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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#711

Post by 3pt14159 »

haspok wrote: post #660
3pt14159 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You missed the `else` branch, not a `return`.

This is one of those arguments I can see both ways, but I ultimately side on the early return side of things over the else branch side of things.

In my opinion, if the function is done its job, it should return. That's what return is for. As the function grows, the else side of the branch gets longer and longer and it is error prone to leave the first branch of the if statement reliant on it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#712

Post by jstummbillig »

williamstein wrote: post #122
jstummbillig wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is completely different than using open source programs to make money. Many open source licenses explicitly require any derived work to maintain the copyright notice and a compatible license. If I use github copilot to create a derived work of something somebody else published on GitHub, I have no idea who wrote the upstream code or what license they made it available under. The defense for this is the claim that…

Lack of training data is obviously not gonna be a linchpin in this project, no matter how reproachful the hs crowd looks upon copilot in regards to oss licensing. Even if we are prepared to dub the copilot team liars (bold move, good luck in court) there is always gonna be enough code to go around to make this thing happen regardless. Rumors are microsoft could chip in some.

In addition, the idea of "derived work" in code snippets is, quite frankly, nuts. There is only so many ways to write (let's be generous on the scope of copilot) 25 lines of code to do a very specific thing in a specific language. If you have 1000000 different coders do the job (which we do) you'll have a significant amount of overlap in the resulting code. Nobody is losing sleep because of potential license with this. Because that would be insane.

I have noticed that upholding oss licensing (at least morally) is kind of a table manner on hs. That's fine, but this is some new level of silly.

It's also not gonna persist, because no matter how much we love our oss white-knightedness, we love having well paying jobs more.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#713

Post by [deleted] »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #637
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…

You haven’t tried Copilot, have you?

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#714

Post by jlpqu »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#715

Post by jlpqu »

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…

Let's upload a lot of Oracle GPL code and find out. Oracle has certainly sued over 10 lines of code and for much higher damages.

But you know what? I think we'll find that CoPilot will have magically skipped those Oracle repositories and only used code from lowly open source slaves.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#716

Post by jlpqu »

blagie wrote: post #706
rmbyrro wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're providing Copilot for free for OSS maintainers.

OSS maintainer here. No. They're not. They're advertising that they are. They are providing it to a very small set of high-profile OSS maintainers some opaque algorithm picked out. Having high-profile adopters is just good business.

Exactly. They are bribing the project leads so they can then say that scanning is approved and voluntary.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#717

Post by tangjurine »

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…

I would say it's good practice for code reviews =P

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#718

Post by bovermyer »

rmbyrro wrote: post #697
keyle wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a polyglot who works in 4-5 different languages every 3-6 months, it's been very valuable. I forget a lot of things, simple dumb stuff like type conversions or specific keywords spelling. Copilot takes care of 99% of that so I can focus on my higher level spec. If anything sometimes it's too agressive. I start typing a word and it's already building up the rest of the application in a different direction...

Isn't your forgetting issue something that spaced repetition would solve while also building confidence in yourself?

Spaced repetition doesn't help with the use case of needing to recall lots of little details spread across a wide number of knowledge domains. You'd spend more time trying to remember everything than on actually doing useful work.

Also, that little "building confidence in yourself" rider that you added suggests that you think the OP doesn't have confidence in themselves. Careful about those assumptions; in this case it comes across as a little patronizing.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#719

Post by 1ChrisAF »

synergy20 wrote: post #308
TaylorPhebillo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played with it a little bit: Copilot did pretty poorly when I tried using it with Julia- it kept suggesting Python code. I suspect it would do something similar in Elixir. I'm also a vim person who doesn't want to use VS code, but I've gotten more than enough value to get into my first IDE (with vim keybindings). A lot of tedious C++ code is getting correctly auto-generated.

I don't think c++ is even on their supported language? the copilot page lists python,js,ts,ruby,go.

From the “About GitHub Copilot” page:

“GitHub Copilot is optimized to help you write Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, or C++.”

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...

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