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GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

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Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#331

Post by mewse »

pizza wrote: post #326
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…

The value prop for things like these is always the same: for the widely - and accurately, although that's irrelevant to my point - lambasted initial release to start the ten year journey down the road towards the creation of an eventual product that will make people link to comments like these the way they link to the original Dropbox Show HN: post. There are levels of ease of which we have not yet dreamed, especiall…

I mean, I'm obviously intensely skeptical that such a thing will happen at all, much less within ten years.

But I guess we'll find out eventually! And if mine does become the "640k ought to be enough for anybody" quote of this decade, then I suppose there are worse kinds of fame.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#332

Post by anigbrowl »

ghoward wrote: post #319
anigbrowl wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. The legal system doesn't have the consistency or dependability of code. A lot of legal 'results' (judicial decisions) are somewhat arbitrary, balancing abstractions with practicality and so on, but get attention because they include clear explanations of the basic issues. Other lawyers then treat those decisions as 'legal facts' by echoing the language and (basically) challenging other lawyers to come up wi…

All of that completely ignores the fact that a court just basically said that a machine cannot invent, which is a small step away from saying a machine cannot copyright, which would mean that Copilot is not transformative. The copyright case you cited involves humans. We are talking about machines.

Copilot is used by human programmers. It's not cloning entire programs, little bits of programs that are curated and assembled into something new are easily going to past the test of transformativity. You go into court with that argument, and the other side will just point out that you have no way of showing the entire program you're complaining about was written by machine.

You seem to be arguing that if it includes any copyright code at all, the whole program is thus an infringement. You will be laughed out of court with that. I'm sorry, but I really don't think you've thought your argument through.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#333

Post by crispyalmond »

progman32 wrote: post #280
crispyalmond wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helped that I was already semi-familiar with it, but the other engineer and team lead quit shortly after I joined, and I was left by myself to complete the tasks. It was brutal, and I'm looking for a different job to get away from this workplace for this reason.

Was anyone managing your task list or checking in at all? Did you have a manager?

We did and currently do have a manager type person. They are not code-savvy though, which is sometimes frustrating. We just recently hired another intern, a regular developer and a lead, so it's slightly less painful now, and I am still the one working on the primary applications. The others are working on separate things. Before the hiring, it was me and another developer, but he doesn't develop the main applications. The task list at that time was infrequently used, but it's become daily routine now.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#334

Post by snvzz »

baby wrote: post #285
snvzz wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand a lot of people are ok with this and that's fine. There's still no good reason I cannot opt my code out of it.

Another comment said "don't open source your code", which I would agree with. If you don't want people reusing your code, just don't open source it. What's the point otherwise?

It's not black and white.

Letting people see the code doesn't mean they can ignore the license and do whatever the hell they want with it.

I am quite reasonable. I favor the MIT license. I still do not want my code in Copilot, which pretty much dismisses my rights entirely.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#335

Post by crispyalmond »

ALittleLight wrote: post #306
crispyalmond wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I am being paid, although significantly less than my previous job. It's not that I can't do the work, but it feels like I'm being taken advantage of because I have no professional experience; although I have almost 10 years of personal experience. It might sound like I'm complaining about the work itself, but it's more than that to me.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#336

Post by Gigachad »

baby wrote: post #286
superdisk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> writing cryptographic code Delegating the implementation of something that you are notoriously never supposed to roll your own, to a text generator AI.... What could possibly go wrong?

I think you got the wrong idea on how people use copilot. You don't just accept everything it throws at you. Think about it as an auto-complete on steroid, would you say that auto-complete is dangerous to use? If not, then this is the same. The suggestions of copilot don't always compile, but they sometimes manage to find the right function to use, or the right combination of functions, or even the right comment (if…

The problem with copilot is that other than the most basic boilerplate generation. It takes just as much effort to verify its output is correct than to come up with a correct answer.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#337

Post by Gigachad »

ghoward wrote: post #201

I have many thoughts about Copilot, but here are two. First, as much as I don't like the idea of Copilot, it seems to be good for boilerplate code. However, the fact that boilerplate code exists is not because of some natural limitation of code; it exists because our programming languages are subpar at making good abstractions. Here's an example: in Go, there is a lot of `if err == nil` error-handling boilerplate. Ru…

The boilerplate often exists because removing it requires assumptions and guesses. The language should never guess, copilot has the benefit of being able to give you wrong answers sometimes and you get to decide if they are correct.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#338

Post by Gigachad »

threatofrain wrote: post #3

I've been getting a lot more misses than hits with Github Copilot, even when writing elementary math or utility functions; but despite its error I am nevertheless astonished at its approximation of intent. Very eager to see Github Copilot catchup to some bright line of signal v noise.

I'm constantly blown away with what it spits out even when its wrong. When it pulls in the greater context of the app and generates comments from scratch using the context of the file, its just incredible.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#339

Post by Gigachad »

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 doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers

Every time this happens, everyone just shifts the goal posts and they now want more features, faster. The majority of software out there sucks. If programmers are now 2x faster, users will demand that some random crud app be at Google software quality. And Google's software will be unimaginable by today's standards.

All of this will increase the value delivered by software, which will bring in greater revenue, which will be reinvested in more developers.

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