meant? Maybe we're in worse shape then I thought.

> The advantage [...] without me having to leave my IDE.

You're arguing for the convenience, my point was that that convenience creates a moral hazard, or if you prefer, a perverse incentive, to increase the number of lines of code, amount of boilerplate, code duplication, and to accept horrible, programmer-hostile interfaces because you have tied yourself to a tool that is needed to make them usable.

> Ajax post boilerplate

This is an argument for choosing the most appropriate abstractions. The problem with boilerplate isn't that you have to type it, it's that it makes the code worse: longer, almost certainly buggier, harder to read and understand, and probably even slower to compile and run. You could have made an editor macro 20 years ago to solve the typing boilerplate problem, but it wasn't the best answer then and it isn't now.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#623

Post by jrockway »

_fat_santa wrote: post #441
croes wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still Windows is a mess.

I'd bet money that the VSCode and Windows teams are basically on different planets and Microsoft.

I bet there are people that use Windows to develop VSCode and use VSCode to develop Windows, so some people probably know each other internally. I think what escapes HN is how massively successful Microsoft is. Sure, the search built into Windows sucks. There are many, many more complicated components of a platform and OS than that, and those seem to work as well as any other platform and OS.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#624

Post by Dylan16807 »

9dev wrote: post #422
jqbd wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a mediocre one and the right AI assistant gives the same results. I think of it as not needing juniors for boring work, all you need as a company is seniors and AI.

So where do these seniors come from?

You could have a much smaller pool of juniors/journeymen that are focused on maximum learning rather than amount of output.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#625

Post by slver »

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

You sound afraid you'll be replaced by software.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#626

Post by slver »

quek wrote: post #585
inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

> As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. Absolutely true. If your code is so repetitive that can be correctly predicted by an AI, you are either using a language that lacks expressiveness or have poor abstraction. The biggest problem in the software world is excessive complexity, excessive amounts of (poor) code and rei…

You're underestimating the sophistication of said AI.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#627

Post by slver »

hbosch wrote: post #576
inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

If we didn't need programmers to do the programming, that would be a perfect world.

This is inevitably leading to the moment where we don't need humans, but I'm fine with that.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#628

Post by z3t4 »

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

If we exclude the VM the code is running on, and the OS layer, and the kernel, and the micro-code, and the standard lib, then people also like to include library code, and also like to depend on third party PaaS and SaaS aka the "cloud"... If you do know what all bits of your code does you can send me a PM. cough All software is shit, with few exceptions. Not necessary because the developers don't know their stuff, but likely because of business priorities, politics, and layers of management. Software is a "people problem". So if we remove the "people" we might get better software ;)

Re: GitHub Copilot

#630

Post by kansface »

qqqwerty wrote: post #451
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.

We went through the same hype cycle with self driving cars. We are now ~15 years out from the DARPA challenges and to date exactly 0 drivers have been replaced by AI. It is certainly impressive to see how much the GPT models have improved. But the devil is in the last 10%. If you can create an AI that writes perfectly functional python code, but that same AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2 instance when the appli…

This isn't self driving for programming, its more like GPS and lane assist.
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