I don't understand what's going on there.
I don't use github. Can someone explain what the author means?
Edit: in detail
Copilot sells code other people wrote
41–50 of 838 posts
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#42I get the feeling this entire debate would have been non-existent had this been a Jetbrains product instead. The whole thing is just bizarre when the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly without once looking at whatever license is attached.
> the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly Perhaps in your circles, but that's certainly not something I've encountered over a 25 year carreer.
So when you google a problem and it leads you to a code snippet that solves it that just happens to be OSS, you immediately scrub your brain and pretend you never saw it and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#43Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
Seems like a narrow vision. Is every line of code you write to solve a problem “not boring”? I solve problems I find interesting, but writing matplotlib code to visualize data never is.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#44[deleted]
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#45I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
The first can be automated without ML though. And once you use ML you cannot guarantee it won't copy-paste existing code.
This whole thing would be fine if GitHub hadn't just used all public code on their platform, ignoring all involved licenses.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#46Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
This is true for the current iteration of the model. Probably won't be true at least to an extent in 5 years.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with solving boring problems. Not everyone can be Bjarne Stroustrup.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#47Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
The most interesting problem will have extremely boring bits. If you write a cli tool to solve all of world problems by changeling magic, you'll still need to add the parameter handling and do some error management. Which is repetitive and likely well generalised and predictable based on other projects.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#48Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
The problem may not be boring. Typing boilerplate code is.
I work on games as hobby. Sometimes I implement mechanics requiring vector math. Working on mechanics is interesting. Writing down math is not. Copilot helps with later.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#49If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?
It's absolutely fine to allow humans to do that while prohibiting (commercialized) AI to do the same thing.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#50Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art.
No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less.
The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.