Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

github.blog

521–530 of 771 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#521

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…

> Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow managing to turn around public opinion about them, it's an all timer

To be fair, it's been almost two decades. I feel like since Ballmer's departure, MS began to turn things around.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#522
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 feel you, in the same time we have been through so many changes. Some people still prefer Vim (at least i do) over full fledge IDE with refactoring helpers. Think of stack overflow, not a habit for everyone. Using macros/snippet to generate code, not that popular. Iterative development in a debugger (think Smalltalk), didn't make printf obsolete. The bottom line is: all software is legacy. Deleting code is the preferred way to debug. Finding the correct abstraction or most simple way to get what you need takes more than the ability to dump code into a computer. Free software didn't ruin the profession, quite the opposite.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#523
post #451
post #407

Earlier 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.

Or $299 a year for the Apple Developer Program just for the great honor to be able to develop for that platform...

$299 a year? It is $99.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#524
post #183

Earlier 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…

Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will cook up this time to ruin your call.

O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has gone downhill at alarming speed.

VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a convincing offer either.

Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average. And don't even get me started on Windows itself.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did individual developers actually pay that? I’ve done quite a bit of development in the MS ecosystem and can’t recall anyone personally paying for MSDN. It was always through their employer that they got access.

Consultants and freelancers for sure did - though again that's technically a business expense.

I definitely had some sort of personal MSDN subscription at one point. Plus compilers and the tike were far from free. I had shelves of books. And computers themselves cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#526
It's kind of mind-blowing to see how well Microsoft has navigated the Next Big Thing (AI) waters compared to Google, whose bread and butter is (was?) AI/ML.

Microsoft seems to have positioned themselves extremely well not only to be a leader in the space moving forward, but also to completely change the space. That's the mark of a great leader and it's exciting to see someone taking the reins whose not afraid to shift a paradigm or two.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#527
post #122

Not very impressed with either Copilot or ChatGPT for programming purposes. I'm sure it will be interesting for some people, but whenever I really feel like I could benefit from an intelligent AI, it usually falls flat. Most commonly, it will just generate calls that don't exist, and if you try to get it to implement them, it will write bullshit. Now the thing is, maybe it really does improve developer productivity b…

I second this. My impressions so far are pretty much the same. Have been trying to get ChatGPT to generate code for some algorithms that are pretty close to well known implementations but with some twists and it absolutely fails no matter how much I tried to provide hints to change the suggestions it gave me. In the end I just went back to hand coding them since it actually saves me the frustration of trying to get C…

Have you tried GPT-4?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it Universal Pet Income. Because at that point won't we just be AI's pets? Not that I'm against it. just call it for what it is.

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

That's completely backwards. Pets don't have to work. Try to convince my cat to do something useful. I'd switch places with him in heartbeat if could. If an AI, or anybody else for that matter, offers to make me their pet without me having to grow fur and losing the opposite thumb (but I still could learn to purr if needed), I'd be even more for it...

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there is 100% feature parity then for all other editors other than VS Code then? YES or NO? Yes. If you had taken the time it took to look up your comment to actually do something productive like looking this up, you'd have probably found it yourself. Yet, here we are. Copilot fully supports JetBrains and NeoVim alongside Code and VS: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/getting-started-with-gith... https://docs.g…

> How, exactly, is providing Jetbrains and Neovim support "re-centralizing everything"? Bait and switch. If it's good enough that Neovim users can't live without it, pulling the plug from Neovim support will result in some subset of users converting to VS Code. Probably won't play out this way with Jetbrains, but editors with smaller following and nobody backing them will most likely suffer this fate. It's happening…

That’s all fair, but that’s not even remotely what their argument was.

Their entire point is that Microsoft is re-centralizing everything by forcing people onto VS Code. Which is something they’re… just not doing.

This is also an optional, paid tool to help when coding. The comparison to Google Talk is IMO not relevant. It’s never going to be “good enough that someone won’t be able to live without it” because it’s at its core a completely optional tool.

If Copilot for NeoVim goes away in 5 years, you can just… stop using it. It’s not like we haven’t developed things without Copilot for decades now.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#530
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…

> Just like we need less manual labor in farms today.

Back of the napkin suggests we have approximately the same amount of manual labor in farms today. The difference is that the same amount of labor today is able to feed a much larger population.

This may simply mean much more software written, not fewer developers.

Post reply on HN