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GitHub Copilot Labs

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Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#21

Post by unbanned »

jimmaswell wrote: post #17
armchairhacker wrote: post #14

when i first used copilot i thought it wasn’t very useful. But as i’ve used it more i realize it helps a lot. A surprising amount of code is just boilerplate, e.g. a single if-statement is 3 lines but you’re not going to abstract all your if statements, so you write similar if statements over and over again. It especially helps when i’m programming in a language or library i’m not familiar with, because i don’t quite…

I've been finding it amazingly useful from the outset. It's like it reads my mind generating whole correct functions just from a small comment or example, and it's great at extrapolating repetitive increments/transformations. Write a small comment telling it what you want and it's uncanny what it can spit out.

What exactly are you asking it to do?

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#22

Post by mrtranscendence »

jimmaswell wrote: post #17
armchairhacker wrote: post #14

when i first used copilot i thought it wasn’t very useful. But as i’ve used it more i realize it helps a lot. A surprising amount of code is just boilerplate, e.g. a single if-statement is 3 lines but you’re not going to abstract all your if statements, so you write similar if statements over and over again. It especially helps when i’m programming in a language or library i’m not familiar with, because i don’t quite…

I've been finding it amazingly useful from the outset. It's like it reads my mind generating whole correct functions just from a small comment or example, and it's great at extrapolating repetitive increments/transformations. Write a small comment telling it what you want and it's uncanny what it can spit out.

I've had the opposite experience so far, though I've admittedly not used it that much yet. I've got this Python fiscal date library at work, and I wanted to add a something like a `strtftime()` method which would replace $P with the period, $Q with the quarter, etc, but treat $$ as a literal $ (so that e.g. $$P would result in $P). Simple enough, but I thought it would be cute to see if I could get copilot to do it for me.

I spent at least a half hour trying to figure out what kind of prompt would result in a correct implementation. No matter how explicit I was it kept giving answers that failed to handle the $$P -> $P conversion correctly. Finally I was able to get it to spit out an answer that at least had the right idea, but it had an unrelated bug in it.

The package also has some functions to determine holidays, and I was impressed that Copilot could generate code for new holidays that mimicked my style, docstrings and all. But disappointingly it failed for any slightly obscure holiday (say, Eid al-Fitr), generating code that was just wrong, even when I hinted that it would have to use an alternative calendar library. It kept trying to use the Hebrew calendar for Islamic and Hindu holidays, I guess because I'd already imported it for Hanukkah.

It also seems useless for Spark ETL, having to be handheld to a degree that it would be easier just to write the code myself. My first attempt to play around with Copilot was to see if it could do a salted join (no luck, unless by "salted join" I meant something like "a join on a column called salt").

I'll keep playing around with it, maybe it's just a "me" problem.

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#23

Post by codeenlightener »

Hello! I'm the founder of https://denigma.app, an AI that explains code. It's available now, with a free demo and VS Code extension, with an Emacs extension coming soon.

Denigma is a product that has been around for a while.

Denigma goes beyond a literal line by line explanation, and explains of programming concepts and deduces the business logic and goal of code.

I'm excited to see innovation in the field.

Here's a sample explanation from Denigma:

The code starts by initializing the trampoline. Then it checks to see if there is a passed_info structure in memory, and if so, copies the struct into the passed_info variable. Next, it sets up some variables for use later on:

- info_struct - The smp_information struct that will be used throughout this function

- longmode - Indicates whether or not we are running in 64 bit mode

- lv5 - Indicates whether or not we are running with L1V5 support enabled (if you're unsure what this means google "Intel VT-x" and "L1D cache")

- pagemap - The address of our page table entry array (this is where all of our virtual addresses go)

- x2apic - Indicates whether or not we are using an Intel X2APIC controller

The code is a function that is called when the kernel is booted. The function checks to see if the kernel was booted in long mode or not, and if it was, it sets up a trampoline to call the original kernel.

We're small, privacy-focused, and bootstrapped, and don't have the marketing budget of GitHub, so we'd appreciate you talking about Denigma in your communities.

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#24

Post by codeenlightener »

mdaniel wrote: post #10
spullara wrote: post #4

Is this the same backend that is powering https://denigma.app ?

Almost certainly not --- That was also the first time I had heard of denigma.app and their tagline of We stress-tested it on the worst, most obscure code we could find. That's why we're confident it will work on your complex codebase. gave me a good chuckle since just trivially modifying their example ... sort of worked Given: RUN apt-get update && exit 1 && apt-get install -y libnss3 libgtk-3-0 libx11-xcb1 libxss1 l…

Denigma works very poorly on short code– especially single lines. It warns you.

It is designed for explaining real-world code in context, and performs poorly on esoteric examples.

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#27

Post by veb »

codeenlightener wrote: post #23

Hello! I'm the founder of https://denigma.app , an AI that explains code. It's available now, with a free demo and VS Code extension, with an Emacs extension coming soon. Denigma is a product that has been around for a while. Denigma goes beyond a literal line by line explanation, and explains of programming concepts and deduces the business logic and goal of code. I'm excited to see innovation in the field. Here's a…

Good on you for editing your comment. I was about to say you probably shouldn't say that :-) I just checked out Denigma, and it's quite wonderful actually. I may give it a try - the pricing is pretty good, less than a cup of coffee where I'm at.

Nice job.

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#28

Post by codeenlightener »

veb wrote: post #27
codeenlightener wrote: post #23

Hello! I'm the founder of https://denigma.app , an AI that explains code. It's available now, with a free demo and VS Code extension, with an Emacs extension coming soon. Denigma is a product that has been around for a while. Denigma goes beyond a literal line by line explanation, and explains of programming concepts and deduces the business logic and goal of code. I'm excited to see innovation in the field. Here's a…

Good on you for editing your comment. I was about to say you probably shouldn't say that :-) I just checked out Denigma, and it's quite wonderful actually. I may give it a try - the pricing is pretty good, less than a cup of coffee where I'm at. Nice job.

I encourage everyone to try it on real-world (non-esoteric, non-homework) code from production. That's where it works best. :-)

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#29

Post by mdaniel »

codeenlightener wrote: post #24
mdaniel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly not --- That was also the first time I had heard of denigma.app and their tagline of We stress-tested it on the worst, most obscure code we could find. That's why we're confident it will work on your complex codebase. gave me a good chuckle since just trivially modifying their example ... sort of worked Given: RUN apt-get update && exit 1 && apt-get install -y libnss3 libgtk-3-0 libx11-xcb1 libxss1 l…

Denigma works very poorly on short code– especially single lines. It warns you. It is designed for explaining real-world code in context, and performs poorly on esoteric examples.

In case it wasn't clear, I modified your DevOps example, so it's not like that code came out of left-field or was hand-crafted to trip you up. If you want to say "it is not good at reasoning about shell, instead focusing on programming languages" that'd be a much more plausible concession

Since you're hanging out here, what is the explanation for how it can say "exit 1 is used to stop any further commands from running." and then carry on?

It's even more bizarre that it (seems to?) understands what "exit 1" does, but only when it is not the first command in the sequence?

Re: GitHub Copilot Labs

#30

Post by veb »

codeenlightener wrote: post #28
veb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good on you for editing your comment. I was about to say you probably shouldn't say that :-) I just checked out Denigma, and it's quite wonderful actually. I may give it a try - the pricing is pretty good, less than a cup of coffee where I'm at. Nice job.

I encourage everyone to try it on real-world (non-esoteric, non-homework) code from production. That's where it works best. :-)

I actually did! It worked a lot better than GitHub's Lab.
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