Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

trace.yshui.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 326 posts

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#181

Post by thaumasiotes »

LandR wrote: post #169
aayjaychan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like your parent said, the same line of code will or won't populate the navigation property depending on whether EF is already tracking the entity that belongs there (generally because some other earlier query loaded it). You get different behavior depending on the state of the system; you can't look at "one line of code" in isolation unless that line of code includes every necessary step to protect itself against context sensitivity.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#182

Post by chx »

Every time... https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650

> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.

> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#183

Post by scaryclam »

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…

Coding speed really is a horrible metric. I can code really quickly, but it doesn't mean I'm doing anything productive or correct.

I'd rather slower coding speed, properly written as it provides higher overall velocity. And velocity should take into account the refactoring that happens months or even years later. Crappy code can look really fancy, and even be bug free, but if it's overengineered and hard to change, it can create long change times or even a full stop in development later in the products lifecycle.

And that's on top of developers losing the understanding of how something actually works. If AI helps create the code that would have been written without AI, then great, but I don't observe that happening, and the code has never been a better idea than then dev could have done without it.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#184

Post by Almondsetat »

zo1 wrote: post #119
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, could you post a couple of examples then

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#185

Post by zahrc »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #161
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.

And even then it happens to ignore context or queries from start or halfway through. I'd rather spend the time coding then trying to bruteforce it to give me the answer I need.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#186

Post by lomase »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #117
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.

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).

EF is the common way of saving data.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#187

Post by howtofly »

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…

[dead]

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#188

Post by collyw »

jdlyga wrote: post #7

From my experience, Github Copilot is useful for its seamless autocompletes. But Github Copilot chat, a new feature, noticeably lags behind GPT-4. I get far better performance copying and pasting code into ChatGPT (GPT-4) than using Github Copilot. Both definitely help productivity, especially when generating code using an unfamiliar framework or library. It's great for generating skeleton code for small programs usi…

That's been my experience as well. Doesn't help me that much in Django where I am pretty familiar. It helps me loads in the frontend, where I am less familiar.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#189

Post by collyw »

bmitc wrote: post #102
jdlyga wrote: post #7

From my experience, Github Copilot is useful for its seamless autocompletes. But Github Copilot chat, a new feature, noticeably lags behind GPT-4. I get far better performance copying and pasting code into ChatGPT (GPT-4) than using Github Copilot. Both definitely help productivity, especially when generating code using an unfamiliar framework or library. It's great for generating skeleton code for small programs usi…

This has been exactly my experience. It is great at autocomplete and boilerplate stuff. It's very hit and miss for StackOverflow type of stuff. And it's usually a complete miss when you ask it something where it needs to understand even basic things of what you're actually trying to do. It can also get very confused and circular when it hits those edges as well. I've found myself fighting with it, and so part of my u…

I find ChatGPT 4 is the best place to ask a question, then often use it's answer to find more in docs or stack overflow. It's basically a better search engine for certain coding tasks. I wasn't overly impressed with ChatGPT 3.5 as it gave me wrong answers enough of the time that it cancelled out the amount of time it saved me.

Re: Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

#190

Post by simonw »

tymscar wrote: post #88
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.

You are clearly not a dimwit, and you don’t only have way more experience than most people here, you also have some amazing projects under your belt. However I can’t help but notice that the vast majority of blogposts, talks, tweets, and basically everything else you do now is around LLMs. Do you not think that’s indicative of this being “hyped” and “shiny tools”?

I'm writing a lot about LLMs at the moment because they're the focus of much of my work.

I don't see that as a hype thing - in the past I've had other topics I've focused on, not because of hype but because those were the topics I was spending the most time with.

Post reply on HN