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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#61

Post by lucideer »

injidup wrote: post #45
zelphirkalt wrote: post #9

Does Copilot already display the licenses of the code it might insert/suggest, or assure the developer, that the inserted/suggested code is not a verbatim copy of existing code? How can developers be sure, that they are not violating licenses by using Copilot?

From the FAQ """ We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare instances where a GitHub Copilot suggestion contains code that matches public code on GitHub. You have the choice to turn that filter on or off during setup. With the filter on, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with its surrounding code for matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace) against public code on GitHub of about 150 characters.…

> the rare instances

That's a bold statement considering how easy it was for testers to quickly find examples of this in initial testing.

> against public code on GitHub

... and how some of those examples found were from code not hosted on Github.

Ultimately though, what matters here is not whether this is true but whether it's plausible enough for legal departments in companies buy it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#62

Post by w0m »

dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

Matches my experience. I legitimately like it for quick boiler plates; it's like a better snippet engine. But Paying for it...

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#63

Post by natefinch »

MrBoomixer wrote: post #59
dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

Technically anyone could use those same open source projects and provide an open source solution, or paid solution as well. I do feel how you feel though it's a little off-putting.

The machine learning models are not open source themselves, so you can't just do this yourself with existing open source projects.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#64

Post by meibo »

samth wrote: post #36
ahnick wrote: post #3

What's the criteria for being considered "a maintainer of a popular open source project"? They never actually publish the criteria anywhere from what I can tell. They just say visit the subscription page and if you are eligible it should be available to you and if you see a charge then you are not eligible. I think though they should still be transparent about what their metric is for determining popular projects on…

At a minimum, 4.3k stars is not enough, because I don't qualify.

This is curious - I maintain 2 projects with 2k cumulative stars, and I was able to claim the free access. Wonder what the metric is? Maybe creation date has something to do with it?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#68

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #9

Does Copilot already display the licenses of the code it might insert/suggest, or assure the developer, that the inserted/suggested code is not a verbatim copy of existing code? How can developers be sure, that they are not violating licenses by using Copilot?

The fact that GitHub is now charging for this feature smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen. They're now literally profiting from potentially stolen GPL code.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#69

Post by elil17 »

rictic wrote: post #51
low_tech_punk wrote: post #31

IMHO, it's still far from GA quality/usability. A must-have feature that's missing is a toggle switch that lets you temporarily turn it off. Without a feature, it can get really noisy.

The VSCode extension has one. There's a button in the bottom right with the logo that you can click to enable/disable, or you could add a keybind for the "github.copilot.toggleCopilot" command

You can toggle in PyCharm with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#70

Post by mgkimsal »

Kiro wrote: post #10
freedomben wrote: post #5

Does copilot learn from and suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working, or does it just pull from the huge pool of projects on GH? How well does copilot help with languages like Elixir that are less common? WIth TypeScript it's been remarkable, but that's one of the most popular and surely very familiar to devs and GH, so I would expect less popular like Elixir to not perform as well. Does copilot work…

It doesn't learn from your codebase but it uses the context of your code so any pattern will be picked up.

… and variable name spelling mistakes!
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