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GitHub Copilot is now available for free

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Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetbrains is still the leader in all of the small details that make navigating and working a code base easy. Copy and paste workflow is a minor slowdown, but nothing compared to things like smart links in terminal, auto detection of run configurations, etc, etc.

This. 1000x This. I watch people navigate code in VSCode and I want to pull my hair out. Things that I don’t even think about are hard and/or require just falling back to search. And before “there is a plugin for that”, I’m sure there is. I’m sure you can configure VSCode to be just as powerful as IDEA but the rank and file using it aren’t doing that work to install and configure a bunch of plugins. So, on average, V…

>I watch people navigate code in VSCode and I want to pull my hair out.

For me it's the other way around, when I see someone using an IDE instead of a lean editor I see their struggle. Multiple seconds to open the IDE (sometimes tens of second), multi-hundred millisecond lag when opening a file, noticeable input lag. And when you have to edit a file your IDE doesn't understand, all you have is a bloated notepad.

I know I'm biased and I intentionally wrote this one-sided to counter your post. In practice, it just depends. Right now in my work I primarily edit scripts (up to a few hundred lines of code), do quick edits to various larger projects - sometimes few different projects a day - and read files in dozens of programming language (I only reall program in Python and C/C++, but I have to constantly consult various weird pieces of code). VsCode works great for me.

On the other hand, long time ago when I was working on large C# projects, I can't imagine not using Visual Studio (or Rider nowadays I guess).

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main sticking point for me, I'm not leaving JetBrains anytime soon. GitHub Copilot + Aider handle my needs beautifully and while I wish Aider had deep IDE integration I can work around that (Yes, I know about the "AI!" command thing, it's a cool idea but sucks in practice). Aider in browser mode has pretty much replaced my back and forth to ChatGPT/Claude's web UI to the point that I'm considering going A…

Jetbrains is still the leader in all of the small details that make navigating and working a code base easy. Copy and paste workflow is a minor slowdown, but nothing compared to things like smart links in terminal, auto detection of run configurations, etc, etc.

I switched from JetBrains to Cursor after multiple years, and it's nowhere near as bad as the comments here make it out to be.

For most of the rough edges, I've found workarounds at this point.

I miss some of the refactorings, but half the time the AI does them for me anyways.

Smart links in terminal are supported. Detection of run configurations is supported.

My main issues atm are:

- Quick search is inferior. You can't search for folders, and symbol search is global, without the option to exclude certain locations (such as build artifacts) from indexing.

- cspell is more annoying than it is useful. I don't want to babysit my spellchecker. Without extensive configuration, there are far too many false positives.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#183
Microsoft would need to pay me to use Copilot. Seems like a major scam for them to learn from our code and then tell us we can’t use it to make our own competing AI systems. “Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.” From https://www.microsoft.com/en/servicesagreement#13r_AIService... TODAY — the ridiculous focus on AI over core business at github is the number one thing likely to kill the platform. They are coasting on network effects

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#184

hm.. it seems like I won't use this service for a while as I got the following error message while starting IntelliJ today: You've reached your monthly code completion limit. Upgrade your plan to Copilot Pro (30-day Free Trial) or wait until -4712-01-01 for your limit to reset to continue coding with GitHub Copilot.

Wow 4712 BCE was when the pyramids were new and shiny. Just kidding, it turns out it was the first Julian day. Got some help here:

January 1, 4713 BCE marks the beginning of the Julian Day count. This system was introduced by Joseph Scaliger in 1583 CE.

Scaliger selected 4713 BCE as the starting point because it is the nearest date where three cycles—solar, lunar, and Roman indiction—coincide. These cycles are:

The 28-year solar cycle.

The 19-year Metonic lunar cycle.

The 15-year Roman indiction cycle.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#185

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

I think you'd find society-at- small was contributing , with perhaps 10x larger yet still quite small number posting but watering down useful contributions, 100x that lurking, and 1000x that just drive-by copy-pasting from SO to their IDE.

Sure, but at least the knowledge the publicly viewable, even if the contributions werent equal. Upvoting, browsing, asking is also a contribution.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main sticking point for me, I'm not leaving JetBrains anytime soon. GitHub Copilot + Aider handle my needs beautifully and while I wish Aider had deep IDE integration I can work around that (Yes, I know about the "AI!" command thing, it's a cool idea but sucks in practice). Aider in browser mode has pretty much replaced my back and forth to ChatGPT/Claude's web UI to the point that I'm considering going A…

Jetbrains is still the leader in all of the small details that make navigating and working a code base easy. Copy and paste workflow is a minor slowdown, but nothing compared to things like smart links in terminal, auto detection of run configurations, etc, etc.

Can you give some examples? I spend the majority of my time reading code nowadays, and I often have like 8 or more Sublime Text windows open (each open on a separate codebase). I cant imagine how much RAM it would take to do that in CLion or Visual Studio.

Sublime Text's text search is the killer feature for me. CTRL+SHIFT+F and I can search a million LOC+ codebase instantly, navigate the results with CTRL+R, do a sub-search of the results with CTRL+F, set bookmarks with CTRL+F2 (and jump to them with F2/SHIFT+F2), pop the results out to a different window for reference, etc. And all that happens with no jank whatsoever.

The LSP plugins make life easier, but even without that Sublime is often able to find where symbols are defined in a project using just the contextual information from the syntax highlighter.

I tried CLion for a while, but couldnt get productive in it. Ofc I'm much more experienced with Sublime, so maybe I just didnt give myself enough time to learn it, but CLion felt sluggish and inefficient. The smart code features are probably more advanced than Sublime's LSP plugins, but I didn't find anything that would make the switch actually an improvement to me.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#188

I have been using Cursor, but I am a vim user at heart. What is the best plugin I can use that gives us the power of AI coding, but for vim? Every time I look, the plugins seem to be far behind Cursor.

https://github.com/github/copilot.vim works pretty well for inline autocompletion

https://github.com/CopilotC-Nvim/CopilotChat.nvim is the best I've found for the chat-type interaction. It lets you choose models/etc.

It's still not quite as nice as cursor, but decent enough that I enjoy using them

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#189
post #168

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

The StackOverflow database was open source for a while, but I haven't checked for a data dump since the new management came in.

True, may not be open source, but it is still viewable.

Best for Society: Open Source Medium for Society: Proprietary, but openly browsable Worst for Society: Proprietary, not browsable <-- LLM-based code assist tools

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#190

They need more training data.

That was my first thought too. The Github Copilot CEO recently said in no uncertain words he wants to make everyone a dev - "a billion developers". Of course this is code for make current dev's redundant IMO similar to how everyone can type these days too making typists redundant. The MBA types really really want this outcome for all intellectual work.

I can imagine that good enterprise/business level training data (the layer above the open source widgets we compose) is not as easy coming on the internet as the open source libraries themselves are. But through their free tool they would get access to this especially from small scrappy startup's that will want to save costs. Seeing some startup's go from zero to next big thing on Copilot will be great training data.

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