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How well can copilot write unit tests? This seems like an area where it could be really useful and actually improve software development practices.
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> I don't think being able to faster write boilerplate is something worthwhile But do you believe people being slower at writing boilerplate is undesirable?
It may be desirable for boilerplate to be maximally painful if it forces our collective hands to cut down on boilerplate and innovate it away
Can any users give their opinion on how it's helping their productivity? What problems are they finding, if any?
I was able to write {"Settings":...} and Copilot completed with {"Settings": "Configurações"} that tool is simply amazing.
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Your response makes me wonder if poisoning the well is possible by submitting code to Github with multiple languages and coding styles. A single file with a function signature written in Javascript and the body written in Python + Ruby. Enough code would surely break the AI model behind it. Unless Copilot has some sort of ingestion validation which wouldn’t surprise.
Probably but you would have to submit an absurdly large amount of code to make a dent. Practically unreasonable considering their training corpus is also increasing per lines of public code submitted on github. So not only would you have to submit a insanely large amount of code but you're also racing against literally millions of users writing legitimate code at any period of time.
Can any users give their opinion on how it's helping their productivity? What problems are they finding, if any?
Tried it out for a while, and it's clear that it's trying to get people to be faster at writing boilerplate, not get people to write better code. I'm a bit scared for what this means as I don't think being able to faster write boilerplate is something worthwhile. The example ed_elliott_asc made is one of those examples where instead of fixing things so you don't have to repeat yourself, copilot makes it easy to just…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your response makes me wonder if poisoning the well is possible by submitting code to Github with multiple languages and coding styles. A single file with a function signature written in Javascript and the body written in Python + Ruby. Enough code would surely break the AI model behind it. Unless Copilot has some sort of ingestion validation which wouldn’t surprise.
In any training with code I've done, we've written a parser that validates against tree sitter grammars to make sure it's at least syntactically valid against some known subset of languages we're training on.
So who knows what all that WASM is for in the Neovim plugin? Is there source for it? https://github.com/github/copilot.vim/tree/release/copilot/d...
How well can copilot write unit tests? This seems like an area where it could be really useful and actually improve software development practices.
One of the main value props for writing meaningful unit tests, is it helps the developer think differently about the code he is writing tests for, and that improves quality of the code composition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tried it out for a while, and it's clear that it's trying to get people to be faster at writing boilerplate, not get people to write better code. I'm a bit scared for what this means as I don't think being able to faster write boilerplate is something worthwhile. The example ed_elliott_asc made is one of those examples where instead of fixing things so you don't have to repeat yourself, copilot makes it easy to just…
> I don't think being able to faster write boilerplate is something worthwhile But do you believe people being slower at writing boilerplate is undesirable?
I mean, it's sort of a false dichotomy -- it's omitting a "default speed" for writing boilerplate that is neither enhanced nor impeded.
the potential issue with an enhanced speed for writing boilerplate is that it means that there'll just be more and more boilerplate to maintain over time, and it's not clear what that cost over time will be.
How much more effort will be expended to replace things in multiple places? It exacerbates existing issues of "these two things look almost the same, but someone manually modified one copy...should that change be propagated?"
Meaning, it's essentially an ad-hoc code generator. Code generation can be a very useful technique (see protobufs), but without the ability to re-generate from a source?
Perhaps a possible enhancement might be for copilot to keep track of all blurbs it generated and propose refactoring/modifying all copies?