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GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

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Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#41
post #2

Can any users give their opinion on how it's helping their productivity? What problems are they finding, if any?

I wrote a test recently for a simple "echo"-style server: clients writes a name to a socket, server replies with "Hello, " + name. Nothing crazy.

In the test body, I wrote "foo" to the socket. Copilot immediately filled in the rest of the test: read from the socket, check that the result is "Hello, foo", and fail the test with a descriptive error otherwise.

wtf? How did it figure out that the correct result was "Hello, foo"? I changed "Hello" to "Flarbnax", and sure enough, Copilot suggested "Flarbnax, foo". I added a "!" to the end, and it suggested that too. After pushing a bit further, the suggestions started to lose accuracy: it would check for "???" instead of "??" for example, or it would check for a newline where there was none. But overall I came away very impressed.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#42
post #13

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.

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.

> Probably but you would have to submit an absurdly large amount of code to make a dent.

So how about an already poisoned well. How up to date is the average Github project on encryption standards?

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#45
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for test case generation there are already mature tools for that. I doubt anything generic could improve on those.

any suggestions for said tools?

Hypothesis for Python.

Schemathesis builds on Hypothesis and generates tests from OpenAPI specs.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#46
post #2

Can any users give their opinion on how it's helping their productivity? What problems are they finding, if any?

If I have an if else case, a switch statement or something similar, it can often predict the next branch exactly how I would write it. That‘s probably 80% of the suggestions I accept, the rest is single line autocompletes. I have never accepted a whole function implementation, and they are actually rather annoying because they make the document jump.

It‘s useful enough for me, as a magic autocomplete.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#47
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m which case shifting strategies toward code that looks correct but isn’t using shared syntax between languages as well as language specific gotchas.

Yeah but if malicious intent is a concern you can just spin up a sandboxed instance to run the code to check first.

Really the thing is there's not way to ascribe correctness to a piece of code right, like humans fail at this even. The only "correct" code is like rote algorithmic code that has a well defined method of operation. And there's likely a lot more correct examples of that, like way more than you'd ever be able to poison.

You may be able to be misleading though by using names that say one thing but do another, but again you'd be fighting against the tide of correctly named things.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#48
post #2

Can any users give their opinion on how it's helping their productivity? What problems are they finding, if any?

It does the boring code for me. If I want to throw an exception if an object is null or undefined, Co-pilot will do the if and the exception throw using the right error class, and a more meaningful error message that what I usually came up with. If want to map some random technical data table to something useful in my programming language, I can copy paste the data from the documentation in pdf or html into a comment…

This is the kind of thing I would need to see in real time, because I simply can't believe that it does any of these things in a way that is reliable and doesn't involve having to search through and make sure it hasn't made any mistakes, taking just as much time as if you did it by hand.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#49
post #43

I signed up for the copilot technical preview right after it was announced a few months ago, but I haven't gotten an invite yet while all my friends who signed up later did (I feel a bit left out). Is there any way to get an invite sooner? What am I doing wrong?

I said I use VSCode all the time, which I suspect is the reason I got access. (I never use VSCode.)

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#50
post #43

I signed up for the copilot technical preview right after it was announced a few months ago, but I haven't gotten an invite yet while all my friends who signed up later did (I feel a bit left out). Is there any way to get an invite sooner? What am I doing wrong?

I said I use VSCode all the time, which I suspect is the reason I got access. (I never use VSCode.)

I actually do use VSCode (in addition to Vi and Vim) and I believe I indicated that.
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