My favourite thing to do is to write a comment about what I'm about to do and let copilot fill in the next line with the syntax. This is especially useful when I'm writing tidbits in a language I'm not super familiar with.
GitHub Copilot is generally available
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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#612This 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…
A wrongthink reply has been deleted. I though HN had a policy of allowing criticism of Ycombinator (and hopefully ex-Ycombinator led) companies.
The OpenAI threads are the exact opposite: The do not seem organic at all. Of course users probably do all the flagging, but it still gives a bad impression.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#613I'm in that middle-state where I program daily for work and hobby, but in earnest I only started about 1.5 years ago. I can make a lot run, mostly API work, data transformation.
I joined the Copilot beta and where it has helped me most is: 1) Ideas 2) Filling in the broad-strokes.
It's name does not deceive, it is only a co-pilot. It will not tell you where to go, it will push you in the right direction and let you focus on the more difficult parts of a task.
I signed up for it because at $10 per month the keystroke reduction is somewhere in ballpark of 70% or more. That's the real value in my use-case.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#614I've been using Copilot for a few months and... Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it. Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder. And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes. But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :inser…
What would be your estimate for how much time it saves?
My own experience with it is rather limited. My workplace doesn't allow the use of it (due to confidentiality), so i've only used it for school work.
It wasn't much help in designing/implementing classes in Java or .NET, but when it came to implementing unit tests it practically wrote everything after i named the class and designated it as a test. It was able to extract all the different methods from the classes being implemented, and create appropriate unit tests based on that.
Now, it was school homework, so not representative of a complex business application, but if i can just handle the basics/boilerplate, it would be worth it.
Assuming a (European) work week of 37.5 hours per week, $10 comes down to $0.06 per working hour, and if it can just save me 5 minutes of work every day it will be worth it.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#615I've been using Copilot for a few months and... Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it. Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder. And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes. But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :inser…
What would be your estimate for how much time it saves?
For me; I would happily pay 50$ a month. It probably saves me at least 10$ worth of time every day.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
I turned off auto-suggest and that made a huge difference. Now I'll use it when I know I'm doing something repetitive that it'll get easily, or if I'm not 100% sure what I want to do and I'm curious what it suggests. This way I get the help without having it interrupt my thoughts with its suggestions.
How do you do that?
In intellij (which is where I use it), section 8 of this document explains how. I'm assuming there's an equivalent for vscode.
When you disable auto complete, it can still be fired via a keyboard shortcut, which is how I use it.
https://github.com/github/copilot-docs/blob/main/docs/jetbra...
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#617Question for managers: how do you solve the problem of intellectual property attribution with Copilot? Or you just assume that is an employee's responsibility?
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#618I don't want to use it, because I don't want to feed Copilot input that makes it better.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#619Earlier 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.
Could have. But they didn’t
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#620I've been using Copilot for a few months and... Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it. Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder. And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes. But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :inser…
> And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just surprising how good of a suggestion it can make. I've had this experience too. Usually it's meh, but at one point it wrote an ENTIRE function by itself and it was correct. IT WAS CORRECT! And it wasn't some dumb boilerplate initialization either, it was actual logic with some loops. The context awareness with it is off the charts sometimes. Regardless I find t…
it is likely that for the stuff you are paid for a custom model might be a better fit.