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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#641
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With VSCode, Github and a perhaps a little bit of help from OpenAI, Microsoft is poised to dominate the developer productivity tools market in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised to see really good static analysis and automated code review tools coming out of these teams very soon.

And still Windows is a mess.

Compared to what other operating system(s)?

wsl on windows 10 has been amazing to develop and work on.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#644
I wonder if by using Github Copilot you are training Github Copilot to code better. I don't see this as replacing a programmer, but I could see it as an advanced, possibly semi-automatic refactoring tool. This could allow a less skilled programmer to be more productive and produce better code, making them more valuable. Also, licensing was mentioned. I would not want Github Copilot training on private repos.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#645

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…

Exactly. I'm currently reading The Mythical Man-Month. 90% of what the book discusses in term of programming work that actually has to be done is completely irrelevant today. Still the software industry is bigger then ever. In the book it is also mentioned that programmers spend about 50% of their time on non-programming tasks. In my experience this is also true today. So no matter the tools we've got, the profession stayed the same since the early 70s.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#646

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…

for those of you like this concept but 1. did not get into the alpha (or want something that has lots of great reviews) 2. need to run locally (security or connectivity) 3. want to use any IDE... please try Tabnine

Re: GitHub Copilot

#647
post #398

I don't think we need to start looking for new career paths yet. This example has a few bugs and it took me longer to track them down than it would have to write it myself: #!/bin/bash # List all python source files which are more than 1KB and contain the word "copilot". find . \ -name "*.py" \ -size +1000 \ -exec grep -n copilot {}\; "-exec grep -n copilot {}\;" needs to have a space before the semicolon otherwise f…

I read this as a criticism of bash

I don't see why. It is on Copilot to produce syntactically correct code that at least doesn't fail to run, even if we ignore the correctness.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#648
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still Windows is a mess.

Compared to what other operating system(s)? wsl on windows 10 has been amazing to develop and work on.

Every other OS. It's full of legacy APIs and scrapped new APIs. Every release is like two steps one step forward, one step back and one two the side. Just because thousands of companies have written software and drivers for it, it's still existing. If it were released today it wouldn't stand a chance.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#649

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…

Self driving is used in the mining industry, and lots of high paid drivers have been replaced.

But you are clearly more knowledgeable with your 0 drivers replaced comment.

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