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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#941

Post by varispeed »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #761
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…

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

I do it todo el tiempo

Re: GitHub Copilot

#942

Post by abn120 »

natfriedman wrote: post #345
stefanos82 wrote: post #197

Earlier 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…

In general: (1) training ML systems on public data is fair use (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler. On the training question specifically, you can find OpenAI's position, as submitted to the USPTO here: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R... We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're eager to…

(1) That may be so, but you are not training the models on public data like sports results. You are training it on copyright protected creations of humans that often took years to write.

So your point (1) is a distraction, and quite an offensive one to thousands of open source developers, who trusted GitHub with their creations.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#943

Post by krageon »

anthropodie wrote: post #335
asdfman123 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

People have been saying AI would end everything and anything since I was a wee baby. It still hasn't happened. How about instead of making the same old tired boring predictions about the impending apocalypse of things we love we start making and listening to predictions that actually talk about how life has been observed to progress. It's not impossible, science-fiction authors get it right occasionally.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#944

Post by krageon »

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 and most likely the majority of programmers

You might be right (I haven't met the majority, I have no idea) about "the majority of programmers", but it seems a little rude to assume the person you are responding to is some talentless hack that can only import things off the internet they don't understand.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#945

Post by WFHRenaissance »

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #493

This seems to work really well in cases where you're just laying down boilerplate. A few cherry-picked comments seem to suggest that React components are an ideal use case - which makes sense, that's a lot of munging and syntax to just render some strings. However, I find the process of writing these sorts of functions cathartic and part of the process to get into zen-mode for coding. I think I'd feel less joy in pro…

I hate to be a downer, but ultimately the people doing the planning and allocating budgets at non-tech companies do not care about the nuances of workflows. They'll lay as much cognitive load on you as is allowed, and they'll always have another body to bring in if you end up quitting.

The value proposition here is clear: "This tool will make it harder for your engineers to do time theft. What used to be an hour's long effort of painstakingly hand-coding boilerplate as a way of 'taking a break' will now be at most 5 minutes worth of easy code review."

Re: GitHub Copilot

#946

Post by corobo »

mdellavo wrote: post #90
fzaninotto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It suggests code line by line, so yes

I guess I dont see the point if only 10% of the time it's exactly what you want and the rest of the time you have to go back and touch up the line. Does it train a programmer for accepting less than ideal code because it was suggested? Similar to how some programmers blindly copy code from StackOverflow without modification. Seems like there is a potential downside that's being ignored.

> I guess I dont see the point if only 10% of the time it's exactly what you want and the rest of the time you have to go back and touch up the line.

Think of it as tab complete. If it's wrong, don't hit tab.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#947

Post by int_19h »

Nixinova wrote: post #879
FreeSpeech wrote: post #680

Earlier 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.

Boilerplate is the most annoying type of code to write/try to remember, having all of that automated away would be awesome.

This approach is kind of a hack, though. The proper way to automate boilerplate is better PL/library design that makes it unnecessary.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#948

Post by wraptile »

devetec wrote: post #810
qchris wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit tricky, because at least in the U.S., I don't believe it's settled question in law yet. Some of the other posters on here have said that the resulting model isn't covered by GPL--that's partially true, but provenance of data, and the rights to it, definitely does matter. A good example of this was the Everalbum ruling, where the company was forced to delete both the data and the trained models used they…

It has been cleared up! https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...

> The case debates the legal right for Google to use copyrighted books in its training database in order to train its Google Book Search algorithm

That's not even remotely the same thing.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#949

Post by wraptile »

gutino wrote: post #819
iwintermute wrote: post #21

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

Developers Human brain are also trained with propietary code bases, then when they quit and go elswere , they program using knowledge learned previously, yet you do not sue them.

We kinda have to accept that - we don't have to accept this. You can't interface with humans but you can interface with one of the biggest corporate tech giants straight up leeching from explicitly public and free work for their own private benefit.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#950

Post by wraptile »

leotaku wrote: post #735

> If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. This may be the first time that a proprietary coding tool offers such a great value preposition that I am actually interested in trying it out and potentially even paying for it. It's also a bit concerning that this will probably be extremely hard, if not impossible, to create an FOSS version of this t…

it is absurdly ironic that OpenAi is turning out to be one of the biggest opennes perpetrators in the near-future/present.
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