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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#401

Post by edub »

I see programming as coding, testing, and documenting. I'm not looking for an AI to do it for me.

But I would be interested in me picking 2 of those 3 for me to do, and the AI can do the third for me. So if I love coding and test writing but don't like documentation, then the AI can do the third leg for me.

I think that the quality of results from the AI would be much better than what Copilot is capable of. Even if I focussed on test writing and documentation, I think that the AI should be able to write decent code based on those two inputs.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#402

Post by evilduck »

jmkni wrote: post #306
Hamcha wrote: post #195

I've been using Copilot non-stop on every hobby project I have ever since they've let me in (2021/07/13) and I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo. My experience using it till this day is the following: - It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well. - It's terrible if y…

> I've been using Copilot non-stop > I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo These two statments seem contradictory to me. Why are you using it 'non-stop' if it isn't even worth $10/month?

GPT-3 and AI-enhanced code completion has had a ton of hype going on, up to and including claims that software development as a job is at existential risk. Using Copilot non-stop to investigate and understand why there's so much hype and coming away with the opinion that it's not worthy of $10/mo is not contradictory. Would you rather someone who hasn't used a product extensively make value claims?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#403

Post by lveillard »

Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason. You failed your delivery.

1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me". Too violent.

A "Hey, we are happy you're using Copilot. We want to inform you that in 2 weeks we will close the beta and we will need you to sign up. But don't worry, it will be free for 60 days"

I'm sure 99% of people here would just be happy to pay those 10usd/month

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#404

Post by CryptoBanker »

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…

They provide VSCode as a free IDE because if they didn't, someone else would have, and in turn received all of the data that comes along with it. Let's not pretend Microsoft created VSCode out of the kindness of its heart

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#405

Post by theobr »

thdxr wrote: post #309

This has been the biggest productivity improvement to my workflow in years No it doesn't "understand what I'm doing" or "get everything right" but that's hardly the point It's often reducing the amount of labor I'm doing by hitting the keyboard by guessing 90% correctly what I was going to type It also often saves me from having to google how to do something, it's effectively serving me a search result right along my…

100% agree. Thought I’d hate it and it’s been a huge productivity win

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#406

Post by albertzeyer »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #262
albertzeyer wrote: post #188

I don't really get this argument why it should be a problem that it is being trained on other public code. Every human was just trained in the same way. Why isn't this a problem for every human? I really don't see the difference. One is an artificial neural network while the other is a biological neural network?

It’s not about the learning part, it’s about the copyright and money part. If you learn how to play song X by The Rolling Stones, you cannot just make money playing song X in a concert. Sure thing you can play song X in your father’s birthday. Here GitHub (Microsoft) is charging for a product that in certain circumstances violates copyright.

But Copilot (or a human) is not copying some existing code. It (Copilot or human) just used existing code to learn. So it is only about the learning part, nothing else.

Yes, if Copilot (or a human) would copy existing code, that would be a copyright violation. But none of the arguments here are about that. It's just about the learning.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#408

Post by vbezhenar »

qqqwerty wrote: post #330
rexreed wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your decision making delta is really $40 a year? How much is your time worth?

I think "SAAS fatigue" is a thing that needs to be considered. The SAAS model is great for startups and companies seeking recurring revenue. But the modern developer stack now involves dozens of companies gunning for a $5-10/month slice of the pie. In isolation, most developers could easily afford the $10/month for copilot. But most developers are probably using the free tier for half a dozen services. So the questio…

> modern developer stack now involves dozens of companies gunning for a $5-10/month slice of the pie.

Can you name most useful ones? So far my only subscription is Idea. I'm considering to try Copilot as I've heard many good things about it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#409

Post by [deleted] »

carschno wrote: post #37
bladegash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”)!

The details might differ per country, but my non-lawyer intuition clearly says that you are responsible for the code you publish, no matter what tool has suggested it.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#410

Post by bryanrasmussen »

omginternets wrote: post #378
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can’t imagine how Copilot would save anything but a negligible amount of effort for someone who is actually thinking about what they’re writing. since I have a right arm swelled up to twice normal size right now and it hurts to type for more than ten minutes (hopefully ok in a few days) I can imagine an advanced autocomplete being really useful for some disabilities.

More so than, say, classical snippets, auto-complete, and speech-to-text? And pray tell, how much typing is required to go back and fix the incorrect code produced by copilot? P.S.: wishing you a speedy recovery!

the person using co-pilot on all their hobby projects described it as working best as an advanced auto-complete, so I guess you should ask them that.

I figure advanced auto-complete should not produce big blocks of code that are more likely to have logical errors in them, since the grandfather comment here suggested that problems show up when you generate larger blocks of code.

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