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Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

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Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#111

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

mhh__ wrote: post #11
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…

> spam The first 100 lines of any project is spam (usually 0 entropy), so AI is a nice win.

If the entropy is 0, you didn't need an LLM. If it's the same every time you can just copy and paste those 100 lines from GitHub or StackOverflow.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#112

Post by noduerme »

nercury wrote: post #101
marcus_holmes wrote: post #87

Years ago, over a decade ago now, I was a .Net developer. Microsoft introduced Entity Framework, their new way of handling data in .Net applications. Promises made, promises believed, we all used it. I was especially glad of Lazy Loading, where I didn't have to load data from the database into my memory structures; the system would do that automatically. I could write my code as if all my memory structures were popul…

Pardon me for the tangent (just a general comment not directed to OP). What I have learned over the years is that the only way to properly use ORM is as a fancy query tool. Build the query, fetch/update data, MOVE THE DATA to separate business objects. Don't leave ORM entities shared across the sea of objects! Phew, thanks, I got that off my chest.

adding an off the shelf ORM layer creates so much more opacity and tech debt than writing queries I don't understand why anyone would willingly put one into their stack. Sure, they're neat although I don't even know if they save time. There's something very satisfying about well-crafted queries. And is it ever really well crafted if you can't tweak them to improve their their execution plan? I've never had a client or boss who asked to use an ORM framework. I suspect it's something people think looks cool - treating SQL as OOP - until they run into a problem it can't solve.

[edit] for instance, I have a case where I use a few dozen custom queries on timers to trawl through massive live data and reduce it into a separate analytics DB. Using everything from window functions to cron timers to janky PHP code that just slams results from separate DBs together to provide relatively accurate real-time results. At the end from that drastically reduced set in the analytics DB... sure, I'm happy to let the client summarize whatever they want with Metabase. But those things just couldn't be done with an ORM, and why would I want to?

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#113

Post by bad_username »

noduerme wrote: post #112
nercury wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon me for the tangent (just a general comment not directed to OP). What I have learned over the years is that the only way to properly use ORM is as a fancy query tool. Build the query, fetch/update data, MOVE THE DATA to separate business objects. Don't leave ORM entities shared across the sea of objects! Phew, thanks, I got that off my chest.

adding an off the shelf ORM layer creates so much more opacity and tech debt than writing queries I don't understand why anyone would willingly put one into their stack. Sure, they're neat although I don't even know if they save time. There's something very satisfying about well-crafted queries. And is it ever really well crafted if you can't tweak them to improve their their execution plan? I've never had a client o…

For me the biggest reason is automated database initialization and migration. After defining or updating the ORM model, I don't have to worry about manually CREATing and ALTERing tables as the model evolves.

This is compatible with the OC suggestion of using ORMs as a "fancy query builder" and nothing more, which I strongly support.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#114

Post by theshrike79 »

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.

With VSCode at least you can say @workspace to Copilot and it'll take it into account.

No idea if it feeds all of the code to the LLM or just parts, but it's pretty good at interpreting what the code does

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#115

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

yreg wrote: post #46
muglug wrote: post #29

GitHub touts a 55% improvement in coding speed based on a study conducted in-house that tested the participants’ ability to paste a pre-written prompt and then check the output: https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-c... The effectiveness of a Copilot-like tool trialed at FB showed that 8% of code contributed by participants was sourced from suggestions, but the latter study made no promise about…

My personal feeling is that utilising LLM assistance often isn't faster, but it can take less "stamina", tiring me less.

Yeah although the frustration of restarting after failed & failed attempts, or introducing bugs in parts of code you didn't want updated is also tiring.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#116

Post by rjst01 »

yreg wrote: post #46
muglug wrote: post #29

GitHub touts a 55% improvement in coding speed based on a study conducted in-house that tested the participants’ ability to paste a pre-written prompt and then check the output: https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-c... The effectiveness of a Copilot-like tool trialed at FB showed that 8% of code contributed by participants was sourced from suggestions, but the latter study made no promise about…

My personal feeling is that utilising LLM assistance often isn't faster, but it can take less "stamina", tiring me less.

I've had the opposite experience - copilot will pop up a suggestion that's wildly wrong and I'll expend energy processing and discarding it.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#117

Post by marcus_holmes »

nercury wrote: post #101
marcus_holmes wrote: post #87

Years ago, over a decade ago now, I was a .Net developer. Microsoft introduced Entity Framework, their new way of handling data in .Net applications. Promises made, promises believed, we all used it. I was especially glad of Lazy Loading, where I didn't have to load data from the database into my memory structures; the system would do that automatically. I could write my code as if all my memory structures were popul…

Pardon me for the tangent (just a general comment not directed to OP). What I have learned over the years is that the only way to properly use ORM is as a fancy query tool. Build the query, fetch/update data, MOVE THE DATA to separate business objects. Don't leave ORM entities shared across the sea of objects! Phew, thanks, I got that off my chest.

Agree completely, as does most of the Go community :) Newbie gophers are regularly told to learn some SQL and stop trying to rebuild ActiveRecord in Go ;)

But in .Net, EF is still the most common way of accessing data (I have heard, because I stopped using it over a decade ago).

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#118

Post by eesmith »

b33j0r wrote: post #39

I disable it when I actually need to recall what I know. It’s like a phone number. If you never dial your mom anymore, you will forget it.

Or like GPS? While GPS gets me where I want to go, I find that using a map or no map at all gives me a better sense of place, so I need less time to get to the point where I don't need a GPS to get around.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#119

Post by zo1 »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #106
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shitty clip art AI art is better than most humans, including most artists. You can take the outputs and immediately turn them into animation. Suddenly I, as a single individual, can easily make film content without figuring out set and lighting logistics or roping in dozens of people. This stuff is magic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The fact that you didn't think to include an example is telling. If you think AI 'art' is good, show me, and tell me why you think it's good.

Not OP.

Conflating "art" (the "snobbish" definition if you will) with realistic depictions of imagined worlds, stories and settings is not helpful here. There are so many talented, imaginative people out there that have previously had Zero ability to manifest their thoughts into a visual form. AI has enabled that on so many levels and we should be grateful for it.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#120

Post by marcus_holmes »

perfmode wrote: post #97
marcus_holmes wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it actually a solution to any of them? The "chance of hallucinations" is the tricky bit - if I have to manually check everything it does in case it's hallucinating, then it's not actually a solution. It's not saving me time (as TFA says).

while you’re in doubt, i’ll be speeding out

Speed on, I'll enjoy the slo-mo crash footage later :)
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