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GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

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Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#51

Post by machine_ghost »

diggan wrote: post #40
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish cursor was an extension of VSCode and not a fork.

Does is matter in practice? Is there stuff you can do in VSCode that isn't possible in Cursor? I'm not a user of either, so honest question.

I don't know Cursor, but VS Code is a very full-featured editor with many years behind it; I rather doubt an upstart editor could achieve full feature parity with it so quickly.

But that's almost beside the point: even if it had perfectly identical functionality, people would still want to use VS Code, if only for its well-established ecosystem of extensions.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#52

Post by JohnnyMarcone »

rvz wrote: post #35
aresant wrote: post #13

“Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.” … until we train our model on your usage data and totally replace you

They are not hiding it anymore and are testing as to how much they can get away with total job displacement. First artists, then musicians, then writers and now programmers. Better prepare for 2030 then as I am already doing so [0]. But from this year and in the next 5 years I'd also read this very carefully [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42563239 [1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-…

Care to share how you are preparing?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#53

Post by UncleEntity »

xnx wrote: post #12

What's the current best free ($) coding assistant? I like Gemini + VS Code, but it seems a little hamstrung by what VS Code extensions are allowed to do.

I'm actually curious about this too.

I've been experimenting with having Claude write the code and DeepSeek analyze, pasting the analysis into Claude to modify the code, rinse and repeat.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, they have come up with an almost fully standards compliant LALR parser for APL -- which is notoriously hard to parse. DeepSeek gets in there "nice and deep, boy" and shakes out all the corner cases while Claude does a fairly good job of implementing the fixes without breaking anything else. Just a few more round and...

But, as one might imagine, this isn't very practical for anything other than just playing around as I have to copy/paste code into the two different chat windows.

I suppose I could get them to write an extension for gedit (my preferred 'code editor'), hmm...

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#54

Post by dhdjruf »

Ninjinka wrote: post #29

Wow, Copilot is so behind Cursor it's pathetic

Its lightyears ahead on the name. Remember that book. Guys remember that book that says adding more programmers actually doesn't speed up but extends the projects completion time!

I read that book I am learned. The unlearned probably thinks the name refers to a planes copilot.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#55

Post by suyash »

diggan wrote: post #38

> When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write better code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer. Later: > GitHub Copilot’s new agent mode is capable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically. Is this Microsoft/GitHub ac…

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say

"We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests."

- Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#56

Post by reducesuffering »

johnfn wrote: post #36
threatofrain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we actually could get to a world where programmers can be replaced, we'll also likely find that vast swathes of the population will be replaced. Then we'll need a totally new conversation on how society should look. That conversation is coming no matter what, because there will not be a global consensus to stop ML development, esp. on the war front.

In a world where programmers can be replaced, it's less clear to me that plumbers, janitors, electricians, construction laborers, etc, are also all out of a job.

Think secondary effects. What does a world in which almost every programmer can be automated look like? It looks like massive extremely fast technological development, how to build and program robotics will be solved almost instantly. With solved robotics goes every other labor.

We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, until they lose control of it too.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#57

Post by jghn »

hassleblad23 wrote: post #30
lolinder wrote: post #3

They'd better get on the IntelliJ integration fast— if I'm going to switch editors in order to use an LLM coding assistant, I may as well just switch to Cursor, which has a strong head start on them on the assistant and also has a much better autocomplete. I'm honestly surprised to see no mention here of them moving to replicate Cursor's autocomplete—IMO that is where Cursor's real edge lies. Anyone can wrap a chatbo…

Github has completely abandoned the Intellij Copilot plugin it seems. Even model selection is not supported. This is good for Jetbrains though because they have their own competing AI service. Jetbrains AI doesn't support multiline edits in tab completion or chat, but it does in the inline prompt mode (although its limited to the same file only).

Yeah. I just wish that VSCode didn't feel so crude coming from 10+ years using JetBrains IDEs. Things I feel are table stakes like nice test run/debug functionality seem like big hurdles. Perhaps it's just a learning curve & I need to get used to it, but whenever I dive into how to replicate functionality I feel is important it seems the answer is at best "it's complicated".

It's a shame as this is by far not the only thing in which I have interest that seems to have fully shifted over to VSCode

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#59

Post by diggan »

machine_ghost wrote: post #51
diggan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does is matter in practice? Is there stuff you can do in VSCode that isn't possible in Cursor? I'm not a user of either, so honest question.

I don't know Cursor, but VS Code is a very full-featured editor with many years behind it; I rather doubt an upstart editor could achieve full feature parity with it so quickly. But that's almost beside the point: even if it had perfectly identical functionality, people would still want to use VS Code, if only for its well-established ecosystem of extensions.

AFAIK, Cursor is a fork of VS Code, so everything you wrote also applies to Cursor. Hence my question.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#60

Post by suyash »

johnfn wrote: post #36
threatofrain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we actually could get to a world where programmers can be replaced, we'll also likely find that vast swathes of the population will be replaced. Then we'll need a totally new conversation on how society should look. That conversation is coming no matter what, because there will not be a global consensus to stop ML development, esp. on the war front.

In a world where programmers can be replaced, it's less clear to me that plumbers, janitors, electricians, construction laborers, etc, are also all out of a job.

Here is a saying that I really think summarises "AI will replace white-collar jobs and Robotics will replace blue-collar jobs".
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