Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 446 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#211

Post by eloisius »

objclxt wrote: post #164
wara23arish wrote: post #142

I have a few questions about copilot. I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet. Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Idk why but this was my initial reaction when learning about this. Given the scenario where copilot and its likes becomes used in a widespread manner. Can it be argued that this might improve productivity but stifle innovation? Im pretty early in my…

> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? In the 50s, we programmed computers with punch cards. Who does now? How many web developers today could tell the difference between `malloc` and `calloc`? Probably not that many. For a lot of developers, programming today bears very little relation to programming decades ago. Copilot is like any other innovation - it obsolete…

I don’t like this narrative. Going from punch cards, to Assembly, to C and to dynamic languages all empowered the programmer with more expressive languages. I don’t believe going from Python to programming via code comments is the same deal.

It would be more like we still write asm but we have editors that let you write a little C code and then it spits out a paragraph of ‘reasonable’ asm that still has to be maintained.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#212

Post by cultofmetatron »

ausbah wrote: post #130

the fact that most of Co-Pilot's usefulness comes from repeating common snippets of code makes me think there has to be a much simpler way to reduce the boilerplate of "common tasks"

common lisp's macros are the most powerful abstraction. that said, its a VERY sharp tool

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#213

Post by mewse »

I’ve never understood the value proposition for Copilot.

In terms of difficulty, writing code is maybe on average a two out of ten.

On average, maintaining code you wrote recently is probably a three out of ten in terms of difficulty, and maintaining code somebody else wrote or code from a long time ago probably rises to around a five out of ten.

Debugging misbehaving code is probably a seven out of ten or higher.

GitHub Copilot is optimising the part of the process that was already the easiest, and makes the other parts harder because it moves you from the “I wrote this” path to the “somebody else wrote this” path.

Even during the initial write, it changes the writing process from programming (which is easy) to understanding somebody else’s code to ensure that it’s right before accepting the suggestion (which is much less easy). I just don’t understand how this is a net time/energy savings?

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#214

Post by boredtofears »

baby wrote: post #77
snvzz wrote: post #63

Still no way to opt your code out of this. Disgusting.

This reaction is why we can’t have nice things :( after trying copilot I’m convinced that this kind of feature is going to bring the world to a next phase. Open source was part 1, this is part 2.

I legit cant tell if the github fanboyism is this real or if this is just a typical product launch astroturfed comment thread

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#216

Post by ctoth »

pugets wrote: post #76

Copilot is crazy. The other day, I was writing a Python function that would call a Wikipedia API. I pulled from the internet an example of a GET request, and pasted it as a comment in my code. # sample call: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=geosearch&gscoord=37.7891838%7C-122.4033522&gsradius=10000&gslimit=100 Then I defined a variable, base_url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?"…

The next version of Copilot will submit its answers to HN and return the highest-voted comment that compiles, after stripping out the well actually spurious tokens. Just look how well it worked this time?

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#218

Post by crispyalmond »

bastardoperator wrote: post #192
neilv wrote: post #168

A lot of the examples people are giving of code Copilot filled in for them sound like what would be called plagiarism, and probably also copyright infringement. Which I think was fairly predictable. What wasn't predictable was that someone would ship this Copilot anyway, consequently exposing their company and their users' companies to liability. Imagine if you hired an intern who was copy&pasting bits of GPL'd code…

Wait til stackoverflow sues everyone into oblivion! Letting your intern blindly commit to your code base seems like the bigger issue here. The entire purpose of an internship is to learn and to be guided by professionals, not to be treated as a cheap laborer. You don't hire interns, you train interns. Have you used copilot or are you speculating?

>The entire purpose of an internship is to learn and to be guided by professionals, not to be treated as a cheap laborer. You don't hire interns, you train interns.

This has not been my experience. I was dropped into the developer team and expected to know the entire tech stack and was not trained by anyone from the company at any point. Have I been bamboozled??

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#219

Post by tikhonj »

eloisius wrote: post #211
objclxt wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? In the 50s, we programmed computers with punch cards. Who does now? How many web developers today could tell the difference between `malloc` and `calloc`? Probably not that many. For a lot of developers, programming today bears very little relation to programming decades ago. Copilot is like any other innovation - it obsolete…

I don’t like this narrative. Going from punch cards, to Assembly, to C and to dynamic languages all empowered the programmer with more expressive languages. I don’t believe going from Python to programming via code comments is the same deal. It would be more like we still write asm but we have editors that let you write a little C code and then it spits out a paragraph of ‘reasonable’ asm that still has to be maintai…

That's roughly how I've seen experienced people work on high-performance code. I mean, they rarely maintain the generated assembly directly, but they do write code with the assembly it would generate in mind, and keeping the code generating comparable assembly over time is part of maintaining the performance-critical parts of the codebase.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#220

Post by truly »

This will lead IMO to an interesting problem, although the technology and the idea is certainly cool.

Currently many programmers do not take the time to really understand how/why their code works -- programming without understanding 1.0. Essentially make library calls and fuzz around with the arguments until it appears to work. [Not wanting/suggesting to go back to the world before libraries/code completion, just stating where we are now.]

This will enable programming without understanding 2.0 -- not only will you not know how/why a particular function call works, you will now fail to understand why you want a sequence of functions in a particular order.

Post reply on HN