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GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

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Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#231

Post by knowledge-clay »

abecedarius wrote: post #189
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…

It's reasonable to worry. - Copilot is qualitatively different from the kinds of automation of programming we've seen before. - It's barely version 1.0 of this kind of thing. Deep learning has been advancing incredibly for a decade and doesn't seem to be slowing down. Researchers also work on things like mathematical problem-solving, which would tie in to "real work" and not just the boilerplate. - In past examples o…

There is a world of difference between what Copilot does and what an engineer does. Imagine reading a design document for a feature and implementing that on a large, years-old codebase, ie, what many engineers do on a daily basis. Copilot isn't even 1 millionth of the way to even beginning to solve that problem, it would require human-level AGI with the capability of understanding human cultural and institutional context: something categorically different than anything happening in deep learning.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#232

Post by chii »

mewse wrote: post #213

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. Gi…

> value proposition for Copilot.

now, instead of copying off stackoverflow, it's gonna be off copilot. It will enable a lot more people to code who otherwise would not. Whether this is a good outcome or not...

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#233

Post by rpeden »

baby wrote: post #74

I’ve been using this for weeks and it blooooows my mind. It comes up with crazy recommendations, just yesterday I wrote this big ass logic to do something, then I wanted to move that code to a function so I wrote the function name and I kid you not copilot suggested a one-liner that worked… the thing is so useful and I’m not writing simple code (writing cryptographic code). And when it’s not doing that at the very le…

I was experimenting with it over the weekend and basically got it to build out a simulation of schooling/flocking boidfish swimming around a tank. That was fun! I certainly wasn't expecting it to create the whole darn thing, but it did. I just added an occasional comment to nudge it toward doing exactly what I wanted.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#234

Post by liquidwax »

mewse wrote: post #213

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. Gi…

Copilot also optimizes for speed to a degree. It's akin to advanced auto complete. IntelliJ auto-completion is great. As much as it pains to say this, I don't think I will be as effective writing Java in Vim as much as I am with IntelliJ. The key differentiator is the auto complete speed. Copilot I feel is just auto complete on steroids. It may not be perfect yet, but there is definitely a problem it solves.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#235

Post by anigbrowl »

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?"…

That's impressive. Discoverability and the varying quality of documentation is a big headache for new programmers or people engaging with a an unfamiliar framework/API/library. I really like the comments pointing out alternatives (json or xml) and the static lat-long values.

One reason I've championed the development of visual programming (flow-based, node diagrams, etc) is that while you don't want to compress a big complex program down into a single layer and become unreadable in the process, graphical methods are a great way for people to see what options they have available and just point at things they want to try out.

Instead of struggling with syntax at the same time as trying to find out what they can do with a new API, they can engage in trial-and-error to find out the capabilities and what makes it worth using, then build up their competency once they are clear about their objectives.

I'm looking forward to trying this now that it's available for my favorite IDE, but I'll probably want to set up a hotkey to switch it on and off as I need it. Once I get fully comfortable with something I often find code completion tools get in the way of my flow.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#236

Post by abalaji »

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?

Stackoverflow content is generally creative commons not GPL unless I'm missing something.

(https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing)

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#237

Post by rtsil »

ericbarrett wrote: post #175
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? Idk why but this was my initial reaction when learning about this. I've been programming since the '80s. It's my opinion that the age of humans writing code is coming to a close. Perhaps another 20 years or so, with the peak in ~10; but I'm less certain about the timeline than the destination. There will still be a long tail,…

Why do you expect machines to not enter the domain of design and algorithms as well? Is there something specifically human about them?

I expect most human intellectual activities of today (from coding to scriptwriting to medicine) can be performed by machines if the current trend continues.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#238

Post by shmoogy »

janto wrote: post #170
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?"…

For me APIs are actually one of the places it performs the worst. Copilot is like having an inexperienced yet annoyingly optimistic pair programmer. The code it generates appears conceivable in some hypothetical universe. No guarantee it's this one though. Remember it doesn't actually know an API or how it should be used: it's putting things together to look like typical code. For me that has meant difficult to spot…

That's a bummer. I just got whitelisted and was hoping it could save me time with some APIs where they only have code in X language or curl and I have to work backwards if I run into any issues.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#239

Post by TheDong »

rectang wrote: post #133
meetups323 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Copilot users are inserting "ticking time-bombs" into their own codebases. The buck stops with the user, when they use code from any source at all , whether it's their head, the internet, some internal library, lecture notes, a coworker, a random dude of the street, or who knows what else, it their own responsibility to ensure the code they're using has been released under a license they can use. They don't get…

We agree that downstream users who redistribute copyrighted code regurgitated by Copilot are in violation of copyright. It doesn't seem to me as though the distinction between "Copilot reproduced the code and the engineer copy/pasted/saved it" versus "Copilot inserted the code" is crucial. There's a separate question about Microsoft's own liability. When Copilot reproduces open source code without adhering to the ter…

> It doesn't seem to me as though the distinction between "Copilot reproduced the code and the engineer copy/pasted/saved it" versus "Copilot inserted the code" is crucial.

I think that could be crucial.

If I read a computer science book, and from that produce a unique piece of code which was not present in the book, I have created a new work which I hold copyright over.

If I train a machine learning algorithm on a computer science book, and that ML algorithm produces some output, that output does not have a new copyright.

In essence, there must be originality for a work to be under a new copyright, and that is likely a requirement that it must be a human author. See this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Mecha...

Similarly, if copilot synthesizes a bunch of MIT code and produces a suggestion, that may be MIT still, while if a human does the exact same reading and writing, if it is an original enough derivative, it may be free of the original MIT license.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#240

Post by manquer »

Graffur wrote: post #94
manquer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example i usually give [1] in javascript is say you have function (x,y) => x + y Orgs targeting code coverage write a test for 1,2 => 3 and get 100% coverage and then stop as there is no incentive to go further. They don't write tests for say (1,null) (null,null) ('x',1) (NaN, Infinity) and so on.. these additional tests will improve coverage of scenarios and code coverage will not move. I have seen projects wher…

So one argument against code coverage requirements is that poor engineers won't test correctly. Without the code coverage requirements you're in the same situation.

Without going down the rabbit hole of Goodhart's law, code coverage % is a poor metric particularly when used standalone.
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