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GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

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Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#301
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…

There are some code in your life you would wish someone could write that for you.

Because such code is dumb, tedious and joyless. I have to bite my lip sometimes to convince myself writing them is not a waste of time, because people demand it, but I hate it to my core.

Copilot is that unfortunate boy that has to do all that manual work. It is the ultimate code boilerplate mixer.

It is not going to write all code for you, if you goal is to have it THINK for your then you are due to disappointment. But it would be able to help you be a more efficient and slightly happier programmer.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#302
post #289
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…

Did you try it? Because I've been using it for weeks and it makes me read these types of comments as "I don't understand the value of the internet" or "what's the purpose of owning a phone". It's night and day if you have it enabled or not. There's just no question about the value proposition once you start using it. I mean, you can tell comments here from people who have actually been using it, and people who have n…

I've only used it a bit and it's like glorified autocompletion. It messes up a lot in some ways too, often suggesting getFoo when in kotlin we just use foo.

It is really fun to see it sort of understand your code though, and every once in a while it does a smart suggestion that could've taken a while for me to figure out myself.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#303
post #292
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Your comment hides some truth! Imagine coding today without stackoverflow. Possible, but you'd lose so much time looking for simple answers.

The more experience I gain the less I use SO and more I just go to the sources or read the docs.

With googling for SO answers I have to parse the question, find a modern answer (because the accepted one is 10 years old and won’t work), parse that and adapt it to my problem. With documentation I just search for what I need and go straight to solving my problem and I’ve never felt more productive.

I feel like people new to programming focus too much on a specific problem at hand instead of learning the problem solving themselves. I wish I would’ve learned to figure out the issue myself from the start.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#304
post #292
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Your comment hides some truth! Imagine coding today without stackoverflow. Possible, but you'd lose so much time looking for simple answers.

My use of stackoverflow has vastly faded over time. I only ever go there to look for hints on ways to do something better, better practice, newer ways or a simpler way.

There are more and more wrong answers posted by what looks like the same people who have MVP on the Apple, Microsoft and Google forums who just whore for kudos points. I can't understand the motivation to dilute something of value.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#305
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…

I feel like 10 years from now we will look at thread like this and laugh akin to 64kb being enough.

640kb, not 64kb, is the value used in that apocryphal quote. A quick google search would have shown that. I wonder if there's a google copilot in the works for social media posts.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??

I think it depends if you're getting paid. If they call you an intern because you're still in college or have no professional experience, but they're paying you fairly then it seems like a fine arrangement they ask you to do real work. On the other hand, if your compensation is primarily "experience" then I'd say you're being bamboozled.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a dodgy way to form query parameters though. Other than for a quick script.

As a noob, what's the issue with this?

It's harder to read than other methods, and it doesn't encode the URL parameters, which means it potentially produces an invalid URL, and in some cases could lead to security problems (similar to SQL injection).

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#308
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment hides some truth! Imagine coding today without stackoverflow. Possible, but you'd lose so much time looking for simple answers.

The more experience I gain the less I use SO and more I just go to the sources or read the docs. With googling for SO answers I have to parse the question, find a modern answer (because the accepted one is 10 years old and won’t work), parse that and adapt it to my problem. With documentation I just search for what I need and go straight to solving my problem and I’ve never felt more productive. I feel like people ne…

> programming focus too much on a specific problem at hand instead of learning the problem solving themselves

you got the importance and focus wrong. People don't care for problem solving skills - they care for the specific problem being solved. That's why they pay someone to fix it.

They don't want to pay someone to "learn" problem solving (because the stakeholder don't care).

Stackoverflow immensely helped this sort of use-case - may be at the detriment of quality - but i cannot deny that copilot is going to accelerate this use-case.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#309
post #289
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…

Did you try it? Because I've been using it for weeks and it makes me read these types of comments as "I don't understand the value of the internet" or "what's the purpose of owning a phone". It's night and day if you have it enabled or not. There's just no question about the value proposition once you start using it. I mean, you can tell comments here from people who have actually been using it, and people who have n…

Are you worried about copyright issues from the code it produces?

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#310
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?"…

This comment is accidentally the perfect example of why copilot is a horrific idea. The old "just copy-paste from Stack Overflow" approach to development is satirised and ridiculed these days (despite being still in common practice I'm certain), because as we all know so well by now, an accepted answer on SO does not always equate to a correct answer. Yes, the SO guys & community do do their best to improve answer qu…

+1. URL encoding is also very relevant on the backend and has security implications, e.g., you want to be sure you are protecting against double encoded URLs. If you elide details like URL encoding using copilot that's dangerous.
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