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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#461

Post by kojeovo »

austenallred wrote: post #444
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'm genuinely curious: How do you value your time? If you're an engineer who is paid $150/hour and Copilot saves you 5 minutes/month it just paid for itself.

Hobby projects don't make any money so it doesn't make sense if I pay for it to be more productive for the company. If they pay, great.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#462

Post by PoignardAzur »

andrewallbright wrote: post #119
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…

I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on how much their music/content is listened to.

The verb "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize that more value gets created when they're a state enforced monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of art/literature/code.

But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far; eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting public domain and game publishers going after anyone who makes a let's-play of their video.

In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy just so you can tax them".

And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10 years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc.

But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating semantics and wonder what we're coding for. What Microsoft has created is a tool that can collectively save developers billions of man-hours. It's a net good for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed Copilot.

tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#463

Post by rexreed »

toyg wrote: post #288
rexreed wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course GPT-3 doesn't "understand" what you are doing. All it's doing is generating high probability text based on a huge training corpus. It's guessing what text will come next. That doesn't mean it understands jack squat. It's basically a parrot with a huge database. Polly want a program?

The fact that such a program is so hyped, is actually an indicator of how much boilerplate and wheel-reinvention goes on among programmers every day. The state of the sector is somewhat embarrassing. We have armies of monkeys well-paid to bang out the same Java/Javascript/C#/Python over, and over, and over...

Microsoft spent a Billion dollars for an exclusive license of GPT-3, and now they want their return. Expect to see GPT-3 hyped on every platform (including Github).

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#464

Post by matsemann »

kromem wrote: post #451
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.

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 verbat…

It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it was just an observation based on the parent comment's own admission.

Please remember this from the guidelines

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#465

Post by richardfey »

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…

I could also make a mistake due to Copilot which takes me time to fix, and then I end up spending more time checking code where I previously used it. It has similar pros/cons than copy/pasting

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#466

Post by Hnrobert42 »

paskozdilar wrote: post #345
omginternets wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, but feel like it’s ignoring the elephant in the room: writing code is not the bottleneck in need of optimization. Conceiving the solution is. Any time “saved” through Copilot and it’s ilk is immediately nullified by having to check it’s correctness. From there, the problem is worsened by the Frankensteinesque stitching together of disparate parts that you describe. I can’t i…

Can Copilot write tests? That way it could test its own code and tweak it until it works. Of course, one would then ask how to verify tests. I suppose Copilot could write meta-tests - tests that verify other tests. That way it could test its own tests and tweak them until they work. Of course, one would then ask how to verify meta-tests. I suppose Copilot could write meta-meta-tests - tests that verify meta-tests. Th…

Isn’t this how they managed to stop the Borg?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#467

Post by xtracto »

mcluck wrote: post #382

Like many people I thought Copilot was neat but ended up uninstalling it because it caused more problems than it solved. Reading the comments here, it seems that most of the people who get value out of it would be better served creating a set of snippets. If all you need is to fill in boilerplate all the time or repeat general test structures but with different arguments, just make a snippet. Every major code editor…

I haven't used Copilot but found this comment interesting. Back in the 1990s when I started programming (BASIC and C) I did maintain collections of code snippets that I used in different programs here and there. I used to cherish those snippets and dedicated a good amount of time to maintain them available through my computers.

Then the Internet and Google came around. I found that instead of me maintaining those code snippets, I could search in Excite/Altavista for how to do something, and it will be stored there for me. Later came sites like StackOverflow (expertssexchange before it) which concentrated much of that information which before was scattered in PHPBBs and Geocities pages.

Now I see this Copilot app like the evolution of that; Instead of having to manually go searching for a snippet, I imagine I can "pull it" almost automatically while I am writing code, with an AI helping me search for the right snippet with the current code context.

That doesn't sound bad at all.

Nevertheless, I haven't used it because I DON'T want my code to be sent to Microsoft or any other company. And I don't believe in adding random code for which I don't know the license! What if there is some code which was AGPL that Copilot happens to use? that's pretty bad.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#470

Post by social_quotient »

Could they charge more and push the product improvements faster? Seems like 10/m/u is optimizing for how bearable the price is but then you have a bunch of users that are quick to complain while you don’t have the budget to make rapid improvements to the platform.

Charge 10x more (or more) and let the dreamers help push the product further and faster. Once it’s awesome then charge a commoditized price for the service.

Charging 10x+ more means we have enough skin in the game to properly send feedback and improvement ideas. At 10/m/u it’s barely worth you reading my support tickets and it’s almost with me just not using it while paying for it.

Thoughts?

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