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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#761

Post by Noumenon72 »

varispeed wrote: post #745
feross wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have been using the Alpha for two weeks as well. I'm impressed by how GitHub Copilot appears to know exactly what I want to type. Not often it even suggests code I was going to peek, such as a snippet to a context menu or completing an array with all Romanian postcodes. Copilot is particularly helpful when working on Angular components where it makes mesmerising predictions. I see technology like Copilot becoming a…

Does it sometimes switch into a different language mid-function?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#762

Post by SilverRed »

mdellavo wrote: post #193
natfriedman wrote: post #60

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.

What do you think about this being overall detrimental to code quality as it allows people to just blindly accept completions without really understanding the generated code. Similar to copy-and-paste coding. The first example parse_expenses.py uses a float for currency - that seems to be a pretty big error that's being overlooked along with other minor issues around no error handling. I would say the quality of the…

>The first example parse_expenses.py uses a float for currency

I have made this mistake without the help of any AI or copy/paste. It's still in the hands of the developer to test and review everything they commit.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#763

Post by nihaals »

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…

How did you manage to get early access? Is there some kind of GitHub Early Access programme (or something similar part of Enterprise)?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#764

Post by miohtama »

chimtim wrote: post #738
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…

Unfortunately, one in 10 times is far from good enough (and this is with good prompt engineering which after using large language models for a while, one starts to do). I feel like the current generation of AI is bringing us close enough to something that works once in a while but requires constant human expertise ~50% of the time. The self-driving industry is in a similar situation of despair where millions have bee…

You are correct. I feel this is why the service is called Copilot, not Pilot :)

Re: GitHub Copilot

#766

Post by SilverRed »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #275
natfriedman wrote: post #60

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.

If I put a section in my LICENSE.txt prohibiting use as training data in commercial models, would that be sufficient to keep my code out of models like this?

Don't make your code public. Someone could read it and train the model in their brain to synthesize some code based on it.

If its publicly available than its fair game to use it to learn and base ideas on.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#767

Post by antiterra »

This presents some interesting theoretical attack surfaces.

- Intentional poisoning the model with difficult to recognize and exploitable faults - Unintentional poisoning from flawed generation habits which are further reinforced by the usage being eventually fed back into the model

I don’t know how it maps to code, but in my experiments generating text with GPT-3, I have started to get a feel for its ‘opinions’ and tendencies in various situations. These severely limit its potential output.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#768

Post by sdesol »

FreeSpeech wrote: post #680
feross wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anyone used Copilot with a more succinct language? It appears to only automate boilerplate and rudimentary patterns, which while useful in repetitive low signal to noise ratio languages like React or Java, sounds less appealing if you're writing Clojure.

This is a good point and it will be interesting to see if something like copilot will get developers/companies to adopt a language that is better supported by AI.

Edit: You are honestly downvoting me for saying something that might actually happen. If copilot lives up to the hype, but for a limited number of languages, this can have a profound affect on what languages people might decide to use in the future.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#769

Post by [deleted] »

bww wrote: post #421

The example in the hero animation has a bug. The ${text} may not be correctly URL-encoded, which would make the body invalid. And because this sort of feature encourages people to blindly trust the machine and not think about what they're doing this error is much less likely to be caught. Personally I think this whole class of feature only offers trivial short-term efficiency gains at the expense of long-term profess…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot

#770

Post by mastax »

jonas_kgomo wrote: post #93
natfriedman wrote: post #60

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.

This is obviously controversial, since we are thinking about how this could displace a large portion of developers. How do you see Copilot being more augmentative than disruptive to the developer ecosystem? Also, how you see it different from regular code completion tools like tabnine.

Intel put itself out of business since all the world's computing needs can now be done on one CPU.

Or, perhaps, lower unit costs of computing lead to far far greater demand for computing since it became practical to apply to more domains.

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