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Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

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Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#51

Post by Tronno »

phil917 wrote: post #46

I just canceled my Copilot subscription last night. I definitely never saw the productivity boost that I’ve seen so many claim. I actually feel like the suggestions seemed to get worse during my month of using it for some reason. Towards the end, it started suggesting these large blocks of code (another issue I had with the interface as well) which were very not relevant to what I was attempting to write. All in all,…

My experience was very similar. Copilot became a sort of improved autocomplete, that would save copy/pasting repeated variable names into tests, logs, etc, but offered no other significant improvements. Its suggestions were frequently incorrect, often not obviously so.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#52

Post by elforce002 »

dnsmichi wrote: post #47
coolgoose wrote: post #40

So whos code is used for training?

GitLab team member here. The training data is publicly documented, and AI features are built with privacy first. For all URLs please check my comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526159

Nice. I really like the transparency. That's one of the main reasons I didn't use github copilot.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#53

Post by john_cogs »

ases wrote: post #4

All the code examples on this page are doubling any brackets ([], {}, ()). How have they managed that? Not a fantastic first impression of its capabilities...

GitLab team member here. Thanks for flagging.

Our web team is working to resolve this issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/b...

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#54

Post by _ea1k »

phil917 wrote: post #46

I just canceled my Copilot subscription last night. I definitely never saw the productivity boost that I’ve seen so many claim. I actually feel like the suggestions seemed to get worse during my month of using it for some reason. Towards the end, it started suggesting these large blocks of code (another issue I had with the interface as well) which were very not relevant to what I was attempting to write. All in all,…

TBH, using this as a fancy smart autocomplete doesn't seem like the best idea. I can't believe that I'm suggesting something that sounds like Clippy... but...

It really needs to be something where you can rattle off a list of requirements and have it build the code for you. The code context is necessary, but not sufficient.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#55

Post by senko »

nonameiguess wrote: post #19
lucasmullens wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using LLMs to do machine translation is a terrible waste of resources. Could you elaborate on that? LLMs seem perfectly suited for language tasks like translation. They don't seem particularly expensive either, especially compared to hiring a person.

There are already machine-translation services trained and created specifically for that purpose. While it's an amazing realization that LLMs can do this and do it pretty well without having to be trained specifically for this one purpose, training something to do literally all text generation tasks is expensive compared to training something specifically to do language to language translation. For a maybe more obvio…

LLMs are the machine-translation services created specifically for that purpose[0], it just turned out they're very good at many other things!

Your analogy would be like saying why use a computer to multiply numbers if you can calculate them using calculator, which is much cheaper. Sure, but if you already have a computer, no need to use a dedicated calculator as wel.

[0] https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/annotated-transformer/#results

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#56

Post by OkayPhysicist »

cj wrote: post #44
meowface wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same argument could be used to defend image generation models. (And, personally, I'm favorable to that argument for both.)

It's a blurry line, I think. Imagine a prompt "Photo of person, Shutterstock ID 132456, with blue eyes instead of brown eyes, watermark removed" If the prompt returns Shutterstock photo #123456 without the watermark (and with the different color eyes) but otherwise a near identical photo, I think most people would agree the output shouldn't be free to use without buying the original photo license from shutterstock. T…

I feel like those kinds of issues could be easily solved in court: "What prompt was used to generate this image? Oh, shameless copyright laundering? Rule in favor of the plaintiff. Case Dismissed"

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#58

Post by benabbottnz »

Tronno wrote: post #51
phil917 wrote: post #46

I just canceled my Copilot subscription last night. I definitely never saw the productivity boost that I’ve seen so many claim. I actually feel like the suggestions seemed to get worse during my month of using it for some reason. Towards the end, it started suggesting these large blocks of code (another issue I had with the interface as well) which were very not relevant to what I was attempting to write. All in all,…

My experience was very similar. Copilot became a sort of improved autocomplete, that would save copy/pasting repeated variable names into tests, logs, etc, but offered no other significant improvements. Its suggestions were frequently incorrect, often not obviously so.

> that would save copy/pasting repeated variable names into tests, logs, etc

This is all it takes for me to get value out of my subscription. It's saving me time by anticipating my next test / block of code based on what I've previously written, and that saved time really adds up.

Sure it's not "Jesus take the wheel" level AI yet, but time is money, and so is my sanity.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#59

Post by dnsmichi »

elforce002 wrote: post #52
dnsmichi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab team member here. The training data is publicly documented, and AI features are built with privacy first. For all URLs please check my comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526159

Nice. I really like the transparency. That's one of the main reasons I didn't use github copilot.

Thanks!

AI for self-managed instances is also focussing on privacy, while bringing more efficiency to teams. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/06/15/self-managed-suppor...

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#60

Post by roflyear »

phil917 wrote: post #46

I just canceled my Copilot subscription last night. I definitely never saw the productivity boost that I’ve seen so many claim. I actually feel like the suggestions seemed to get worse during my month of using it for some reason. Towards the end, it started suggesting these large blocks of code (another issue I had with the interface as well) which were very not relevant to what I was attempting to write. All in all,…

People love to cargo-cult. It's wild. It was okay but I'm happier with ChatGPT for one-off things I don't know how to do "give me a sql query that does this obscure thing" etc..
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