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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

#421

Post by shagie »

gonehome wrote: post #412
shagie wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.

The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?"

When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications.

Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while).

Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple.

Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs.

If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#422

Post by kypro »

Slightly unrelated I suppose, but I'm not sure how I feel about a world where people frequently communicate with each other via AI generated prompts.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something quite creepy about this future we're currently being sold. A world where inauthenticity is the norm, and where everything you read is no longer written by your family, friends and colleagues, but by their AI assistant.

I suppose people have expressed similar feelings about phones and video conferencing, and AI prompts are just the next step of optimising human interaction by removing all the constraints and annoyances that come with interacting with other humans.

Any way I would be interested in hearing how others feel about this. Or if it's more convenient, how you feel as interpreted by your AI assistant. It's all the same after all.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#423

Post by pleb_nz »

0xDEF wrote: post #372
nivenkos wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is a half-measure, we need democratic, communal control of industry.

>we need democratic, communal control of industry That is called socialism. I don't mind socialism and state owned enterprises as long as the force of market competition is still at play. That is the reason state owned enterprises don't suck in China. They have multiple SOEs within the same fields like car manufacturing and telecommunication competing against each other.

The state doesn't own SOE in pure socialism, society and the workers do. This is the idea behind socialism and I don't think anywhere on the planet practises true socialism and instead it's morphed or combined where it is said to be used.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#424

Post by bhj »

ogogmad wrote: post #365
agentultra wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is it absurd? If it writes readable code, you can check it. Writing the first version often takes a long time, so this is clearly a breakthrough.

I would much rather use it as a code review tool than become the code review tool. I suspect the latter will happen at a lot of companies, though.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#425

Post by steve_adams_86 »

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…

> Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning?

In my own project I've got it generating solutions to errors, and if possible, it also generates simple unit tests to validate the fix. What I haven't implemented yet (and likely won't, because Copilot does it now) but I have tested is generating a pull request describing the fix, why it works, and the same for the tests.

> Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a plausible-sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no sense.

With limited scopes, it works quite well. For example, something fails because a DOM reference is undefined in a React component. GPT will add a condition to assert that the reference is present, then generate a simple test which mounts the component with stubbed references that are present or undefined using jsdom. The tests makes sense. A quick scan shows they're sensible, and upon running them, they do work.

I began adding a recursive feature which would automatically debug issues with its own solutions, but it can get a little weird in some cases. Likely due to bad prompting – I haven't dedicated enough time to it. But it can also make it so tests with errors are revised and corrected so they will at least run.

All of that with a coherent explanation of what was changed, why, tests, and why they assert the fix is valid.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be useful? Absolutely. I'm a little sad Copilot makes my project redundant because it was actually very exciting to build. There is real potential here. I started the project in order to learn and validate GPT, and I'm very convinced it has genuine utility and massive potential.

> CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't understand specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It can't take a specification, generate a program, discover new abstractions that make the solution more elegant, and explain its reasoning. It can generate a heck of a lot of code though! Wow! Is it the right code? Maybe!

I think the key is limited scopes. Like with the React component example, the solution is small, easy to reason about, and tedious to resolve yourself. I understand why it doesn't work, I get the error, and spinning up an entire branch and PR to clean up the mistake is a bad use of my time. I don't want Copilot/AI to work magic, but I'm okay with it resolving minor mistakes and misuses of languages and libraries here and there.

I do think it will grow from here to do more and actually be good at it, though.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#426

Post by joeyh »

cess11 wrote: post #383

Why participate in the hype? It's highly likely this is the result of legal having mulled over the Copilot litigation and deciding that it can go either way or worse, so the top layer in MICROS~1 has decided to rush whatever product development they can use the general public for and try to hook as many people as they can to their stochastic parrots. Which they wish to insert into not just every other government mach…

To the extent of claiming that "GitHub Copilot is already writing 46% of code". It smacks of desperation to lie so baldly with statistics.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#427

Post by chatmasta »

brundolf wrote: post #328
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] unt…

That may be true, but for many of Microsoft's flagship open source projects, it is very much about the people. For example, TypeScript has been created and maintained by a relatively stable team of highly proficient developers who have become the face of the project and in many ways the driving force behind its success.

It's important that Microsoft backed them, because it provides a stable environment for the developers to keep working on the project and gives confidence to the community that it's a stable language to adopt. But fundamentally it's the people who are important.

In recent years, Microsoft has shown there can be real upside to corporate-driven open source, especially when it has proper buy-in from management and usage throughout the organization (e.g. VSCode is developed in relative lockstep with TypeScript, and both projects benefit from that relationship).

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#428

Post by polyterative »

adzm wrote: post #294
nlh wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be missing the intended audience for this — it’s aimed at folks who are visually or otherwise impaired and cannot type using a traditional keyboard/input device.

The accessibility potential of AI is vastly understated. I expect this to fill that niche perfectly. The difference would be life changing for millions of people.

I suffer from chronic pain in my hands because I have been programming non stop for the past five years. this really gives me hope to recover without losing my job

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#429

Post by belorn »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #116
tarruda wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When you sign up for CoPilot, there's a settings section on Github for it. One option you can toggle is "Allow GitHub to use my code snippets for product improvements *". Context still needs to be processed, so surrounding line, block, and a couple open tabs gets piped into the prompt. And here's a quote from the privacy page. > Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub Copilot may also collect and retai…

What is the default?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#430

Post by qgin »

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.

It's definitely not considered high status here to be positive about anything
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