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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#581

Post by philliphaydon »

natefinch wrote: post #168
uwuemu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interesti…

I used copilot yesterday because I wanted a random 10 character long string and was like. Ahh I don’t have the brain power right now to think of this. And remembered I had copilot. So I enabled it. Wrote a comment. And it generated ~10 lines that solved my problem. Tweaked a little bit and rolled with it.

It helps solve the boring simple shit so I can focus on the interesting bit.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#582

Post by culi »

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?

It's an extension... You'd have to go out of your way to disable it. It's also completely optional so it's (almost) only additive. The only harm is sometimes it generates suggestions faster than I can press tab to fix my spacing

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#583

Post by richiebful1 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #484
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 think your response highlights why individual developers are the worst target market and why you want to sell to businesses if you're in the tool space. Let's say the average developer in the US costs 10k a month (I think that's pretty close to the real average of around 120k a year). So copilot would cost .1% of that developer's salary. I realize calculating things around "improvements in developer productivity" i…

If you're an employee what percentage of that productivity increase accrues to you?

I would not spend $10/month on a code completor for my job, because I would probably never see those $10 back in salary. I doubt the company would even notice the minor bump in productivity, say $100 a month

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#584

Post by Longlius »

blip54321 wrote: post #570
lsh123 wrote: post #555

I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?

Damages. This question will come back to damages. If you steal 10 lines of code from me, the damages will be the greater of: - The benefit to you (10 minutes programmer time) - The cost to me ($0) - Statutory damages (probably $200) In other words, it's very unlikely to be worth a lawsuit. The most likely outcome is: - A legal letter is sent - Infringing code is removed - As good bedside manner, some nominal amount o…

Willful copyright infringement for monetary gain can be prosecuted as a criminal act in the United States (and many other countries including Japan) and it's highly possible Github themselves can end up in hot water for facilitating this.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#585

Post by skinnymuch »

matsemann wrote: post #538
DantesKite wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it was just an observation based on the parent comment's own admission. I don't think that's true. When the parent comment made that observation, they attached the caveat they might not be as skilled as others. They were already fully aware their potential lack of skill might affect their opinion of the product. All you did was repeat that same claim back to…

No, I explained why I thought it didn't provide value to me, in the context of having a different background than the person I responded to. Nothing malicious intended in that. I find you having to write 3 long paragraphs of bullshit about that to be the truly astonishing thing here. Holy crap.

Not commenting on the actual riff the two of you are having. However I dislike the come back of “you wrote so much”. I’m overly verbose. I have adhd. So what. Having to hear school ground retorts insinuating I care so much because I write too much is tiresome. Is it even a bad thing? Is it even logical to say writing more than average is somehow an inherent flaw?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#586

Post by 2600 »

lsh123 wrote: post #555

I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?

Under it's settings, there's an option for GitHub Copilot to "allow or block suggestions matching public code."

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#587

Post by culi »

uluyol wrote: post #577
culi wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like it too but I can't help but feel like all the same people panicked about Microsoft acquiring GitHub are suddenly quiet about the fact that Microsoft has found the ultimate way to profit off of open-source There's a ton of developer effort that went into Copilot and those devs should be paid fairly. But the majority of what fuels Copilot is the millions of lines of open source code submitted every day. I…

Microsoft could simply crawl archives of code wherever they exist, and use that to build copilot. GitHub hosting open source communities is a way of giving back.

Microsoft gives free copies of Office to schools. Why do you think it does that? MS benefits from people being locked into its service and suite. It provides premium subscriptions for additional features.

Hosting code "for free" is part of its business model. It's not a way of "giving back"

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#589

Post by solomatov »

The most concerning part of their FAQ is this:

>What data does GitHub Copilot collect?

>...

>User Engagement Data

>...

>Code Snippets Data

>Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub Copilot may also collect >and retain the following, collectively referred to as “code snippets”: source >code that you are editing, related files and other files open in the same IDE or >editor, URLs of repositories and files paths.

It's possible to opt out, but it's not disabled by default, and this code snippets might be very sensitive.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#590

Post by jrpelkonen »

3pt14159 wrote: post #499
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…

Right on the money. What I want is a copilot that finds errors ala spellcheck-esque. Did I miss an early return? For example in the code below def some_worker if disabled_via_feature_flag logger.info("skipping some_worker") some_potentially_hazardous_method_call() Right after the logger call I missed a return. A copilot could easily catch this. Invert the relationship. I don't need some boilerplate generator, I need…

Perhaps curly braces are useful after all.
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