GitHub Copilot is generally available • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#641

Post by calum-bird » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

CapsAdmin wrote: post #357

I really like copilot, but my outside of the content being generated it still feels a bit slow and somewhat hacked into vscode. It sometimes interferes with regular "intellisense suggestions" as well. I've been in the beta since almost the beginning I have not really seen much improvement on the frontend side. Since its release, the changelog only mentions 10 small (or so it seems) improvements https://marketplace.vi…

Copilot does inline completion right now - they implemented it into copilot as a pilot program[0] before OAI went live with that new model IIRC.

[0]: https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-edit-insert/

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#642

Post by baby » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

scifibestfi wrote: post #527

cube2222 wrote: post #146

I'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?

in some tasks, like refactoring, I would easily say that 75% of my time is saved by copilot.

For example, I just had to convert some OCaml code to Rust. I wrote the first few conversions, and then I would just paste the OCaml code in a comment, and it would auto-complete the equivalent code in Rust. I just had to check that it was correct, which it was most of the time, rinse and repeat and wow. One would have to be blind to not find copilot impressive, really, it's the future.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#643

Post by baby » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #575

ascorbic wrote: post #564

I've been using the beta since last year and I love it. I think most of the people complaining about it either haven't used it, or are judging it on its most verbose guesses. That's not what I use it for mostly. For me, it's just a really, really good autocomplete. It's best for things with common patterns and APIs. But hey, they're common so I write them a lot. Boring stuff like creating a Response object, adding th…

How much time would you say it saves you per day? Ie. how much more productive does it make you? I’m curious whether we’re talking 5% or 30%.

It's hard to tell, but if I would place some baseline "the tool is useful if it helps me this amount per day" somewhere, then it's WELL above that baseline. So I would say that if you can say the tool is useful if it improves 1% of your day, then it's probably at 15-30% right now.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#644

Post by baby » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

lsh123 wrote: post #479

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?

This is why we can't have nice things

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#645

Post by baby » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

Hamcha wrote: post #187

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'd be willing to pay more than 10$/month for it personally. It has a greater impact than Netflix on my day-to-day. Also, I would expect my work to expense it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#646

Post by baby » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

lveillard wrote: post #352

Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason. You failed your delivery. 1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me".…

your comment badly aged

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#647

Post by dang » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

jklpt wrote: post #612

thdxr wrote: post #273

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…

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.

I suppose you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834991? Users flagged that. I don't think they were wrong to flag it - it's pretty flamey, and the site guidelines ask you to avoid flamebait, fulmination, and name-calling. Would you mind reviewing them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's true that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is the topic, but (a) Github isn't one, and (b) we can't do any sort of moderation (less or more) on posts we don't see. I didn't see yours until now.

Re OpenAI threads - I'm not aware of anything non-organic going on there. As far as I can tell, HN users are just really interested in AI related stuff. Same for Deepmind threads, etc.

(Btw, although it's common for commenters who break the site guidelines to confer honorifics like "wrongthink" on their own posts, you don't need to resort to that to understand why users flagged your comment.)

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#648

Post by israrkhan » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

natefinch wrote: post #390

lveillard wrote: post #352

Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason. You failed your delivery. 1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me".…

It's still free with no payment for existing (beta/technical preview) customers. There was a github bug with some auth token nonsense that was causing problems, but all technical preview users should still be free for 60 days.

I was a technical preview user, and i am getting this error :

GitHub Copilot could not connect to server. Extension activation failed: "User not authorized"

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#649

Post by jsnelgro » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

Is it just me or do the top comments seem super suspicious? They aren’t nearly as critical and level-headed as I’ve come to expect from hn. Skeptical of their authenticity.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#650

Post by anakaine » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 6:34 AM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #427

cube2222 wrote: post #146

I'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…

I've found that even in the specialist domains I'm working in, it does pretty well. The caveats being that you need to guide it quite a bit, but once a workflow starts to come together then it really starts to hum.