Why people will upload their code to GitHub (if they are working in some state-of-the-art tech) is beyond me, you will be easily replaced by microsoft and they will say that was a product generated by gpt, see what happened in Amazon store with the popular products
GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
441–450 of 771 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Concern over this is the #1 reason I have not yet tried to use Copilot. For my hobby projects I don't care enough to pay for it. And if it's phoning home proprietary code, I can't allow that to happen.
I use GitHub so not really a concern for me, they have my code already.
IIRC they didn’t train on private repos though, so using copilot in a private (github) repo will potentially open up your proprietary code to being used in that way.
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also another risk, which is that copilot generated code may not be copyrightable[1]. I'm not sure how that would play out as part of a large codebase, but something to watch closely. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-so... > The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do no…
Isn’t software copyrighted as a whole, not line-by-line?
As the linked article describe it:
"the office said copyright protection depends on whether AI's contributions are "the result of mechanical reproduction," such as in response to text prompts, or if they reflect the author's "own mental conception.""
So if we take that into software development, the text input that the developer gave copilot may be protected under copyright but the output of copilot may not.
If the developer arrange or modify the output, then those arrangements and modifications can also be protected under copyright.
To me that means that during copyright cases there will be a much bigger burden on the plaintiff to prove that they own copyright in any specific situation, and that the infringement is done on those parts that is covered by copyright and not just the output of the copilot algorithm. Simply claiming authorship to all the code will no longer be enough.
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#444Scary. 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…
Translating ideas into code has never been the bottle neck in software development. Well, not in web dev anyways. Developers spend very little time writing code compared to reading. You still need all your expertise to guide copilot & evaluate its suggestions.
I see copilot as just another productivity tool. Combined with ChatGPT it may save a few roundtrips to Stack Overflow too.
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use. I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that…
They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not…
> integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart
Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS lock in most people still need office to deal with interop.
Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with a free feature from a product suite most companies are forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they struggle at handling acquisitions.
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D
or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying out linux distributions in the past like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc. Basically they have accepted that windows server have failed and their server l…
> Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc.
I develop for Linux but I use WSL only indirectly through Docker Desktop.
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
The best was when you knew somebody who worked at microsoft and could get the company discount!
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#448Scary. 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 have the opposite feeling by watching their mini video demos. All I see is: engineers blindly commiting and pushing what copilots spits at them. Not only that, also the PRs descriptions/comments will all be one TAB+enter away. That means many things will go wrong and more engineering time will be spent reviewing nice-looking code good that only does what it's supposed to do in 80% of the cases. Meaning, it's gonna be hard to debug those 20% remaining cases.
Besides, coding is probably the least of my problems. Dealing with people is harder. AI can help there as well, but ultimately people like to interact with people (see the whole trend about RTO)... we cannot stand each other faces via Zoom => we are not gonna stand talking to an AI.
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#449Earlier 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
Well productivity is up 240% since the 1950s. So due to a single person being more efficient than 2 in 1950 and the 43.5 million workforce we can extrapolate that no more than 20 million workers will be needed nowadays.
Except in 2020 there were 152 million employed americans, with a productivity 2.4x higher than 1950s, or a cummulative workforce of 365 million 1950 americans working. And somehow they all had stuf to do and work on
Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mid level engineers will come from building something like GitHub, Netflix or Gmail over the weekend using powerful AI. The skills of current senior engineers will be much easier to gain since the feedback loop for software architecture and design will be down to hours instead of quarters. Being able to architect massive software systems well, will be expected from a new graduates. The role of junior software develop…
Senior developer aren't senior because they can type code very fast. They are senior because they can take on responsibilities and make decisions. A junior that types code very fast is a junior that types code very fast.
I think we’re in agreement.
The key here is what are you taking responsibilities and decisions for. Senior engineers take decisions which consequences will be apparent in a year or two. If productivity increases to the point where features that take months to deliver take days, the decisions made _currently_ by senior engineers can be taken by fresh graduates.
There’re still going to be senior roles, but their scope will be much bigger and expertise sought will be different than what senior engineers do currently. No one will hire a senior engineer just because they can architect and deliver a scalable SaaS product on a short timeline.
Engineers who learn and adapt will be fine. Engineers who dropped learning the moment they graduated from college… not so much.