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GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

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Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#51

Post by PoignardAzur »

I think Microsoft is going the wrong direction with Copilot (though it's a reasonable direction given their incentives).

Right now Copilot is terrible at large changes to complex codebases; the larger and more complex, the worse. But it's great at suggesting very short snippets that guess exactly what you were in the middle of writing and write it for you.

I wish Copilot focused more on the user experience at the small scale: faster and smaller completions, using the semantic info provided by the IDE, new affordances besides "press tab to complete" (I'd love a way for Copilot to tell me "your cursor should jump to this line next"), etc. This whole focus on making the AI do the entire end-to-end process for you seems like a dead end to me.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#52

Post by packetlost »

jonahx wrote: post #48
studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years. I'm not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we're heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme prod…

Serious answer to a legitimate question: 1. Good senior developers are taking the tools seriously, and at least experimenting with them to see what's up. Don't listen to people dismissing them outright. Skepticism and caution is warranted, but dismissal is foolish. 2. I'd summarize the current state of affairs as having access to an amazing assistant that is essentially a much better and faster version of google and…

I think latency is the biggest reason I killed my Copilot sub after the first month. It was fine at doing busy-work, like 40%~ success rate for very very standard stuff, which is a net win of like... 3-5%. If it was local and nearly instant, I'd never turn it off. Bonus points if I could restrict the output to finishing the expression and nothing more. The success rate beyond finishing the first line drops dramatically.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#53

Post by [deleted] »

studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years. I'm not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we're heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme prod…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#54

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

HideousKojima wrote: post #5
studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years. I'm not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we're heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme prod…

Writing code is one of the less important parts of your job as a developer. Understanding what the client actually wants and turning that into code is where the real difficulty lies for most software development. Also, I doubt we'll be able to overcome the "subtly wrong/insecure" issues with a lot of LLM generated code

> Understanding what the client actually wants

This is what AI bros don’t understand since they seem to spend their days writing CRUD backends for REST APIs.

You need to understand a lot of stuff before coding anything:

- client: what do you want? - product owner: what does the client really want? - me: what do they fucking want and how will I do it? - QA: how will I test this cleanly so that they don’t bother me all day long? - manager: when do you want it? - boss: how much are you willing to spend for this?

We usually say that nerds are shy and introverted, but we are central to the development of a product, and I don’t think an AI can change this.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#55

Post by idan »

packetlost wrote: post #10
studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years. I'm not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we're heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme prod…

The hardest part of software development is not writing code, full stop. It never has been and it never will be. The hard part is designing, understanding, verifying, and repairing complex systems. LLMs do not do this, even a little bit.

Absolutely. Copilot Workspace might not seem like it, but it's very much our first step towards tools to aid in comprehension and navigation of a codebase. I think a lot of folks have conflated "generative AI" with "writes code" when reading and understanding is a much larger part of the job

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#57

Post by kristiandupont »

studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years. I'm not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we're heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme prod…

I've been writing software professionally for 25 years and I am absolutely not dismissing them, on the contrary.

We are currently in a window where LLM's are helpful but nothing more, making them a great tool. I suspect that will last for a good while and probably turn me into more of a "conductor" in time -- instructing my IDE something like "let's replace this pattern with this other one", and have it create a PR for me that changes many files in one go. But I see absolutely no reason why the evolution shouldn't continue to the point where I just need to tell it what I want from a user perspective.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#58

Post by skydhash »

michaelmior wrote: post #31
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme productivity multiplier not be catastrophic to labor demand. Every single time a change like this happens, it turns out that there is in fact that much demand for software. The distance between where we are now and the punch card days is greater than where we are now and the post-LLM days and yet we have more software devel…

> Someone is still gonna have to convert what the business wants into instructions for the LLM It seems like with GitHub is aiming for is a future where "what the business wants" can just be expressed in natural language the same way you might explain to a human developer what you want to build. I would agree that right now, LLMs generally don't do well with very high-level instructions, but I'm sure that will improv…

SQL and python are arguably the languages closest to English, and even then getting someone to understand recursion is difficult. How do you specify that some values should be long lived? How do you specify exponential retries. Legalese tries to be as specific as possible without being formal and even then you need a judge on a case. Maybe when everyone has today’s datacenter compute power in their laptop.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#59

Post by wilsonnb3 »

michaelmior wrote: post #31
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme productivity multiplier not be catastrophic to labor demand. Every single time a change like this happens, it turns out that there is in fact that much demand for software. The distance between where we are now and the punch card days is greater than where we are now and the post-LLM days and yet we have more software devel…

> Someone is still gonna have to convert what the business wants into instructions for the LLM It seems like with GitHub is aiming for is a future where "what the business wants" can just be expressed in natural language the same way you might explain to a human developer what you want to build. I would agree that right now, LLMs generally don't do well with very high-level instructions, but I'm sure that will improv…

> It seems like with GitHub is aiming for is a future where "what the business wants" can just be expressed in natural language the same way you might explain to a human developer what you want to build.

I do agree that this is their goal but I expect that expressing what you want the computer to do in natural language is still going to be done by programmers.

Similar to how COBOL is closer to natural language than assembly and as such more people can write COBOL programs, but you still need the same skills to phrase what you need in a way the compiler (or in the future, the LLM) can understand, the ability to debug it when something goes wrong, etc.

“Before LLM, chop wood, carry water. After LLM, chop wood, carry water.”

As for the security stuff, on premise or trusted cloud deployments will definitely solve a lot of the security issues but I think it will be a long time before conservative businesses embrace them. For people in college now, most of them who end up working at non-tech companies won’t be using LLM’s regularly yet.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#60

Post by davidbarker »

cedws wrote: post #47
davidbarker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Cursor? ( https://cursor.sh ) It's a fork of VS Code with some AI features sprinkled in. It writes around 80% of my code, these days. It also has a few useful features: - a chat interface where you can @-mention files, folders, and even documentation - if you edit a line of code, it suggests edits around that line that are useful (e.g. you change a variable name and it will suggest updating the other u…

Looks interesting, but I don't really want my code to go via some unknown company. As far as I can tell in "Privacy Mode" code still goes via their servers, they just promise not to store anything (with the caveat that OpenAI retain stuff for 30d).

They give you the option to use your own OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure API keys, but in all honesty, I don't know if they still gather information about your code even using your own API keys.

You could use something like Little Snitch (on Mac) to check if it makes any calls to their servers.

They also allow you to override the URL for the OpenAI models, so although I haven't tried, perhaps you can use local models on your own machine.

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