GitHub Copilot • Hacker News Board

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #415

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.

I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive". I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.

Oh now I see! This is how we will enter a new era of ‘code bloat’ - Moore’s law applied to software - where lines of code double every 18 months-

Re: GitHub Copilot

#938

Post by varispeed » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

aprinsen wrote: post #833

varispeed wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this a joke? Top 3 comments follow almost an identical format?

Yes it was a joke. I wrote it myself. Seems many people didn't get it. Oh well...

Re: GitHub Copilot

#939

Post by corobo » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:12 AM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #309

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…

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

The next skill will be perfectly casting the right spell to make the AI spit out the product as spec'd.

Repurposed Google-fu. We'll always have jobs :)

Re: GitHub Copilot

#940

Post by jereees » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:18 AM UTC

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.

The technical preview document points out that editor context is sent back to the server not just for code generation but as feedback for improvement. Are you (or OpenAI) improving the ML models based on the usage of this extension? It is interesting what the pricing will look like given that the model was originally trained on FOSS and then you go and harvest test cases from real users. If that’s the case I think that should be clearly explained upfront.