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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#261

Post by thayne »

gentleman11 wrote: post #94
tyingq wrote: post #30

They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…

> The python example is using floats for currency. Dumb question, but what is the proper way to handle currency? Custom number objects? Strings for any number of decimal places?

An integer of the smallest denomination. For example, cents for the American dollar. And you probably would want to wrap it in a custom type to simplify displaying it properly, and maybe handle different currencies. If you language has a fixed point type that might also be appropriate, but that's pretty rare, and wouldn't work for currencies that aren't decimal (like the old british pound system).

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#263

Post by codyb »

foobiekr wrote: post #226
tyingq wrote: post #30

They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…

Copilot appears to be “give more efficiency leverage to the worst kind of coder.”

Hmm... I mean, these all seem like mistakes I could make and I don't think I'm the "worst kind of coder".

The currency one I learned a while back, but it's not like I intuited using integers by default.

Value being a reserved keyword, I'm not sure I'd know that and I do Postgres work as part of my myriad duties at the startup I work at. Maybe I'd make that mistake in a migration, maybe I have already.

In a way, is it much different then what we do now as engineers? I'm hard pressed to call it much of an engineering discipline considering most teams I work on barely do design reviews before they launch in to writing code, documentation and meeting minutes are generally an afterthought, and the code review process while decent isn't perfect either and often times relies on arcane knowledge derived over months and years of wrangling with particular .

It's pretty neat, presumably it'll learn as people correct it, and it'll get better over time. I mean it's not even version one.

I get the concerns, but I think they're a bit overblown, and this'll be really useful for people who want to learn how to code. Sure they'll run into some bugs, but, I mean, they were going to do that anyways.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#264

Post by 3pt14159 »

reader_mode wrote: post #70
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…

>2/ The boilerplate is what bothers me the most (as someone who believes in the declarative approach to software engineering). The future for programming and programming languages should be an attempt to step up to a higher level of abstraction, that has been historically the way we step up to higher levels of productivity. As applications get larger and code-bases grow significantly we need abstraction, not more boi…

I'm all for abstracting. I like Rails, for example. That said, it gets truly difficult to add or change stuff at the more abstract layers. For example, adding recursive querying to an existing ORM is tough. And on the rare occasion that there is a bug in the abstract layer, debugging that from the normal application code is also tough.

I understand why some corporations prefer dumb boilerplate everywhere for some applications. If there is an outage it's usually easy to fix quickly. Sometimes it's not, if it's a issue in the boilerplate (say, Feb 29 rolls around and all of the boilerplate assumed a 28 day month) that means a huge update all across the system, but that rarely happens in practice.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#265

Post by jacobsenscott »

School-Cotton wrote: post #184
jacobsenscott wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone asks how to handle money the best answer is integers or fixed precision decimals. There may be a valid case for using floats, but if someone asks they shouldn't be using floats. Also I'm hard pressed to come up with a case where floats would work. Can you give an example?

> Can you give an example? The answer is the same as _any_ time you should use floats: where you don't care about answers being exact, either (1) because calculation speed is more important than exactness, or (2) because your inputs or computations involve uncertainty anyway, so it doesn't matter. This is more likely to be the case in, say, physics than it is in finance, but it's not impossible in the latter. For exa…

Good answer. I've only ever worked on accounting style financial apps, so I've didn't think of those types of cases.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#266

Post by kyrra »

gentleman11 wrote: post #94
tyingq wrote: post #30

They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…

> The python example is using floats for currency. Dumb question, but what is the proper way to handle currency? Custom number objects? Strings for any number of decimal places?

To pile on, here's a copy/paste from when this was asked a few days ago:

Googler, opinions are my own. Over in payments, we use micros regularly, as documented here: https://developers.google.com/standard-payments/reference/gl...

GCP on there other hand has standardized on unit + nano. They use this for money and time. So unit would 1 second or 1 dollar, then the nano field allows more precision. You can see an example here with the unitPrice field: https://cloud.google.com/billing/v1/how-tos/catalog-api#gett...

Copy/paste the GCP doc portion that is relevant here:

> [UNITS] is the whole units of the amount. For example if currencyCode is "USD", then 1 unit is one US dollar.

> [NANOS] is the number of nano (10^-9) units of the amount. The value must be between -999,999,999 and +999,999,999 inclusive. If units is positive, nanos must be positive or zero. If units is zero, nanos can be positive, zero, or negative. If units is negative, nanos must be negative or zero. For example $-1.75 is represented as units=-1 and nanos=-750,000,000.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#267

Post by maliker »

Copilot transitions programmers from writing code to reading auto-generated code. And the feeling is that reading code is 10x harder than reading it? Seems like a rich source of problems.

(However, I'm still definitely going to try this out once I get off the waitlist.)

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#268

Post by amelius »

Co-pilot fixes the wrong problem.

It should be a tool capable of one-shot learning.

I.e., I'm in the middle of a refactoring operation and have to do lots of repetitive work; the tool should help me by understanding what I'm trying to do after I give it 1 example.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#270

Post by amelius »

tyingq wrote: post #30

They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…

What are the statistics of Copilot based on a validation set? How often does it get code right?

I want to see hard statistics, not 4 hand-picked examples.

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