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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#131

Post by uwuemu »

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.

Depends on your budget of course, but I don't think it's worth $10/month. I pay just a little bit more than that for an entire IDE. The problem with Copilot is that it's USEFUL for boilerplate code and when you need a lot of copypaste "coding" (think APIs, controllers, etc... basically shifting data around the place), but any time you need to actually code something with some actual algorithmic logic behind it, it's little more than a distraction, and often even a really problematic one, because if you let it, it will happily suggest things that look OK on the surface, but are almost always (and I really mean most of the time) wrong, buggy or otherwise incomplete. You can't realy on it. It's like a kid (I wanted to say a "junior programmer", but it's not anywhere near that level) you can offload some chores to, but you always have to check on it and what it actually does. Fine if all you need is to wash the dishes... more than that and you're asking for trouble.

When I'm in the flow, trying to solve some algorithmic problem, I always turn it off because the BS suggestions coming from its little "mind" actually slow me down and mess with my focus. Which all makes sense when you realize what it ultimately is - a philosopher, as opposed to a mathematician.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#132

Post by __alexs »

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…

Having used it quite a lot I'm not sure it does save me $10 of time per month. At least as often that it generates usefully correct code it generates correct appearing but actually totally wrong code that I have to carefully check and/or debug.

It's quite nice not to have to type generic boilerplate in sometimes I guess but it's very frustrating when it generates junk.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#133

Post by lelandfe »

lucideer wrote: post #61
injidup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recit...

> That corresponds to one recitation event every 10 user weeks

> This investigation demonstrates that GitHub Copilot can quote a body of code verbatim, yet it rarely does so, and when it does, it mostly quotes code that everybody quotes, typically at the beginning of a file, as if to break the ice

A year old post now, YMMV.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#134

Post by causi »

password4321 wrote: post #101
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.

> train on open source projects To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely leaving the Copilot user responsibl…

Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued. "Hey now, I just hit paste, the software pressed copy by itself" is not going to hold up.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#135

Post by planb »

Anyone else using Copilot just as a glorified copy&paste helper? It’s great for repetitive tasks, but I’ve yet to encounter a situation where it really helped me to write meaningful code. At least I’d expect it to work together with intellisense, so it does not propose stuff that will get a red underline right away.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#136

Post by bdn_ »

josephcsible wrote: post #74
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.

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. Yeah, this feels like the same nonsense that scientific journal publishers pull. If your product only has value because of what we made, it's completely unfair to not pay us for our work and then to turn around and charge us to use the output.

Yes. Even if it may be permitted under some licenses, training models off millions of developers' code and capitalizing on those models goes against the spirit of open source software. I'd expect nothing less from Microsoft.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#137

Post by pcj-github »

The free thing for (a few) open-source maintainers seems needlessly complicated... Who should qualify is non-transparent. They'd have been better off just charging everyone for it. Not an instant buy for me for the moment. Often it works well, but it also frequently takes time to correct/sort-out the suggestions. It might in fact be making me dumber as I wait for a suggestion rather than thinking it out.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#138

Post by speedgoose »

w0m wrote: post #62
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...

It's worth it if it saves you a few minutes every month.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#140

Post by natefinch »

lelandfe wrote: post #116
natefinch wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is logic to ensure that copilot does not emit exact duplicates of code in the training set... but that logic is significantly newer than that tweet.

Link? I couldn't find anything "significantly newer" than 7/2/21 (though I'm sure GitHub is doing a lot here). They had this blog post 6/30/21 regarding efforts on avoiding raw code: https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recit... . They concluded: > We will both continue to work on decreasing rates of recitation, as well as making its detection more precise.

Source: I work on the copilot team.
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