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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#301

Post by Fogest »

gopher_space wrote: post #220
matthewmacleod wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For my part, it's a very obvious boost in exactly that sort of keystroke-saving way. Here's an example I just now tried in the codebase I had open. I literally typed in the following Go in a function: mean := geom.Vec3D{} for Copilot then autocompleted this, me pressing tab to accept each line, to: mean := geom.Vec3D{} for _, detection := range filtered { mean.X += detection.X mean.Y += detection.Y mean.Z += det…

I can picture autogen boilerplate being collected and distributed in versioned "community expansion packs" to popular languages, and I'm not looking for fragmentation like that in my tools. I really don't want my IDE involved like this. I'd rather see Copilot used to expand existing libraries. Pulling potential additions to your own library off of Copilot would be an interesting twist on the situation. A hacktoberfes…

Nobody is forcing you to use it... Others like myself find it useful and to be a huge timesaver. If it doesn't benefit you, then just don't use it. Why must people be so vocal about not liking something? I get that you don't think it would be useful for yourself, but it sounds like you've never used it, yet are against it enough to come bash on it in a thread.

I think you should give it a try and see what you think about it. I was hesitant about it at first but was very surprised at how much time it could save me from having to look up things on Google. I've found it especially useful when I'm switching to a language I may be less familiar with. I can understand the basic logic of what I want to do, but would have to spend time looking up how to do it in this specific language. Orrr... I just have copilot help me out and generate such a solution.

It's obviously not going to be a tool that is applicable to everyone. Just like how many manual labour oriented contractors have a bunch of tools, each of them may have their own set of tools that slightly differs from the other person. That is okay, and there would be no need to try and bring someone else down for their choice to use a certain tool.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#302

Post by atomicnumber3 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #253
nightpool wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some research level jobs where a PhD in CS is necessary, but for most coding jobs, an MSc is just 2 years of missed experience where you're learning bad habits and antipatterns by never having your code used by other people in any strenuous way. Certainly there are…

I've thought of going back for an MSc because it sounds kinda fun. Although probably in math rather than CS. I never thought it would be held against me though. Seems weird.

I don't think it would be held against you? Especially if it was "going back" for it.

I think the uncharitable view people take of a Bachelors followed immediately by a masters but with no PhD is that they presumably weren't planning to go for a PhD, and given that, had the choice between a) doing 2 more years of school for very tenuous benefit and b) going directly into a job where entry level pays 1.5x+ the median household income in many states. And they chose a).

So I think the uncharitable interpretation is then that the person was afraid of entering the adult world or felt like they couldn't hack it.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#303

Post by Fogest »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #277
netr0ute wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're into being hydrated, water is great. Just try it

Exactly. Since it was so great, I didn't need to be told to try it, and what's it to you if I do or don't?

And if you were given an IDE from a young age with copilot you also wouldn't be told you needed to try it...

Re: Coping with Copilot

#304

Post by teddyh »

skybrian wrote: post #299
teddyh wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Fair use” is, technically, not actually permitted by copyright law. ISTR that “fair use” is only a defense you can use when you are being sued for copyright violation. Suppose we create a new AI image generator, and use as training input every image ever made of a Disney character (official images by Disney, that is, no fan art), including every frame of every Disney movie. Could we just use the output images of tha…

Looks like there is case law that fictional characters are protected if they are "sufficiently delineated." I don't see how that applies to code, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...

I guess we’ll find out.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#305

Post by contravariant »

emeryberger wrote: post #215
russfink wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adjunct instructor here. Before I came into the program, cheating was on the rise. When given programming assignments, students would go to Geeks for geeks and download solutions, some of them mostly correct, and submit those for credit. One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder. Eventually, they got so hard that we were asking people new to computer science to implement a full arbitrary…

I think grading on multiple dimensions makes sense, though scaling is a challenge. As for analysis write-up: turns out, language models can also explain what the code does really well, in convincing vernacular. They generate reasonable comments. https://twitter.com/emeryberger/status/1560618825208320001?s... As an illustrative example, I just typed in a little test into Copilot. I only typed the first line and the te…

Now I'm curious if it can find the O(1) version of that same function.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#306

Post by ivraatiems »

Here's a thought: Replace mandatory homework with proctored, time-limited exams on systems that don't have copilot available (or dramatically reduce homework's percentage of one's grade).

If one cares about cheaters (and I'm not convinced we should), doesn't that solve the problem?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#307

Post by wokwokwok »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #123
thefourthchime wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing code for nearly as long and man, you have to try it. It's more like autocomplete on roids than something that generates Fibonacci methods automagically.

I will try it at some point, but I have... feelings... about its abuse of open source licenses software as a learning set. Also I work in Rust these days, and use CLion. Not sure if it would be much help in that environment.

It works fine in clion with rust.

The completions are often more “similar to stuff I’ve typed before” rather than “generate this working function”, and it’s not an order of magnitude improvement over just regular intellij completion.

…but I find it’s generally better.

Up to you if you consider it worth the cost of paying for it, and the macro completion is so-so, but “its rust so copilot can’t do it” isn’t really true.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#308

Post by salty_biscuits »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run. One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely codi…

"our profession is in trouble"

Or the world will shudder at the Byzantine monters we can pump out day after day

Re: Coping with Copilot

#309

Post by cageface »

datpuz wrote: post #297

Maybe I'm weird, but I do not get the hype. I was using Copilot for a few weeks as a Go backend dev with occasional work in the React/TypeScript frontend, and I thought it actually reduced my productivity. A lot of times, the suggestions were totally wrong, but looked correct-ish, and I would have to pause and basically debug that code, which generally took longer and snapped me out of my flow. Some of the autocomple…

I eventually turned it off too. It was good at certain things like filling out repetitive test data but overall I found it more distracting than helpful.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#310

Post by LelouBil »

datpuz wrote: post #297

Maybe I'm weird, but I do not get the hype. I was using Copilot for a few weeks as a Go backend dev with occasional work in the React/TypeScript frontend, and I thought it actually reduced my productivity. A lot of times, the suggestions were totally wrong, but looked correct-ish, and I would have to pause and basically debug that code, which generally took longer and snapped me out of my flow. Some of the autocomple…

You can keep it disabled and enable it with a hotkey when you think it can help. That's my strategy.

You need to recognize what it's good for, like generating code similar to what you've written but a little bit different.

For example : I had a project in Rust where I would print a sentence describing an error that occured. I had a big match block with my possible error variants. The error enum was declared in the same file.

And so, when I added a new error variant, I just had to place my cursor at the end of the match and watch copilot generate exactly or almost what I needed, a similar block of code that the other cases, but with a different message and using the fields of this varient intelligently.

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