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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

#431

Post by mrinterweb »

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…

I use copilot, and I feel that it is useful about 40% of the time. Most of the time the suggestions are not what I'm going for, sometime the suggestions are close or help me think through the solution easier, and occasionally spot on and I can tab complete the code.

I've noticed that the suggestion quality/usefulness varies considerably between projects and programming languages. For a self-contained bash script, it is incredibly useful. For a rails application, less so.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#432

Post by istjohn »

pleb_nz wrote: post #418
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People said the same thing about Excel in the 80s and 90s. There are more accountants now than then. There might be more programmers out of this developments than before. It just will lower the barrier of entry, and increase productivity. Like most tools

Companies are there to make money. If the same job currently dinner by 5 people can now be done by 3, and it means more profit for shareholders, what do you think shareholder will want? While profit is the main driver, it'll mean smaller teams Not today, not with current tech, maybe in the near future though

But just like building more roads induces more demand by making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps one day soon it will be affordable for every company of every size to have a fully custom ERP solution instead of shoehorning their business processes into Salesforce or the like. Perhaps every family will have a custom app managing their household's smart home appliances, childrens' allowances, autonomous vehicles, home maintenance, bill payment, child homework tracking, etc. in an integrated system.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#433

Post by maicro »

kypro wrote: post #422

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 assis…

All joking below aside, I'm not sure how I feel about this either, though I also haven't been following things too closely yet. The below is the first "real" use I've made of an AI to write a response for me.

I guess there are a couple different layers there. On the one hand, the technology/medium being used has always caused us to adjust our communication style - we communicate differently if it's a letter that will take weeks to deliver and weeks more to receive a response, vs. a hasty limited text message, vs. an email, vs. a face to face conversation with no time constraints, etc. So I guess that as long as the person sending the message agrees that it conveys what they want, having an AI draft it isn't terrible...

--- Me: Write a response agreeing to this message: [contents of your post, without correcting the original typo thus explaining paragraph 4] Bard draft 3: I agree that there is something quite creepy about a world where people frequently communicate with each other via AI generated prompts. It seems like a world where authenticity is lost and where everything is just a simulation.

I can see how people might be attracted to AI prompts because they are convenient and efficient. But I think there is also a risk that people will become too reliant on AI and that they will lose the ability to connect with each other on a deeper level.

I think it is important to maintain a balance between using AI and interacting with other humans. AI can be a tool that helps us to communicate more effectively, but it should not be a replacement for human connection.

I have not been interrupted by my AI assistant, but I can imagine that it would be annoying if it was constantly trying to interject or offer unsolicited advice. I think it is important for AI assistants to be respectful of human privacy and to only provide information when it is asked for.

Overall, I think that AI has the potential to be a powerful tool for communication, but it is important to use it responsibly and to be aware of its limitations.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#434

Post by xxpor »

paxys wrote: post #407
pastor_bob wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50+ in monthly subscription fees? BRB buying some MSFT

We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation of developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN subscription just as the base cost for doing business. This is what Microsoft does.

the MSDN subscription was amazing for me to piggyback off of my dad as a kid though. access to essentially everything in MS's current and back catalog that was even remotely related to dev work, including OSes :)

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#435

Post by ComplexSystems »

There has been this bug with Copilot in VSCode for just about forever where it only suggests one line at a time. People have been asking for this to be fixed for months and months: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522

Do the people here in the comments section, who seem to be getting good results with Copilot, somehow not have this issue? If so, what is the workaround?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#436

Post by adambard »

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…

Copilot user here.

Copilot (the existing gpt-3 one) definitely helps at writing unit tests. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't nail it, but one thing it can do reliably is to repeat a pattern, and I don't know about you, but my unit tests tend to repeat the same pattern (with some tweaks to test this-or-that-case). Quite often it infers the correct change from the name I gave the test method, but even if it doesn't it'll write a 90% correct case for me. I imagine the GPT-4 version will do more of the same with better results.

It cannot replace reasoning, but it can augment it (by suggesting patterns and implementations from its latent space that I hadn't thought of), and worst case it can replace quite a bit of typing.

Long-term, it remains to be seen how far bigger/better/stronger LLMs can push the illusion of rationality. In many fields, they may be able to simply build their ability to pattern-match to beyond some threshold of usefulness. Perhaps (some subset of) programming will be one of them.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#437

Post by sh4rks »

bhj wrote: post #424
ogogmad wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? When the latter is just as effective but also much quicker?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#438

Post by klibertp »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #229
ilovetux wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, but then they made PowerShell, which was at the time seriously the most advanced shell and shell scripting language out there. PS got pretty mixed reactions because it was different than BASH, but the idea of typed pipes of objects instead of one-size-fits-all streams of lines of text was (and still is) powerful. (The syntax could be a little less verbose though)

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#439

Post by chatmasta »

nixarn wrote: post #371
piokoch wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Have you tried co-pilot? I don't want to code without it. Saves so much time and produces good results, instead of searching for answers online, which isn't easy as you get into ad filled sites, find shitty Stack Overflow answers and webpages with outdated docs and examples. Two examples from this week. Formatting dates in javascript, I had a datetime string and I wanted to show it as YY-MM-DD HH:MM for our internal…

> Have you tried co-pilot?

I wanted to try co-pilot, but noped out when I saw it required a subscription. I thought it was in some kind of beta and would still be free. Is there a way to try it without signing up for a subscription?

My general worry is about becoming personally dependent on a paid tool just to do basic programming work.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#440

Post by DeathArrow »

ignoramous wrote: post #250
daydream wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. B…

> GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, including their XBox division.

> That said, except for OS and Browsers

Windows is not negligible.

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