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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

#221

Post by squeegmeister »

Someone1234 wrote: post #149

Just to save others from wasting their time (and free trial): The Copilot extension in full Visual Studio (i.e. NOT VS Code) is super terrible, broken, and buggy. It is so bad it is worse than nothing (literally, it can make Visual Studio lag out). But don't take my word for it, read the reviews: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c... This is the polar opposite of VS Code where it works super…

I haven't noticed any issues with it, other than it occasionally just not chiming in. I'm using vs2022 on windows fwiw.

That said, it wouldn't surprise me if vscode is getting preferential treatment

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#222

Post by scandox »

brookst wrote: post #90
toomuchtodo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think people understand the hockey stick we’re on. Don’t focus too hard on the failings, look at the scaffolding being rapidly deployed that makes the iterative improvement process exceptionally tight.

It’s the same with every paradigm shift. “GUIs are pretty but slow. Ok, they’re faster but just glued on to CLI programs. Ok, they’re native but less information dense. Ok, that’s a good thing, but…” “The internet is nice but you still have to go to the store/bank. Ok, you can shop/bank online but you still have to call airlines. Ok you can buy airline tickets but you still have to go to the library to research. Ok,…

Your overall point is reasonable, but to take your point about GUIs...we actually lost an awful lot moving from text based interfaces going to GUI. We got universal adoption and more or less zero training required...but we got very slow and inflexible interfaces.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#223

Post by nicky0 »

unshavedyak wrote: post #214
programmarchy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth it even for hobby projects, imo. It reduces the time spent on mundane tasks and allows you to think at a higher level and just move faster. Maybe you achieve a level of zen from implementing utility level code, similar to how some people might still write assembly code, but otherwise it’s a valuable tool/skill to learn. Tangentially, I think there’s some fear associated with adopting AI tools, perhaps beca…

Can you describe how you use it? I struggle to imagine how it would even be done. Ie do you write prompts? Just code as normal but frequently hit a "copilot" button? etc Though i do wonder if it'll improve my ability to read code. PRs are a pain because i find it easier to write than read. I'd pay for Copilot in a heartbeat if it was good at spotting PR errors/etc.

Just type your code in the editor. And it offers auto complete suggestions. Sometimes it will complete the entire function based on the function name or a comment. Sometimes it'll just guess the function you want to write, without you typing anything at all. (Turns out a lot of code is rather predictable).

By experience though it’s best to go line by line rather than accepting whole function autcompletes.

For me, I found incredibly useful for generating test cases. It will type out test functions for various conditions, stuff that is normal really tedious to code.

Sometimes is eerie, how how well it knows exactly what next line should be. Countless times it filled in an important detail that I hadn’t thought of.

It’s not perfect at all, sometimes it goes off on tangents or writes incorrect code.

I don’t think you even have to pay for copilot. At least it’s free for me.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#224

Post by piokoch »

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…

Who will verify that those data are correct? What if majority of the code sucks, what if majority code uses "best practices" that are no longer valid - think of many GoF Java "patterns" that are now considered to be code smell?

AI will not invent anything, it will effectively reproduce mistakes made by others.

The process of code writing is such a small part of the whole IT project, that shortening of time spent on writing code does not matter in practice.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#225

Post by noworriesnate »

This will be a hard moat for GitLab to cross. There is so much value to having open source models though that I wonder if we could come up with a project on the scale of Linux that is for open source machine learning models. So many companies could benefit from it.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#227

Post by RivieraKid »

mkaic wrote: post #213
RivieraKid wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the AI will work for us, it's our pet.

Why would something smarter than us be our pet?

Because we will have full control over it. It will do what we ask. The AI has no motivation or personality, it's just a tool used by humans.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#228

Post by golergka »

fn-mote wrote: post #171
hu3 wrote: post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

> For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we consider quality. Now maybe…

> Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites

They used to, 10 to 15 years ago. Now they just hire a SMM specialist to set up their Instagram account. Why would they bother with a website?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#229

Post by PurpleRamen »

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,…

Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much as possible for admins and devs.

Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of this, just more dev-friendly.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#230

Post by snickerbockers »

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…

> They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS.

I really hope they get reamed in court over this. When Microsoft's servers running Microsoft's AI transmit somebody else's code covered under GPL (or any other FOSS license with attribution, like BSD) to a third party without replicating the license statement or even providing proper attribution, Microsoft has absolutely violated the GPL. They can't get around that by waving a paper that the third party signed.

This reminds me of those dump trucks you see with stickers saying that the owner will not pay for damage caused by falling debris. Absolutely laughable attempt at dodging legal responsibility for an act that they are absolutely responsible for.

I'm glad execs like you are taking this seriously instead of going along with M$' flagrant disregard for FOSS licenses. I hope there's a lot more corporate pushback for trying to sell a tool that can poison their customers' codebase with code stolen from copyleft projects.

As an aside, I find it very telling that they trained this on other peoples' code instead of their flagship products like Windows, Office, VS, etc. I also remember seeing a few years ago an article on HN about M$ not allowing its employees to use github internally because they were worried about accidental IP leaks; I wonder if this is because they were already planning copilot?

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