GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#91

Post by retrocryptid » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:43 PM UTC

envy2 wrote: post #66

w-m wrote: post #33

I tried getting myself on the CLI waitlist ( https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli/ ). That they use ffmpeg as the example hits a huge pain point for me. But: "Next Waitlist by GitHub Next would like permission to: Act on your behalf Not owned or operated by GitHub" Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give permissions to an app to act in my account? An app that isn't even officially from GitHub? Th…

I think this is just a standard API access prompt. The GitHub Next page clearly indicates it is (C) GitHub Inc and the blog post makes GitHub's control clear.

Well. That's what the AI wants you to believe.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#92

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:43 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #70

erdaniels wrote: post #14

How have people been thinking about licensing and attribution when it comes to using AI code assistance tools like this? In my personal work, I'm avoiding it since being trained on "publicly available code from GitHub" feels too risky for me if I were to say accidentally pull in GPL code to a private project.

I honestly don't think it's going to be a risk for developers. I don't believe you can accurately run attribution on any of the source code generated for you, right? If so, that should give you plausible deniability, while putting all the liability on Github's shoulders. It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate licenses in their own model.

> It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate licenses in their own model.

Maybe morally that's true. But who do you think is easier to sue? Small startup using copilot or Microsoft?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#93

Post by macNchz » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

w-m wrote: post #33

I tried getting myself on the CLI waitlist ( https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli/ ). That they use ffmpeg as the example hits a huge pain point for me. But: "Next Waitlist by GitHub Next would like permission to: Act on your behalf Not owned or operated by GitHub" Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give permissions to an app to act in my account? An app that isn't even officially from GitHub? Th…

It's interesting because the Copilot for PRs preview uses an app that does say "Owned and Operated by GitHub". Probably just an oversight, but I'm pretty sensitive about what access GitHub apps have, especially given the list of major attacks that have happened in recent years that were initiated by someone sneaking malicious payloads in somewhere along the development pipeline.

Curious why they'd use a totally different domain in the first place–how much access do you think you could get to private repos just by cloning that page onto githubfuture.com (available) and spearphishing interesting targets?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#94

Post by marginalia_nu » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

_bohm wrote: post #16

BratishkaErik wrote: post #8

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)

Could you explain your reasoning? You expect that these tools will create more work to get from point A to point B rather than less?

It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect just that. Overall, producing code quicker is probably not something we need. It's plenty quick to type code. What's slow is finding good designs. I think more often than not, we jump to the coding part too early and build things too soon. This creates problems that are hard to fix after the fact.

The easier it is to produce code, the more code will be produced. The more code is produced, the more complex and short-sighted the architecture will be as a result.

This is much older than AI. You can take a one-person task that takes two weeks to perform, assign it to a five person team, and they'll solve it by producing 25 times the code.

We create abstractions to cope with the noise of a large code base, but in doing so, we also create a noisier and more complex code base that needs more abstractions.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#95

Post by dagw » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

BratishkaErik wrote: post #36

sebzim4500 wrote: post #12

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...

Copilot lets me get the 'boring' scaffolding work out of the way quicker so I can spend more time on the parts of my project that actually are hard and 'unique'.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#96

Post by efields » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #71

ren_engineer wrote: post #13

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].

The sublime plugin for Copilot works well enough already. I'm sure Copilot X will be something you can fold into any editor. I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the UX lag in VSCode

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#97

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #40

erdaniels wrote: post #14

How have people been thinking about licensing and attribution when it comes to using AI code assistance tools like this? In my personal work, I'm avoiding it since being trained on "publicly available code from GitHub" feels too risky for me if I were to say accidentally pull in GPL code to a private project.

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…

There's also another risk, which is that copilot generated code may not be copyrightable[1]. I'm not sure how that would play out as part of a large codebase, but something to watch closely.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-so...

> The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do not create copyrightable work.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#98

Post by vintermann » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

elil17 wrote: 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.

Yes, I feel like it is much better than HN has given it credit for in earlier discussions. But that may be influenced by the fact that I only started using it relatively recently; I've probably mostly seen it at its best.

Also, I have no illusions about how language models work. I notice that the sloppier the code I'm editing, the worse suggestions (and dumber comments) it suggests. If I start writing a comment and copilot immediately suggests "TODO: delete this", that's a better indicator of poor code health than any metric I know about. It's not a magic wand, but it can be extremely useful if you use it sensibly.

Then again, you can just decide to forget how it works and ask it questions directly in comments:

    // Hey GPT3, write me a poem
    // ANSWER:

It's not sensible, but it's great fun.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#99

Post by simonvc » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

yanis_t wrote: post #44

On the negative side, no mentions of the Vim plugin update so far.

vim mode in vscode is good enough honestly. i've not booted vim for anything other than quick hacks in ages.

99% of the time i `code` now instead of `vi`

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#100

Post by brookst » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

eterps wrote: 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.

Do we even need such a language, beyond just English / other human languages?

IMO we’ll see LLM interpreters / compilers where the spec is the code, and whatever the LLM does in the background is opaque to the “programmer”.