61–70 of 672 posts
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 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…
6/ Copilot learns from the past. It can only favor popularity and familiarity in code patterns over correctness and innovation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would certainly alleviate the license concerns. If it was possible to train it to a level (that produces effective output), then sure. As a thought experiment, I thought "what would happen if we trained it on our 15 million lines of product code + my language-ext project". It would almost certainly produce something that looks like 'us'. But: * It would also trip over a million or so lines of generated code * And…
> legacy OO code Aside from OO vs FP. A concern with that I'd have is that it would encourage and enforce idiosyncracies in large corporate codebases. If you've ever worked for a large corporation on their legacy code, you know you don't want any of that to be suggested to colleagues. This would enforce bad behaviors and make it even harder for fresh developers to argue against it.
I think this is a significant point. It maintains the status quo. We change our guidance to devs every other year or so. New language features become available, old ones die, etc. But we're not rewriting the entire code-base every time, we know if we hit old code, we refactor with the new guidance; but we don't do it for the sake of it, so there's plenty of code that I wouldn't want in a training set (even if I wrote it myself!)
This is a very famous function [0] and likely appears multiple times in the training set (Google gives 40 hits for GitHub), which makes it more likely to be memorized by the network. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...
It's worth keeping in mind that what a neural network like this (just like GPT3) is doing is generating the most probable continuation based on the training dataset. Not the best continuation (whatever that means), simply the most likely one. If the training dataset has mostly bad code, the most likely continuation is likely to be bad as well. I think this is still valuable, you just have to think before accepting a…
As far as licenses go, idk. Presumably it could delete associated comments and change variable names or otherwise obscure where it's taking code from. Maybe this part is shady.
Quake and GitHub are both owned by Microsoft now, perhaps we can assume this is relicense?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 intro…
Stuff like Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult, not better and easier. Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult if you're aiming for a specific set of coding values and style that Copilot doesn't generate (yet?). If Copilot generates the sort of code that you would write, and it does for a lot of people, then it's definitely no worse (or better) than copying something from SO. The author of a…
In some cases the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (such as using a stack overflow answer that's stood the test of time for something you don't know how to do), but with Copilot you don't even get the benefit of upvotes, human intent, or crowdsourced peer review.
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…
My question is would Copilot be useful if you could choose the codebase it would be drawing from? Almost as an internal company tool?
It would be interesting how much code you would need before it was useful (and how good does it have to be to be useful? Does even a small error rate cost so much that it erases other gains, because so many of the potential errors in usage of this type of tool are very subtle?)
I've always assumed that we would eventually have a low-code, or no-code junior dev replacement, and was wondering if this was it. GH and MS actually have [Ed. had?] some cred for this kind of thing. Nope. Game over. Play again?
Copying GPLed code as your own and passing it under an MIT license is not too far fetched of a thing for a junior dev to do. Jokes aside, to have a proper junior dev replacement you need something that is able to learn and grow to eventually become a senior dev, an architect, or a CTO. That is the most important value of a junior dev. Not the ability to produce subpar code.
I think a lot of modern software development shops, these days, exist only to make their founder[s] as rich as possible, as quickly as possible.
If they are willing to commit their entire future to a lowest-bid outsourcing shop, then I don’t think they are too concerned about playing the long game.
Also, the software development industry, as an aggregate, has established a pervasive culture, based around developers staying at companies for 18-month stints. I don’t think many companies feel it’s to their advantage to incubate people who will bail out, as soon as they feel they have greener pastures, elsewhere.
I’m really dumbfounded by the Copilot team decision to not exclude GPL licensed code. Why was this direction chosen? Is the inclusion of GPL really worth the risk and potential Google v. Oracle lawsuit? I’d like to know the reasoning.
Why would excluding GPL'd code be enough to not violate licenses? I don't understand why people think MIT or other licenses are free for alls to take code as they wish. The MIT license includes an attribution clause. And, as the linked video shows, Copilot is more than happy to take its code and put your pet license and copyright notice on instead. Isn't that equally as infringing as stealing GPL code? The idea of mi…
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…
Just the other day someone on copilot threads was arguing that this kind of boilerplate optimizes for readability... It's like Java Stockholm syndrome and the old myth of easy to approach = easy to read (how long it took them to introduce var).
I've always viewed code generators as a symptom of language limitations (which is why they were so popular in Java land) that lead to unmaintainable code, this seems like a fancier version of that - with all the same drawbacks.