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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

#321

Post by nicky0 »

Vespasian wrote: post #255
nicky0 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

They have a limited trial or company memberships afaik. It costs 10$/month 100$/year for individual users.

~~That's weird because I don't pay anything.~~

EDIT: GitHub Copilot is free to use for verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#322

Post by deeviant »

agentultra wrote: post #265
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…

It feels absurd. A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate writing tests! Yay! Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense and specify the…

Based on your statement, I feel you haven't used GPT based code much. The code it generates is generally beautifully organized and commented.

Sure, it can be flat out wrong, but it is always eminently readable. Self-documentating code with clean comments, far above the standard I see on average human code. That's about as good as "explaining it's reasoning" as you get.

Also, you can literally ask chatGPT to explain the code, line by the line, and it will. So there's that.

Is it ready now? Certainly not if it will be expected to the do the entire job of a SWE. But it is already extremely useful, especially to less experienced devs as both a production for specific tasks and as learning tool. And it will only get better.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#323

Post by shagie »

gonehome wrote: post #242
zer00eyz wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"

Siri still sucks?

Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into.

The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included).

However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much.

Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone.

This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#324

Post by electrondood »

> GitHub Copilot Chat builds upon the work that OpenAI and Microsoft have done with ChatGPT and the new Bing.

Cool, so it can sass me and threaten to stop responding when it doesn't like my tone?

Whatever PM decided that tools need to have a personality should be fired and blacklisted.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#325

Post by ddren »

drdrek wrote: post #167

I would love to hear from other people here but I tried it for a while and dropped my subscription. For short things it was nice, but the larger the suggestion the worst it got. I found myself constantly mentally debugging the output it suggested, I do not know if it was faster but I was mentally exhausted by it, unable to go for long periods of time. Dumb code completion is predictable, I know I'll need to press dow…

I used it for a while but I found that too many suggestions are worthless and having to consider them makes me waste more time than just writing the code myself. For the things that it is useful like snippets, I found that ChatGPT is better anyway.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#326

Post by symlinkk »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #309
moneywoes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems strange with all the layoffs

Sometimes thinking that you are understaffed is actually caused by being overstaffed. The reason is that having a lot of people introduces tons of overheads and coordination costs, that reduce your time for your main work.

Lol the cope here is unbelievable. Let me guess, the people that are “just overhead” and “reduces time for main work” are everyone else, not you, right?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#327

Post by cyrusatjam »

basch wrote: post #288
madeofpalk wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I raised this concern before about how unclear this is and the concern was pretty much dismissed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539150 "Techies" often lament about how silly users are about falling for phishing tricks, but then they also routinely make it so difficult to determine what's legit from what's fake.

>routinely make it so difficult to determine what's legit from what's fake. Like the amount of times on my phone where I get prompted for a username and password different from the app im in (to make some kind of connection) but then suppress the url from visibility. An astoundingly poor design choice that has proliferated into every single variant of that interface design flow.

Not to mention, the app you're in can inject JS into the page it renders. Best practice is to open in your default browser and then allow the deeplink in the callback_uri to return you back to the original app

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#328

Post by brundolf »

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…

Public companies aren't people. It doesn't make sense to trust them, but it also doesn't make sense to hold a grudge against them. They act in a way that fits the moment. Right now, Microsoft seems to be in a "build good tools" moment. If they get too dominant they could re-enter an "abuse power" moment. But that would be because it's what they think is in their best interest, not because "Microsoft is [uniquely] untrustworthy"

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#329

Post by waboremo »

agentultra wrote: post #265
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…

It feels absurd. A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate writing tests! Yay! Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense and specify the…

I'm not sure this works out in the long run. We're currently using extremely generalized tools here, it's difficult for it to establish any "reasoning" when it does not have a "history" to rely on so to speak. Which is where our reasoning stems from, history. We opt for Solution B because we previously tested Solution A in another similar project.

I just don't see this as being a barrier for too long. Not when more companies opt into training data internally.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#330

Post by ensignavenger »

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,…

At this point, it seems MS has almost as many years of being neutral-supportive of FOSS as they have of being against it.
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