Copilot is a steal at $10/m. HN can set itself apart from Twitter and Reddit by celebrating great achievements rather than tearing them down. Copilot stands on the shoulders of open source, yes. So do many of our personal and commercial projects. Copilot benefitted from having beta users. That relationship went both ways. A big thanks to the Copilot team for letting us be a part of the beta. I will happily pay $10/m…
Steal is a good word, considering that in some cases Copilot violates some open source licenses.
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…
That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.
That's how any business product works. Whenever a company releases a new product, the income doesn't go to the employees; It goes to the company, who will then pay those employees.
I’d be even more curious (more philosophically than anything) as to who is liable for the mishap if Copilot suggests something that ends up violating a license. Is it the developer? The developer’s company? GitHub? Maybe the “AI” is the ultimate scapegoat (“we can’t be liable for what our helpful robot decides to do”)!
It's the developer. Just because you copy/paste something you find on SO or Google or Githib doesn't absolve you of copyright infridgements
In most jurisdictions, if the developer is an employee the legal liability is with the company.
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…
But I don't get paid on a piece rate; the amount of time I spend working is constant. Anything that increases my productivity just means I get more work done. (Others may differ, but I know from experience that I like to keep to a fixed schedule.) And that's mostly benefitting my employer, not me, so it seems like something my employer should pay for, if they believe in it.
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.
Given the cost of the infrastructure needed to run those large language models, it's very likely that Microsoft is still operating copilot at a loss. I don't see an issue with it being a paid service as it is a costly service to provide. What I pity however is that there's no free tier for hobbyists as paying a 10 usd monthly subscription wont make sense when you only code occasionally. For professionals using it eve…
GitHub Pro is $4/mo and includes 3000 minutes of CI compute per month (private repos), among all the other features. You’re not going to use 7500 minutes worth of compute a month with Copilot. I’ll certain pay up, though.
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.
I went to see the pay URL and it said I was eligible to get it for free. Not sure if that works for some people who contrib to other OSS repo's, but I was about to give up on it when I saw I didn't have to pay, so might be worth checking.
Another concern is that nearly every stackoverflow answer or wikipedia article that isn't a trivial algorithm tends to be buggy at its edge conditions. Most of them look like they were submitted by college students and not experts.
Remember when we believed that experts were over because the wisdom of the crowds would reign supreme? Been a hell of a decade, hasn't it.
When the wisdom of the crowds is all easily accessible, the hard part becomes curating.
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…
That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.
What? Should I have to reimburse the author of every tutorial and Stack Overflow post I read on my journey to becoming a software engineer?