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GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

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Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#241

Post by lostintangent »

If folks want to see what Copilot Workspace looks like, here’s a sample session where I addressed a feature request in an OSS VS Code extension I maintain: https://copilot-workspace.githubnext.com/lostintangent/gitdo....

You can see the originating issue and the resulting PR from there. And note that while the initial spec/plan/code was mostly good, I iterated on a couple parts of the plan, and then made a minor tweak to the code manually (everything in CW is editable). Which is a key part of our goal with CW: to help bootstrap you with a task (or think out loud with AI), and then provide the iteration primitives to explore further.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#242

Post by freedomben »

lispisok wrote: post #147
msoad wrote: post #78

This should've been done in VSCode. Most developers don't want to write code in a browser. Once VSCode extension is built they could generalize it to other editors. I'm sure they are thinking of VSCode integration and I am hopping for that to be available soon

I wonder if AI tools is going to kill editor diversity. Every one of these tools VS Code is the first class citizen and other editors are an afterthought. Sure people can write their own Emacs package but that's only if the tool developers enable it and the experience is usually not as good as the official VS Code version. I can also see the future where not using VS Code is a signal you are less reliant on AI tools…

This is a great fear of mine as a (neo)vim user. I've repeatedly encountered situations already where it was assumed everyone was using VS code, and I only see that getting worse as more and more integrations get built into IDEs.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#243

Post by throwaway4aday »

imiric wrote: post #170
lelandbatey wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually i…

> And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures. Don't you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago. This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn't to do ever…

I don't know about the rest of the developers in the world but my dream come true would be a computer that can write all the code for me. I have piles of notebooks and files absolutely stuffed with ideas I'd like to try out but being a single, measly human programmer I can only work on one at a time and it takes a long time to see each through. If I could get a prototype in 30 seconds that I could play with and then have the machine iterate on it if it showed promise I could ship a dozen projects a month. It's like Frank Zappa said "So many books, so little time."

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#244

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Watching the examples and other people's demos, I get the sense that this product completely ignores what makes good software. It has no "big picture" plan or contextual awareness required to make those nuanced yet critical decisions in the far ends of applications. Those cases where you badly need domain expertise, understanding of how the user interfaces with the product, awareness of existing technical debt, and so on.

The scope it can assist in is too limited. It is exactly the kind of thing I'd use to generate self-destructing spaghetti. The thing is, people with less experience will eat this up because it can do some tasks with ease which might not be familiar to them yet. Over time, the code they produce will be a mine field of incongruent patterns and solutions.

It appears to support the hypothesis that these tools may actually create more work, but I worry that the work will be much like that created by outsourced developers shipping duct-taped nonsense back to North America throughout the last 20 years or so.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#246

Post by mvdtnz »

sroussey wrote: post #207
candiddevmike wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had ChatGPT output an algorithm implementation in Go (Shamir Secret Sharing) that I didn't want to figure out. It kinda worked, but everytime I pointed out a problem with the code it seemed more bugs were added (and I ended up hating the "Good catch!" text responses...) Eventually, figuring out why it didn't work made me have to read the algorithm spec and basically write the code from scratch, throwing away all of…

Once it writes the code, take that into a new session to fix a bug. Repeat with new sessions. Don’t let it read the buggy code, it will just get worse.

How do you not let it read the buggy code but also take it into a new session?

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#247

Post by bloomfieldj »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #51

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 sma…

I find Cursor’s Copilot++ is miles ahead of GitHub’s in terms of speed and autocomplete helpfulness. They’re also working on the “your cursor should jump to this line next" feature, but I haven’t relied on many of its suggestions yet. It’s available in their vscode fork, but doesn’t seem to be in their docs yet.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#248

Post by sensanaty »

a_t48 wrote: post #49
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…

For adding and refactoring it can be a great tool. For greenfield development, it's more tricky - yesterday I sat down and started writing something new, with no context to give Copilot. Mid sourcefile, I paused to think about what I wanted to write - it spit out three dozen lines of code that I then had to evaluate for correctness and just ended up throwing away. I could have probably helped the process by writing d…

I don't even trust AI for tests, except for generating test cases, but even then it usually does something idiotic and I have to think up a bunch of other test cases anyways

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#249

Post by burntcaramel »

Pretty sure I wouldn’t want to work on a team using this.

“Who wrote this code, it has a serious flaw?”

“The customer needed that feature quickly so we used Copilot. No sorry, I don’t know how it works, I trust that it does. I glanced over the code and it looked about right.”

“Did you read the checklist that it generated? The flaw stems from an assumption it made.”

“Oh no, I didn’t see that. To be honest I don’t read the checklists it makes.”

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#250

Post by sensanaty »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #173
mike_hearn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, don't quit your course because of a product announcement! That'd be overreacting by a lot. Please consider these points instead! Firstly, it's not true that LLMs can structure and execute large scale changes in entire repositories. If you find one that can do that please let me know, because we're all waiting. If you're thinking of the Devin demo, it turned out on close inspection to be not entirely what it see…

> Secondly, do not underestimate the demand for software. For as long as I've been alive, the demand for software has radically outstripped supply. GitHub claims there are now more than 100 million developers in the world. And yet jobs are more difficult to come by than any time in recent history (regardless of skill or experience; excepting perhaps "muh AI" related roles), a seemingly universally expressed sentiment…

People usually mean FAANG jobs with the absurdly overinflated FAANG-level pay when they talk about jobs being hard to come by, to be fair.
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