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GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

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Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#71

Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies can overcome that have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem. Credit t…

I hope that Copilot X will be brought to other IDEs as well, not just Visual Studio [Code].

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.

sorry if i was unclear, by "real productivity" i meant something that requires more creativity than copypasting stackoverflow/copilot to your code, not measured in "lines of code" but rather in how much it is unique. Highly subjective, yes...

What's the reason to think that it reduces the amount of creative code that's written. Doesn't it just let you get through the copypastable stuff faster - all things being equal I'd assume it means you spend more time on the creative parts.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#73
post #55
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone asked me to pay for a team subscription for Copilot. As I'm CTO (and thus legally responsible for those agreements that you normally just click through); I read the terms of service, and they do not actually grant license to the code. They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS. So, as I don't want to encourage people to think that they can simply copy over copilot solutions I dec…

Do you also disallow your employees from reading github, stack overflow, or other sources of code?

I disallow copying of copyrighted code into our product repositories unless the license is clear, I have even reached out to people to directly license copyrighted software, or for them to relicense their public AGPL/GPL license (for a fee).

To answer your statement directly:

1) StackOverflow submissions are CC-BY-SA, so if a person copies' code from there, even if it's copyrighted you can consider it good faith and remove the offending code from your product. This is actually a licensing nightmare but the current situation is the same as when the music industry accidentally uses an unlicensed sample and there's no current reason to consider it otherwise.

2) Github has a neat repository licensing feature (LICENSE) so you can easily tell what repo has what, not having a license file means the repository is fully copyrighted by default by the way; if we bundle GPL code then we would have to open source our game, which is not going to happen, so no you're not allowed to just copy code, but you can take inspiration; which is what Copilot is saying you should do in their terms *NOT COPY CODE VERBATIM*.

Ultimately: Software licensing is a joke to you because it doesn't really concern you, however it concerns me as it is quite literally part of my job to protect the company from being sued over doing something wrong here.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#74
post #42

With increases in productivity from systems like this, and a guaranteed bottom line improvement from cutting labor and running leaner teams, has anyone here heard of any large corporations using LLM's as an excuse for headcount reduction yet? In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if this has already played a large behind the scenes role in the layoffs at Google/Microsoft.

I work at a big tech company and there is a complete ban on coding using LLMs. The fear is sending our code for the model to learn in the future. This is also why then hype around GTP4-powered Office is overhyped. Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets Until an on-prem solution is offered, many of these companies won't get anything out of the te…

> Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets

Aren't they already doing this, if your documents are in Sharepoint or Google Drive? I have assumed so, but with no basis

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#76

Another reason to switch from GitHub, I don't want to strengthen this ecosystem. AI-generated description for PR? gg. IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform (but still increasing whatever fake metric [accepted pull requests? stars?] people love to check)

>IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.

Not everyone - me and quite a few others I know tried it and turned it off.

It might be better now they've improved it, but for the sort of work I do (maintain a mature Kotlin codebase) the prior version wasn't a productivity upgrade, it was a downgrade because the type system and IDE generated more accurate suggestions that I don't have to double check for errors. Copilot and ChatGPT both seem to have error rates too high for this sort of work.

I can see though, that once I switch to some other sort of work it might be more valuable.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#77
post #45

Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables). Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely astounding.

I used sympy the other day for the first time. I was blown away by that library I wish I had known about this years ago.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#78
post #67

Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies can overcome that have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem. Credit t…

When you use copilot integrated in the editor, does microsoft collect all source code data on your project or only context used to perform the completions?

Concern over this is the #1 reason I have not yet tried to use Copilot. For my hobby projects I don't care enough to pay for it. And if it's phoning home proprietary code, I can't allow that to happen.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#79

Another reason to switch from GitHub, I don't want to strengthen this ecosystem. AI-generated description for PR? gg. IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform (but still increasing whatever fake metric [accepted pull requests? stars?] people love to check)

>IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.

I have used it for 2 months and disabled it. So there is your exception.

The code it suggests is always highly suspect and writing raw code never was the problem in the first place (for me). I was “discussing” with it for far longer than it was making me “productive”. I give it -5%.

I do however love occasionally using GPT directly for converting some weird list of values to JSON or coming up with plausible test data. Sometimes some text or ideas for emails (especially English, which is not my mother tongue). Sort of a secretary of sorts.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#80
post #47

I am guessing that at some point a class of programming languages will be designed that is both optimal to generate by LLMs and easy to read/understand for humans. Right now most PLs are optimized for writing code by humans.

That is what makes them also optimal for LLMs as is. It would be more efficient to have something that is direct machine code, but LLMs are Large Models right?
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