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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#121

Post by presentation »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #96
baby wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. "open source is great, except when it's used in a way I don't like"

Yes. It is completely valid, understandable, and reasonable to have a variety of different feelings and views about how specific code and specific licenses are used. This is particularly the case when we see the emergence of new technologies that use it in different ways. Different people may have a wide variety of equally valid views about how it is incorporated into that system. There's nothing inconsistent, confus…

I think the issue is not that it’s trained on open source code but that it’s trained on code whose licenses may not permit it. If you license your project in a permissive way then I don’t see a problem.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#122

Post by williamstein »

jstummbillig wrote: post #90
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.

> has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself Sure it has: Time. In terms of economics it's really simple: Does Copilot free up more than 10$ worth of your time per month? If the product works at all as I understand it (I haven't tried), the answer should be a resounding "yes, and then some" for pretty much any SE, given the current market rates. If the answer is no (for example because it pro…

It is completely different than using open source programs to make money. Many open source licenses explicitly require any derived work to maintain the copyright notice and a compatible license. If I use github copilot to create a derived work of something somebody else published on GitHub, I have no idea who wrote the upstream code or what license they made it available under. The defense for this is the claim that GitHub copilot doesn’t create a derived work, since the code it produces is very different than anything upstream (this is claimed in the original paper from openai). However, many people have found examples showing this to be a questionable or wishful-thinking claim.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#123

Post by colechristensen »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #100

My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get. And no. They don't owe you anything. In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE…

copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many different open source licenses of its training data

Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address this kind of code use without license, attribution, or consent. (and the training data is a huge part of the value of an AI product)

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#124

Post by samth »

baby wrote: post #97
meibo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you want to check if you qualify: https://github.com/github-copilot/free_signup

Yeah that just redirects me to the paid page. I do wish the criteria were a little more transparent.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#126

Post by greatpatton »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #103
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.

How can it help you to speed up development but not be worth 10$/month. Your hourly rate can’t be that low.

It's great when it works, and can also be costly when it doesn't or when you blindly trust it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#128

Post by Spartan-S63 »

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.

Agreed. At the very least, I was hoping they'd bundle it with the GitHub Pro subscription for individuals rather than as a separate product.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#129

Post by colechristensen »

hyperzhi wrote: post #102

Nice. Not even halfway through my CS degree and my would've been future job has already been automated. Thanks GitHub!

No more than the suggestions on your phone for the next word replaces you as a friend to talk to. It is sometimes right as to the next word to use and sometimes can make comprehensible sentences, but it is still very incapable of doing anything all that useful.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#130

Post by davidbarker »

aviraldg wrote: post #24
bil7 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working Sometimes, with variable results. I think I've only observed it guess patterns from the current directory > Does copilot work for shell scripts? Yes, it gave me this earlier today while editing my .zshrc: # kill a process on a given port killport() { lsof -i :$1 | awk 'NR!=1 {print $2}' | xargs kill }

Can't wait for someone to integrate this into a shell. Does anyone know if such a project exists?

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but Warp (a new terminal client) has "AI Code Search" built in that's powered by GPT-3. Quite useful for someone like me who tends to avoid the terminal when I can.

https://www.warp.dev

https://docs.warp.dev/features/ai-command-search

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