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Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

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Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#161

Post by shaky-carrousel »

klauserc wrote: post #148

I find GitHub Copilot close to useless for production code. The worst, most obscure bugs I've had to debug in the last year were all in Copilot-written code. It _looks_ plausible, but it makes extremely subtle mistakes. Occasionally, you have repetitive sections of code where it can copy&adapt lines from the context, but that's about it. It's a different story for test code. Test code is often formulaic and "standard…

Copilot for me is very useful with all the scaffold boring code. It sometimes helps with problems, but I have to guide it, and be very precise with my request.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#162

Post by Tomte »

storafrid wrote: post #160
Tomte wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because the employer doesn't allow sending proprietary source code to random internet services on an employee's whim.

Silly. Many big corporations trust Microsoft touching their code. There are enterprise policy controls for Copilot, which includes data privacy. If you want to make this argument, then the realistic reason would be that Copilot hasn't yet completed the SOC 2 compliance process. That would be a valid reason to wait, for corporations that are listed on Nasdaq or work with very sensitive data. But that's far off from th…

At my employer this would be a firable offense. And we‘re under German worker protection laws.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#163

Post by aayjaychan »

LandR wrote: post #152
neonsunset wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which version?

We are currently on the latest. We had an issue last week where we had an obect like public class Foo { public List Bars { get; set; } } We'd query for some Foos, like: await _dbContext.Foos.ToListAsync(); and some amount of them would have Bars be an empty list where it should definitely be populated from the db. And it wasn't even consistent, sometimes it would populate thousands, sometimes it would populate a hand…

navigation properties are not loaded automatically, because they can be expensive. you need to use `.Include(foo => foo.Bars)` to tell EF to retrieve them.

EF tries to be smart and will fix up the property in memory if the referenced entities are returned in separate queries. but if those queries don't return all records in `Foo.Bar`, `Foo.Bar` will only be partially populated.

this can be confusing and is one of the reasons i almost never use navigation properties when working with EF.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#164

Post by devjab »

klauserc wrote: post #148

I find GitHub Copilot close to useless for production code. The worst, most obscure bugs I've had to debug in the last year were all in Copilot-written code. It _looks_ plausible, but it makes extremely subtle mistakes. Occasionally, you have repetitive sections of code where it can copy&adapt lines from the context, but that's about it. It's a different story for test code. Test code is often formulaic and "standard…

I think automated tests are the one area that LLMs will truly improve productivity (and overall code quality). It’ll likely also lead to a lot of tests that actually tests nothing, but as a whole, it’ll hopefully be capable of both generating and updating tests if you give it some good inputs to do it on. Documentation is another area where I have high hopes. In the ideal world people update it as they change things. In reality, however, well…

Then there is the design side of things. I really feel bad for designers of Icons now that you can get some really good one really fast by tasking one of the image generating AIs.

I’m not sure LLMs will ever really be capable helpers as far as programming goes. Well I guess it’s two part, they can help with trivial tasks, but they can’t help with anything related to the actual work of generating business value with code. It’s two-sided of course. They certainly allow a lot of people write functioning, though really shitty, code. Which is a huge benefit for a lot of programming tasks where it doesn’t really matter that it’s inefficient and well terrible. We’ve already seen our more digitally inclined employees make great things with power apps, most of which are eventually replaced by more robust software as they scale. But we also see small Python programs helping out with tiny personal tasks around our offices, and while IT operations aren’t too happy it’s generating a lot of individual value that wasn’t there before.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#165

Post by skywhopper »

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…

The last entity I would trust for trustworthy data on how much Copilot helps programmers is GitHub. They obviously skew the scenarios and metrics to find the best possible number to report.

I think the truth as revealed in your comment and many others is that it all depends on the context. For repetitive code or boilerplate, or starting new projects in well-known frameworks and languages, it probably does increase velocity. The other context factor is the programmer themselves. Their familiarity with the problem domain, the language, and the framework all matter, as does the personality and coding style of the individual.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#166

Post by alrs »

kaba0 wrote: post #127
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…

> and started learning Go. Which does exactly what it says it does, with no magic Too little abstraction is just as bad as too much.

Assembly is too little abstraction. Go is not.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#167

Post by portaouflop »

devjab wrote: post #164
klauserc wrote: post #148

I find GitHub Copilot close to useless for production code. The worst, most obscure bugs I've had to debug in the last year were all in Copilot-written code. It _looks_ plausible, but it makes extremely subtle mistakes. Occasionally, you have repetitive sections of code where it can copy&adapt lines from the context, but that's about it. It's a different story for test code. Test code is often formulaic and "standard…

I think automated tests are the one area that LLMs will truly improve productivity (and overall code quality). It’ll likely also lead to a lot of tests that actually tests nothing, but as a whole, it’ll hopefully be capable of both generating and updating tests if you give it some good inputs to do it on. Documentation is another area where I have high hopes. In the ideal world people update it as they change things.…

I think few if any designers rely on icons for income. There have been thousands of free icons around before genai.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#168

Post by neonsunset »

alrs wrote: post #166
kaba0 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and started learning Go. Which does exactly what it says it does, with no magic Too little abstraction is just as bad as too much.

Assembly is too little abstraction. Go is not.

It is. Oh, and also, Go managed to screw up even the assembly, inventing portable but actually not dialect that uses ugly bits of AT&T syntax, custom operator precedence and in practice is non-portable, forcing you to mix Go-only mnemonics (which might even collide with opcode names on certain platforms), supported opcodes of target platform, and BYTE literals for opcodes it doesn't support, making a lot of your preliminary (N)ASM knowledge useless. Isn't that magnificent?

Gee, I wonder if there's a better way to do so that is not such a lazy job. But doing it properly, like .NET does, is supposedly too much effort!

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#169

Post by LandR »

aayjaychan wrote: post #163
LandR wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are currently on the latest. We had an issue last week where we had an obect like public class Foo { public List Bars { get; set; } } We'd query for some Foos, like: await _dbContext.Foos.ToListAsync(); and some amount of them would have Bars be an empty list where it should definitely be populated from the db. And it wasn't even consistent, sometimes it would populate thousands, sometimes it would populate a hand…

navigation properties are not loaded automatically, because they can be expensive. you need to use `.Include(foo => foo.Bars)` to tell EF to retrieve them. EF tries to be smart and will fix up the property in memory if the referenced entities are returned in separate queries. but if those queries don't return all records in `Foo.Bar`, `Foo.Bar` will only be partially populated. this can be confusing and is one of the…

We have those, and when I say inconsistent I mean inconsistent on the same query / exact same line of code on the same database.

e.g. stick a breakpoint, step over, see in the debugger that it was not populating everything it should. Then run it again, do the same and see different results. Exact same code, exact same db, different results.

5000 results back from the db, anything between 5000 and a handful were only fully correctly populated.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#170

Post by Foobar8568 »

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…

From what I remember, lazy loading wasn't part of EF for a long while and even longer for navigational properties. I am not even sure if it was part of EF4.
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