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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

#151

Post by thebackup »

jchw wrote: post #122

Not very impressed with either Copilot or ChatGPT for programming purposes. I'm sure it will be interesting for some people, but whenever I really feel like I could benefit from an intelligent AI, it usually falls flat. Most commonly, it will just generate calls that don't exist, and if you try to get it to implement them, it will write bullshit. Now the thing is, maybe it really does improve developer productivity b…

I second this. My impressions so far are pretty much the same. Have been trying to get ChatGPT to generate code for some algorithms that are pretty close to well known implementations but with some twists and it absolutely fails no matter how much I tried to provide hints to change the suggestions it gave me. In the end I just went back to hand coding them since it actually saves me the frustration of trying to get ChatGPT to bend in the direction I need.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#152

Post by acdha »

Kiro wrote: post #107
vintermann wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You're being too kind on the HN crowd. We're usually extremely pessimistic for no good reason and useless at predicting things. It seems like we just love to hate on stuff.

People here love hot takes, especially if it stakes out a contrarian position as the smart one. Criticizing the big players is just too easy to do that with since it doesn’t require you to build an alternative and is often right in some aspect so you can get validation.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#153

Post by vintermann »

retrocryptid wrote: post #111
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.

So it's on par with a junior software engineer?

Sure. One that never gets tired, never gets frustrated, always does his best, and has a pause button.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#154

Post by wseqyrku »

tarruda wrote: post #67
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…

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?

Same is true if you use `git push` in which case all the code is transferred through the wire and is collected by GitHub which may or may not be desirable.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#155

Post by yodon »

After finally switching to a Mac full time last year for the better developer experience (bash command line without the WSL disk access slowness), I now feel like I need to install Parallels to get the better developer experience (Copilot and Copilot X under Windows)

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#156

Post by kreas »

Kiro wrote: post #107
vintermann wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You're being too kind on the HN crowd. We're usually extremely pessimistic for no good reason and useless at predicting things. It seems like we just love to hate on stuff.

I would say this about most developers not just HN. It took years for me to break that mindset.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#157

Post by erikstarck »

ilovetux wrote: post #131
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…

> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class. I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source,…

"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

He wasn't kidding.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#158

Post by tootie »

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'm a fanboy of heavy IDEs with big fat debuggers like JetBrains tools. It's ironic that Microsoft who used to dominate that niche, is now dominating with a glorified text editor.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#159

Post by _piif »

rvz wrote: post #120
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…

[flagged]

Aren't lock-ins into their own respective ecosystem what every tech giant is striving for? Don't see how that behavior is Microsoft-exclusive necessarily.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#160

Post by ilaksh »

m_ke wrote: post #41

People should keep in mind that these human in the loop AI systems are built to learn from the human until they’re good enough to replace them.

I am building my system https://aidev.codes and adding virtual servers to allow back-end code with the explicit goal of selling this service to end-users as an alternative to hiring software engineers. In the niche I have previously been working in, there is a huge demand to build fairly complex integrations (such as with my other service) without an adequate budget to hire a person.

I already know at least one designer who previously would have considered hiring me for something but now has explained that they are achieving tasks with ChatGPT.

Especially when you start to understand the reasoning ability of GPT-4, what the 32k context window and ability to understand images means, any software engineer who thinks their job will remain safe is in complete denial.

In fact, with this release you will start to see quite a lot of non-programmers start using Github. Within X months or a few years, its quite feasible that Microsoft will have a software engineer built into Windows.

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