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

GitHub Copilot is now available for free

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 412 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#291

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

rankun203 wrote: post #268
TuringNYC wrote: post #166

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 there will always be open platforms for us to exchange ideas where Copilot can't help. It's just now simple problems can be solved with Copilot directly, we can finally focus on implementing ideas and optimizing them.

I don't know. Sometimes there's many ways to solve a simple problem but some are better than others. On stack overflow you get that variety and that discussion. Copilot just gives one. It might be suboptimal or it might have subtle bugs.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#292

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

AlienRobot wrote: post #245
Terretta wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Useful contributions" is subjective. Not everyone is born a senior developer. Juniors, and even children who aren't even juniors yet ask questions on these channels. Source: I bothered a lot of people on the Internet about C++ when I was child.

Are you saying these child questions are useful contributions?

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#293

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

justsid wrote: post #278
TuringNYC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is just like the majority of communities moving to Discord over Forums. The barrier to entry might be a lot lower than getting a VPS and hosting phpBB or whatever, but the discoverability and searchabilty has gone towards 0. Everything is just moving into opaque black boxes.

I never understood the move to Discord. Maybe I should host a PhpBB and bring some sanity back.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#294

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

xpl wrote: post #261
uludag wrote: post #28

I feel like this free plan is just enough to get someone hooked and require them to upgrade to paid. Like, imagine GPS navigation wasn't widespread and there was a paid service that gave you 20 free trips. Eventually your normal navigation skills would atrophy and you'd be obliged to purchase.

It is to collect more data for LLM training. To tap into proprietary code bases that are never uploaded to GitHub.

Have you read the terms or are you just saying things?

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#295

Post by barrell »

fifilura wrote: post #283
barrell wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster is not necessarily better, and if 2/3 of your value comes from LLMs, that doesn’t bode well for job security. There’s a lot that engineers can due that are well beyond the limits of LLMs. If you really want to keep your day job, I would really commit yourself to that gap when you can!

> If 2/3 of your value comes from LLMs I would put that phrase the other way around. The time freed here gives me more time to spend on what actually brings value. My primary job is not to write applications. And if it was, I would not include "the process of editing lines of code" in my job description. I am not afraid to be fired, but at the same time there is no discussion about the ethics of using AI and whether…

Ah my bad, mentioning writing applications 3x faster and narrative ties to a day job led me to assume your day job way writing applications :)

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#296

Post by fragmede »

_heimdall wrote: post #279
pabs3 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"public weights"?

Can those weights be interpreted by anyone viewing them? If not, it seems like publicly available, obfuscated code at best.

"model available" would be my preferred term.

Is Photoshop.exe "interpretable" by anybody with a copy (of windows)? How about a binary that's been heavily decompiled, like a Mario game?

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#297

Post by huijzer »

euoia wrote: post #289
solarkraft wrote: post #281

I have already replaced Copilot with continue.dev+qwen2.5-coder:1.5b on Ollama and don't see myself coming back. For the last year Copilot completions have been slow, unreliable and just bad , coming in at random moments, messing up syntax in dumb ways, being slow and sometimes not showing up at all. It has been painfully bad even though it used to be good. Maybe it's since they switched from Codex to the general GPT…

Do you have a guide for how to set this up? I am also pretty dissatisfied with Copilot completions.

Probably via Tabby (https://www.tabbyml.com/)

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#298

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

thot_experiment wrote: post #241
scosman wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, Sonnet goes past that. 300+ line changes in 20 seconds. You have to review it, but generally it's right. It's infinitely faster than the time to look at docs and do it myself. Sure it's busywork. But it's a lot of busywork very fast.

Well it's definitely not infinitely faster since you're having to review it, but we're talking about the delta between Sonnet and Qwen/Mistral/Llama or whatever, not doing it manually. I'm really curious what your problem domain is, like specifically what sort of code are you asking it to change and what changes are you asking for. I just gave o1 and Sonnet a total layup question (optimization that had a huge win sim…

My work involves a lot of boilerplate. Made some changes recently that amount to about 3 lines of meaningful code but wrapped in 4 new files + edits to like 6 others. It's ridiculous. Perfect for AI but I haven't found a way to automate because the tools don't seem to be smart enough to create files and make random little edits, and the amount of words to explain what I want would be too much. One day...

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#299

Post by nbbaier »

euoia wrote: post #289
solarkraft wrote: post #281

I have already replaced Copilot with continue.dev+qwen2.5-coder:1.5b on Ollama and don't see myself coming back. For the last year Copilot completions have been slow, unreliable and just bad , coming in at random moments, messing up syntax in dumb ways, being slow and sometimes not showing up at all. It has been painfully bad even though it used to be good. Maybe it's since they switched from Codex to the general GPT…

Do you have a guide for how to set this up? I am also pretty dissatisfied with Copilot completions.

Also interested !

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#300

Post by mfkp »

euoia wrote: post #289
solarkraft wrote: post #281

I have already replaced Copilot with continue.dev+qwen2.5-coder:1.5b on Ollama and don't see myself coming back. For the last year Copilot completions have been slow, unreliable and just bad , coming in at random moments, messing up syntax in dumb ways, being slow and sometimes not showing up at all. It has been painfully bad even though it used to be good. Maybe it's since they switched from Codex to the general GPT…

Do you have a guide for how to set this up? I am also pretty dissatisfied with Copilot completions.

looks like the parent comment hints at https://docs.continue.dev/chat/model-setup#local-offline-exp...

(Assuming your computer has the specs necessary to run ollama)

Post reply on HN