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Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

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Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#71

Post by skydhash »

simonw wrote: post #37
aimazon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you’re a dimwit but I read your post[1] with an example and I am curious to whether you feel you’re losing something by telling the LLM it’s wrong and to try again, rather than going through the exploratory/iterative learning process yourself. For example, would you have known to ask about GeoJSON if you had not come across and learned about it pre-LLM? More succinctly: do you feel you’re learning more…

Absolutely I could have learned more from that particular project if I'd spent more time with it rather than getting the LLM to do the work... but that's why I like it as an example: since it was effectively a distraction (a "side quest") the alternative wasn't learning more, it was not doing it at all (and learning nothing). I'm able to get really great results out of LLMs because I have 20+ years of experience help…

> I'm able to get really great results out of LLMs because I have 20+ years of experience helping me know what questions to ask of them.

While a direct answer is nice, I like an iterative/explorative process because of all the things I pick up alongside it. An example is when I was working on an epub reader for macOS (side project). I wanted to a native layout engine instead of a webview and I decided to go with muPDF. This has lead me to know more about text layout and rendering, and embedding C inside Swift than I would if I just have direct answers for every problem (if I'd know the correct questions in the first place).

I accumulate side quests like that until I can do a nice experiment to learn as much as I can for a particular domain space.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#72

Post by simonw »

Loocid wrote: post #70
yawaramin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have 20+ years of experience helping me know what questions to ask of them. That seems rather unlikely given that LLMs didn't exist more than seven years ago, much less 20+.

They mean they have 20 years experience in programming, which helps them ask good questions.

Yeah, that's what I meant. With LLMs having deep domain knowledge in a field helps enormously in terms of prompting them as productively as possible.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#73

Post by dogcomplex »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #2

Local maxima go BRRRRRRR AI will get there eventually, but this current paradigm seems increasingly only useful for spam and shitty clip art. Even so, everyone is throwing absurd amounts of investment capital at it in the hopes that something useful will happen. It's a pretty clear depiction of the investor class being so detached from the technical reality of what they're investing in that they just sit around light…

It is honestly shocking how different people can be, even within programming. Been finding LLMs very useful for pair programming and low-effort spin-ups of projects I would just never do without the tools. Frankly, I'm waiting any day for an architecture to arise that takes lossy LLMs and has them error correct enough to produce 99.9999% reliable progress on simple tasks cheaply. This feels incredibly close, and if the unit of intelligence of each step of those is around GPT4 level? Jesus christ. Programming massively automated overnight.

Any programmer that is this dismissive of these tools frankly... hasn't been using them right, and has no imagination - or a massive ego. This stuff is still far too early to make such judgements.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#74

Post by dudus »

mlinhares wrote: post #49
12907835202 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This last sentence is the most important. You can describe your dB schema in words and get laravel migration, models, controllers and if you wanted policies, form requests etc all near perfect. You can get a V1 in 10-20 minutes then go about handling all the actual logic

So rails scaffold from 20 years ago but with a chance of hallucinations?

It's very easy to find multiple solutions to one problem. The power of LLM is that it's one solution to many problems.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#75

Post by muglug »

gtirloni wrote: post #53
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the copilot doesn’t need to be integrated into every keystroke, just able to analyze the context and kickstart the code. Getting up to speed with new libraries is so much easier with AI instead of the bad old days of trial-and-error-and-marked-as-duplicate

Can Copilot analyze my whole codebase these days or just the file I've opened? Honest question as I've stopped to use it a long time ago.

Whole-codebase understanding is beyond current coding assistants’ capabilities. To do that you need to add in traditional static analysis. But I’m sure people are working on it!

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#76

Post by dartos »

skydhash wrote: post #68
eru wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I often find that copilot is pretty good at picking up on the pattern of refactorings that I am doing. Especially those that are a bit tedious and almost mechanical, but not quite mechanical enough to do with a simple search-and-replace.

Vim and text motions should do the trick.

Sure, but doing the refactor the first time, without thinking about how to record a vim macro, then just hitting tab to have copilot do the same change over and over is a lower friction experience

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#77

Post by dartos »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #2

Local maxima go BRRRRRRR AI will get there eventually, but this current paradigm seems increasingly only useful for spam and shitty clip art. Even so, everyone is throwing absurd amounts of investment capital at it in the hopes that something useful will happen. It's a pretty clear depiction of the investor class being so detached from the technical reality of what they're investing in that they just sit around light…

I don’t really think AI will get there the way we’re going about it.

Statistical models will always be limited by their data and how edge case filled reality is.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#78

Post by ern »

anonzzzies wrote: post #17
simonw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been finding this stuff genuinely useful for two years now, across Copilot and ChatGPT and Claude 3 Opus and similar tools. Either I'm a dimwit, easily conned by hype and shiny tools to the point that I can imagine benefits for two years that simply aren't there... or there's something to them.

Nah, it seems a lot of people are using them wrong? OP seems to also fall in that category. I sit next to many people in pair programming situations and it’s quite weird to see very smart programmers using gpt or copilot; they are the ones shouting ‘stochastic parrot’ on forums and yet expect some kind of mind reading magic when using these tools. When I show that you can put a comment for your function, like you sho…

You make an interesting point. I once worked with someone who was brilliant, but had gotten into the field via a math degree, and we were building an enterprise-software product.

We tried pair-programming, and he cracked within a few minutes. He couldn't articulate his thought processes verbally. Sounds similar to the scenario you're describing.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#80

Post by ukuina »

skydhash wrote: post #67
Seb-C wrote: post #45

I still haven't found any interest in this wave of AIs for coding, mostly because writing code hasn't been a bottleneck for me since I learned vim and started using it as my only tool. Knowing what to write and how to organize the code is the really difficult part of our job, and I am unable to do this correctly when reviewing stuff written by others (or by an AI). I have been wondering if people are actually using t…

Same. Most of my time is spent thinking about the domain space, constraints and processing flows. Refreshing my memory about a method, a class or a specific how to is fast based on a combination of Dash (offline docs), PDF Manuals, and opening the libraries pages in advance. And with Vim, I can copy-paste code while having complete control over the code. And thanks to the buffer model, I can have everything I'm think…

> Most of my time is spent thinking about the domain space, constraints and processing flows.

This is the ideal place to add the most value, since a generic LLM will be weakest here.

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