For me, the excitement comes from Microsoft spending big money on this tech. For those in the field of program synthesis it will be interesting to compare performance and viability of the tech. It's still early stages but this has been long coming and will put the emphasis of software development into more collaborative aspects such as architecture, design and code reviews.
GitHub Copilot
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action? - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as a team? - can Copilot copy…
You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I think it answers all of your questions: https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
Sorry Nat, but I don't think it really answers anything. I would argue that using GPL code during training falls under Copilot being a derivative work of said code. I mean if you look at how a language model works, than it's pretty straightforward. The word "code synthesizer" alone insinuates as much. I think this will probably ultimately tested in court.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#913This things suggests code to write, but not code to remove.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
What you didn't write or deleted does not contain errors and you do not need to support or fix it.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#914Gigantic caveat. > I agree to these additional telemetry terms as part of the technical preview
Right. If you’re comfortable giving access to your source files to GitHub+OpenAI, then go for it. I’m not sure how this would apply to secret keys or flat files with customer data/PII, but in any case that makes it a non-starter for me. Their “Please do not share this URL publicly.” Banner at the top of the page which disclosed this info makes my skin crawl a bit… If I were only working on public projects I would be…
I am pretty sure they will train it on private repos they are hosting as well (just not be public about it)
Re: GitHub Copilot
#915I wonder why there is no example in java. It is one of the most popular languages (drfinatelly more popular than ruby or Go, and on par with Javascript and python).
Cause Java is enterprise lang and programmers there know Microsoft master plan, so it won't get adoption. They rely on newbs and hippies to help them train it.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
By definition, currency uses fixed point arithmetic not floating point arithmetic.
Not even remotely true. It is entirely context dependent. I've always used floats when working in finance.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#917i’m sort of a Luddite so take this with a grain of salt. I don’t see this going anywhere. If it’s really good and we can actually have 1 developer instead of 2 now why would any developer want to do this? this would basically be a piece of automation that diminishes the value we are creating. If it’s crap it’s going to create mountains of verbosity and code written to pump up the LOC numbers. It’s terrible. After tha…
As long as supply > demand then 1 programmer able to do job for 2 equals higher salary. Obviously supply shortage will end though, sooner or later.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#918Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or the converse? If Copilot is as good as it gets but only for some languages, won’t it influence what languages will be chosen by devs or companies?
Would be an interesting fact so see companies adopt languages that need significantly more code to reach the same result just because some AI can automate a lot.
Thinking about generating 10 times the code you need, just because you can generate it instead of writing (perfomant?) code.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#919So the AI doesn't actually understand the code does it? It only looks for similar things. So if I'm writing a game in Rust using the hecs ECS library, how is it going to help me? How many other people have written a game in that language using that library in this genre trying to do this task before? Probably very very few. And yeah that's a niche example, maybe this is super helpful for writing a react app or someth…
I have no idea how well Copilot will work in practice, but, in principle, imagine a huge Cartesian space where every program in Copilot's training data is a point. Call this space S. Now suppose S contains two programs P1 and P2. Copilot should be able to represent P1, P2 and any program in S that is on a gradient between P1 and P2. If you want to write a new program, P3, such that P3 is in S between P1 and P2, then you're in luck. Otherwise you'll get garbage.
This is explained in more detail in the article below; see the first section titled "Deep Learning: the geometric view":
https://blog.keras.io/the-limitations-of-deep-learning.html
In other words, Copilot should work well for boilerplate code and allow for many variations, but for anything more original it should be hit-and-miss. In principle. In practice, we'll know in a year or two, once enough people have used it. Or not even then.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#920Earlier 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…
>Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, which increases demand for the skills.
Well like everything in life I guess it depends? The only iron rule I can always safely assume is supply and demand.
But for programming especially on the web, it seems everyone has a tendency of making things more difficult than it should be, that inherent system complexity isn't going to be solved by ML.
So in terms of squeezing out absolute efficiency from system cost, I think we have a very very long way to go.