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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#451

Post by kromem »

matsemann wrote: post #397
jwpapi wrote: post #386

I’m honestly shook at all the comments here. I don’t make any money coding and I’m probably in the lower 25% of HN readers in terms of skills, but I’m more than happy to pay $10/m. I would pay Github $10/m for what they already give me. What is your time worth? You should easily get $60/hr, so you need to save 12 minutes per month to make it worth. I would pay that for all my employees. CoPilot is not a replacement f…

Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it? For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.

I code for a living and have done so for over a decade now, and I completely agree with their analysis.

Does it save you $10 worth of your time within a month?

Comments here are wildly uninformed. I see comments complaining about copyright that seem to have no awareness of either fair use doctrine prior law as it relates to partial usage nor the details regarding how infrequently Copilot generates identifiable verbatim results outside attempts to auto fill empty files in empty projects (which seems outside typical usage).

Or complaints that it makes mistakes, as if 90% of those mistakes aren't immediately flagged by the linter. Not only that, but I've found that often when it does make mistakes, it reflects a consistency smell in my own code, such as tripping up on a legacy naming convention that should really be refactored out.

If it doesn't save you $10 worth of time, obviously don't use it. Personally I was worried it was going to be more given the ways in which it cuts down on the most boring parts of a high value profession.

But insinuating that someone's positive experience of the tool reflects inexperience is a weird gatekeeper flex, and honestly I'm more inclined to think that all the curmudgeonly resistance I see in here to the inevitable march of progress instead reflects old dogs unable to adequately learn new tricks (like how to effectively prompt it).

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#453

Post by CryZe »

marcodiego wrote: post #66

Did they fixed the licensing dangers?

You apparently can "opt out of public code" now. I didn't find an explanation for whether that properly limits it to permissive licenses though.

Update: It seems like they check whether the code it emits matches the training set and if it does it won't suggest it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#454

Post by eclark »

causi wrote: post #278
bastardoperator wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the fact that you grant GitHub an implicit license as outlined in the ToS.

GitHub isn't liable. That's been established in court with regards to training AIs. Who is liable is you who may or may not have the legal right to use the code CoPilot spits out for you.

I don't think it's a clear cut as you make it out to be. Tortious interference is a common law remedy that might make Github/MS liable.

If I induce you to break a contract with someone else they can come after me for damages.

For example in this case, there are developers who have created GPL code. That code was licensed to some other developer. Github then encouraged people to upload git copies of the GPL code onto github where it was put into the model. That model contains the copyrighted materials and isn't coming with the necessary notices. The output of the model can be code that is a direct stand in for the copyrighted work. Thus Github have become a party to breaking the license even though they themselves never agreed to the GPL.

In addition Github are encouraging (They are advertising it and making it available broadly) other developers to copy that code and use it in their project. Again that's encouraging an action that breaks a contract. Github is well aware that this is likely happening and they continue on. Thus they might be liable. You also might be liable.

All of these things can and likely will be argued before courts but it's not at all one sided.

> That's been established in court with regards to training AIs.

What are you basing the certainty of this statement on? The case law I have seen around this is pretty spotty. Cases around training on copyrighted materials have predominately been about the input, and not the output. With the final output usually being controlled by the model owner. For example Google obtained the books they scanned legally then used them to produce google books' index. There are some major differences.

- The books were purchased, meaning they got a license to use the book. There's for sure code in the model that Github does not legally have the right to use. They are aware of this. Making the input more shaky for github. - Github is making a direct profit off of this service. It's a revenue generating enterprise. That's important since it raises the bar of what they can be expected to do.

There's been nothing that goes to the supreme court yet; it's all per circuit and not settled case law. Also this gets WAAAAY more complex when we start talking about outside of the US and isn't decided at all.

These things are complex and likely you need your lawyer to advise you with any real questions.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#455

Post by presentation »

tedunangst wrote: post #393
raunak wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP - I use it non-stop for boiler plate filling as well. I wouldn't use it for anything other than that, so I would say it's worth honestly at max $1/month.

$1 is worth what, one minute of your time? If you're using a tool that doesn't even save you one minute, why bother?

Most people don't make purchasing decisions based on the value they create but rather based on some ingrained assumptions about how expensive software is supposed to be. VSCode and many other complex pieces of software are free, autocomplete is built into my OS, and those subscription consumer software that does have a price usually are priced very low—so relative to those, $10/month feels like a lot (even though I hope that practically anything anyone makes the effort to subscribe to produces at least $10 of value for them).

Some companies seem to be leaning into higher subscription pricing (Superhuman and Motion come to mind) and almost certainly produce far more value than their subscriptions cost if you ask me, but there's definitely a mental barrier to value based pricing to consumers, as well as the fact that with so many companies offering cheap/free software, the market isn't solely determined by value created but rather comparison against other software.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#457

Post by alfor »

It is awesome for me (diving back into Django after a long pause)

It seem to understand the common boilerplates things in Django that always annoyed me and type them for me. It understand the structure and adapt them to my code: imports, connection between modules, etc.

For sure, you need to be carefull with it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#458

Post by munchler »

cauefcr wrote: post #340
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems unfortunately clear that generative ML as typically practiced falls under fair use of even the most restrictive licenses or lack thereof (e.g. a training set including disney movies without disney’s permission). Some people say that’s great and it’s legal hooray, but I would love it if the law caught up and added requirements to the models trained this way. If you benefit from other people’s stuff without th…

What is actually crazy is having copyright/patents/whatever apply to mathematical structures and code, and be retainable for long, it's rent on ideas, such a ridiculous concept.

Copyright and patents are very different. I think the general consensus among developers is that software patents are silly, but copyright on source code is very important.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#459

Post by patrickthebold »

theshrike79 wrote: post #419
matsemann wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it? For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.

> For me the bottleneck is seldom typing This is one of my pet peeves in this field. People create whole programming languages that are "expressive", just to save typing a few dozen characters and have huge tirades against "verbose" languages that require typing a bunch of boilerplate. If typing the code is the bit that takes the longest for you in a project, stop and take a good look in the mirror. There's something…

For a verbose language the problem isn't the typing it's the reading. On the typing side I agree with you: I don't mind spending 30 minutes typing a bunch of boilerplate. I do mind digging through 100s of lines of code to find the 2 lines that actually do something interesting.

Of course, copilot is only going to save you typing time, and you'll have to pay it back at reading time.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#460

Post by mrsmee89 »

I don’t think this is worth 10$ a month and I hope they come out with a free tier at some point. In my experience copilot is fantastic for autocomplete.

Probably the best autocomplete I’ve ever used across multiple languages but it’s not reliable at all for the more complex tasks that their marketing makes it seem it’s good at.

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