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Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

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Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#71
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s coming up: https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x

I'm excited to continue to be disappointed.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#72
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,…

Same. It’s funny reading comments on here. Even gpt4 I think is just ok. Maybe the people who see these huge increases are more junior?

I'm definitely not more junior, and I'm seeing massive productivity improvement from Copilot and GPT-4 - but I'm finding it takes a lot of expertise to get the best results, both in my ability as a programmer and in terms of knowing the best ways to use the AI tools.

Learning how to get the best results of them takes a great deal of experimentation.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#73
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to rip off people's labor? What's stopping you from incorporating it into your own work?

I mean: Compile already working code, slap my logo on it, spend millions of dollars marketing it with young good looking adults subliminally letting you know that you aren't cool unless you give me money.

You can do that with GPL code.

Make your logo a trademark so that others can't use it. It doesn't violate GPL because trademarks are not copyright, and make sure your marketing campaign drives home the point that you are the real deal and all others are ripoffs (including the original).

I mean, people manage to sell bottled water to people who have perfectly good and 1000 times cheaper tap water.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#74

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…

GPT-4 is a much much better translator than Google Translate and the like. You should absolutely be using GPT for translations especially for distant language pairs that quickly devolve into nonsense with Google Translate, Deepl etc

https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/13lkh6c/gpt4_is_far...

https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#75

Okay, but how much are they charging? It's getting really annoying how many sites force you into a trial just to find out how much it'll cost when it ends. EDIT: Is this even positioned to compete with Copilot? What editors are there plugins for? There is surprisingly little information on the site.

Code Suggestions can be used in GitLab's Web IDE and VS Code and Microsoft Visual Studio when you have the corresponding GitLab extension installed: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/code_sugg...

We offer experimental support for additional editors: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/code_sugg...

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#76

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…

The quality difference is substantial. I don't care if it's wasteful to use something that has many uses for a supposedly narrow task (although I don't see translation as a particularly narrow task anymore than I see writing as a narrow task). I would gladly waste untold trillions of floating point operations for a 1% increase in translation quality. From my experiments, though, it's much higher than 1% increase in translation quality. And regardless of how wasteful the compute is, it's actually cheaper in terms of dollars. Using GPT-3.5 to translate Korean to English would cost about $11 per million words, based on the average characters per token of the small sample of text I gave it. DeepL (the best translation service I could find) costs $25 per million characters, or for my sample text, about $64 per million words. At $11 per million words I can have GPT-3.5 perform multiple translation passes and use it's own judgment to pick the best translation and STILL save money compared to DeepL.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#77
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..

It's okay that it didn't fit well into your workflow, but accusing those who use it of cargo culting isn't constructive. Other people don't have the same workflow as you do, and as simonw noted above, some of us actually adjusted our workflow to get the most out of Copilot.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#78
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even MIT licensed code requires you to preserve the copyright and permission notice. If a human did what these language models are doing (output derivative works with the copyright and license stripped), it would be a license violation. When humans want to create a new implementation with clean IP, they have one team study the IP-encumbered code and write a spec, then a different team writes a new implementation acco…

Has anyone been able to create a prompt that GPT4 replies to with copyrighted content (or content extremely similar to the original content)? I'm curious how easy or difficult it is to get GPT to spit out content (code or text) that could be considered obvious infringement. Tempted to give it half of some closed-source or restrictive licensed code to see if it auto-completes the other half in a manner that is obvious…

I can reproduce when prompted all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, but my doing so isn’t automatically copyright infringement. It would depend on where, when, how, in front of what audience, and to what purpose I was reciting them as to whether it was irrelevant to copyright law, protected under some copyright use case, civilly infringing, or criminally infringing copyright abuse.

The same applies to GPT. It could reproduce Bohemian Rhapsody lyrics in the course of answering questions and there’s no automatic breach of copyright that’s taking place. It’s okay for GPT to know how a well known song goes.

If copilot ‘knows how some code goes’ and is able to complete it, how is that any different?

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#79
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,…

Same. It’s funny reading comments on here. Even gpt4 I think is just ok. Maybe the people who see these huge increases are more junior?

I've been working as a programmer for almost 15 years and I work on fairly touchy (perf, reliability-wise) networked systems in a programming language with a good type system. I find Copilot to be very valuable even if I have to give it a little bump or edit what it produces sometimes.

Re: Gitlab’s AI-assisted code suggestions

#80
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean: Compile already working code, slap my logo on it, spend millions of dollars marketing it with young good looking adults subliminally letting you know that you aren't cool unless you give me money.

At least you’re honest!

Did you miss that they're being sarcastic? ;)
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