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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#161

Post by exyi »

netr0ute wrote: post #106
gabagool wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’re making GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, generally available to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. It will also be free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. > Do you want to start using GitHub Copilot today? Get started with a 60-day free trial, and check out our pricing plans. It’s free to use for verified student…

I have an open source project. Do I qualify or not other than guessing at what appears on the billing screen

Yea, I also have no idea... They could be more specific what qualifies as popular os project

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#162

Post by mccorrinall »

colechristensen wrote: post #123
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…

You need to require rights for scraping publicly available resources?

Damn, rip Google.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#163

Post by w4ffl35 »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #32
MarquesMa wrote: post #2

Thank you, GitHub, this is one of the best things! No, it cannot make me write code I couldn't write before. It does not autopilot and does all the coding by itself. But it still boosts my productivity greatly, making me relaxed while coding and focusing on the important part rather than errands.

I've been using it for a while now. When I forget some syntax occasionally I'll switch this on instead of searching documentation or google, but more often than not my IDE can get me unstuck with less overhead. Also if there are some repetitive sections of code I need to bang out quickly this will auto fill that repetitive pattern (although I'd argue this is usually a sign that the code should be cleaned up) I avoid…

Additionally: when I allowed copilot to do heavier coding for me, I found myself returning later and feeling somewhat unfamiliar with the code. That's really bad for maintenance, project pace, etc. I don't want to try to re-learn, fix, remember and maintain code that someone else (a computer in this case) wrote. Its hard enough doing so reliably in group code settings (work), now injecting that into my daily coding life feels like a solution I didn't ask for.

I will say that I'm not averse to change and do appreciate the new tools that we have available to us - Starting on a x386 writing QBASIC as a kid to using Jetbrains Rider is an indescribably different experience.

That said, I'm not ready to move to the backseat and let the computer take over yet. In small doses copilot is fine, but I wouldn't lean heavily on it for large projects or to do the thinking for me.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#164

Post by ridiculous_fish »

andrewallbright wrote: post #111

This has probably been talked about but... If most code is "bad" code (any definition works) and this AI was trained on all/most code on GitHub, does that mean that this AI mostly helps to produces bad code?

It definitely can. Here it suggests a plausible looking but incorrect function for averaging integers: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/14527512360594513...

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#165

Post by tpxl »

danuker wrote: post #82
josephcsible wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Also its users might be violating the GPL. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-...

How can the user be violating the license, not the distributor? If I give you a binary that gives you a Disney movie, it's not you violating the copyright, it's me. The copilot itself is violating the copyright, not its users.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#166

Post by lmarcos »

Reminds me of the scene in Fight Club where Tyler explains how he makes money (he sells rich women their own fat asses in the form of luxury soap). In this case the fat is open source code hosted in GitHub, the soap is Copilot, and the rich women are us, the developers.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#167

Post by shadowgovt »

causi wrote: post #134
password4321 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#168

Post by natefinch »

uwuemu wrote: post #131
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…

I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some library, I'll let it write it for me, and then double check it to make sure it's doing what I want. That's still faster than me going to check the API and writing it all out by hand.

Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#169

Post by kevincox »

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…

> People who maintain popular open source projects receive a credit to have 12 months of GitHub Copilot access for free. A maintainer of a popular open source project is defined as someone who has write or admin access to one or more of the most popular open source projects on GitHub

https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-ca...

I like how "open source project" == "on github". Can't say that I am surprised though.

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