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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#11

Post by louthy »

ethangk wrote: post #8
louthy wrote: post #5

This is utterly damning. I have already instructed my team that Copilot can never be used for our projects. Compromising the product because of unknowable license demands isn't acceptable in the professional world of software engineering. But if we put the licensing to one side for a moment... 1/ Everything I've seen it generate so far is 'imperative hell'. It is practically a 'boilerplate generator'. That might be u…

This is a little off topic, but your framework looks really interesting! How come you opted for building a functional framework in C#, vs using F#? I couldn’t see anything in the README about what was specifically frustrating about F#? I ask because we’re looking at introducing it at my company.

I cofounded a company in 2005, the primary product is a never-ending C# web-application project. As the code-base grew to many millions of lines of code I started to see the very real problems of software engineering in the OO paradigm, and had the functional programming enlightenment moment.

We started building some services in F#, but still had a massive amount of C# - and so I wanted the inertia of my team to be in the direction of writing declarative code. There wasn't really anything (outside of LINQ) that did that, so I set about creating something.

We don't write F# any more and find functional C# (along with the brilliant C# tooling) to be very effective for us (although we also now use PureScript and Haskell).

I do have a stock wiki post on the repo for this though [1]. You might not be surprised to hear it isn't the first time I've been asked this :)

[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/wiki/%22Why-don't-you...

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#13

Post by captainmuon »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #10

What causes this in a net? I’m guessing the RNN gets in a catastrophic state..

I would say overfitting - the net doesn't "understand" the code in any meaningful sense. It just finds fitting examples and jumbles them a bit.

Understanding would mean to have an internal representation related to the intention of the user, the expected behavior, and say the AST of the code. My pessimistic interpretation of this and many other recent AI applications is that it is a "better markov chain".

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#15

Post by bencollier49 »

This does make me wonder if this is susceptible to the same form of trolling as that MS AI got. Commit a load of grossly offensive material to multiple repos, and wait for Copilot to start parroting it. I think they're going to need some human moderation.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#16

Post by mimixco »

louthy wrote: post #5

This is utterly damning. I have already instructed my team that Copilot can never be used for our projects. Compromising the product because of unknowable license demands isn't acceptable in the professional world of software engineering. But if we put the licensing to one side for a moment... 1/ Everything I've seen it generate so far is 'imperative hell'. It is practically a 'boilerplate generator'. That might be u…

Awesome summary and thanks for trying it for the rest of us!

Copilot sounded terrible in the press release. The idea that a computer is going to pick the right code for you (from comments, no less) is really just completely nuts. The belief that it could be better than human-picked code is really way off.

You bring up a really important point. When you use a tool like Copilot (or copypasta of any kind), you are introducing the additional burden of understanding that other person's code -- which is worse than trying to understand your own code or write something correct from scratch.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Stuff like Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult, not better and easier.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#19

Post by NullPrefix »

bencollier49 wrote: post #15

This does make me wonder if this is susceptible to the same form of trolling as that MS AI got. Commit a load of grossly offensive material to multiple repos, and wait for Copilot to start parroting it. I think they're going to need some human moderation.

Coding with Adolf?
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