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

GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 260 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#81

Post by 827a »

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…

IMO: Copilot (and Devin) has always missed the mark. Its always been a lazy, bad product that feels like it was made by a team that doesn't even want to use it themselves. Going more agentic is only going to make it worse; Copilot's product leadership appears obsessed with more comprehensive replacement of their customer workflows, but ideal customers want deeper and more fluid integration into the workflows.

Its one of those facts that seems so obvious once you realize it, but no one at Github clearly does. Who is buying and using these things? Seriously, anyone at Github, answer that, not who you think is buying them, but who is actually buying them. The answer isn't CEOs or CTOs; its Software Engineers (or CTOs, for their Software Engineers). Github's leadership needs the answer to be CEOs or CTOs, because the scale of investment (to produce such a shit product) is so large that only per-customer revenue commensurate to the replacement of SE salaries justifies it.

I know of four companies (including my own) that had a corporate Copilot subscription for their devs, and over the past quarter/this quarter are replacing it with a Cursor subscription, at the request of their devs. I'm super bullish on Cursor and Supermaven.

- I think they understand their ICP way better.

- I think their ICP is actually excited to spend money with them.

- I think these new companies have demonstrated that they are more willing to build more than just a panel in VSCode; whereas Github is bogged down by legacy interests.

- I think this deeper level of integration into existing workflows is what pushes AI past the hump of "oh i want to use that". Speeding up existing workflows by 30% feels insanely good. It grows the pie. Smaller & smarter, not larger & derivative.

- I think, from a business perspective, MS/Github has and continues to royally screw up by literally subsidizing the cost basis of their competitors by building VSCode and hosting billions of lines of open source code competitor models train on. I love it as a user. But it costs them millions of dollars, and every dollar of that spend makes their competitors stronger.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#82

Post by throw83288 »

post-it wrote: post #77
suyash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but it doesn't look like there's been much progress on the robotics front.

Until reasoner AI 10x's research and solves it far ahead of schedule.

You don't even need robotics, just a good multi-modal reasoner model with domain knowledge that you can attach to a headset manna-style [0]. The only thing that makes blue collar work different from any minimum wage labor is the System 2 reasoning required, and that'll get solved.

[0] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#83

Post by armchairhacker »

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).

IntelliJ with Cursor-like autocomplete or Cursor with IntelliJ-quality general IDE tooling (lookup/rename symbol, diagnostics, and general UI) would be the ultimate editor.

IntelliJ’s autocomplete was really bad last time I tried it, and if it’s still only single line it’s still bad. Fortunately GitHub copilot in IntelliJ is good, maybe as good as Cursor except that it can’t delete/rewrite code or jump to different locations.

IMO agents aren’t nearly as important for either team to focus on, because they can be used outside of the IDE or in a separate IDE. I think the teams who develop the best agents will be big model-trainers and/or teams dedicated to agents, not teams writing IDEs.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#84

Post by ndiddy »

diggan wrote: post #71
tomduncalf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code so most of the UI is identical and it can use the majority of extensions. Some extensions are MS only though and they may start using this as a moat, who knows!

> Some extensions are MS only though Is that really true? According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931088 ("VSCode Marketplace Web Pages No Longer Allow Direct VSIX Downloads"), you can still manually download extensions via cURL et al, if you really want to. Probably will disappear in the future though.

One example: Microsoft's closed-source Pylance extension (their replacement to the previous open source Python language server) has DRM that will refuse to run on non-Microsoft builds of VS Code.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#85

Post by satvikpendem »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #46
hidingOnBush wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are sleeping on codeium. I've found their AI assistant to be much better than cursor

Cursor has obviously figured out marketing better. I switched to Windsurf 2-3 months ago, feels a lot better for me.

I was looking at Windsurf and Cursor as well, what are the differences?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#86

Post by satvikpendem »

astrodude wrote: post #48
thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor has obviously figured out marketing better. I switched to Windsurf 2-3 months ago, feels a lot better for me.

Agreed. Windsurf is a lot better

What do you find better about it?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#87

Post by nozzlegear »

suyash wrote: post #55
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 te…

> 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.

I hope I can turn this feature off, i.e. that it's not a feature other users can use on my repositories. I'm already getting AI slop comments suggesting unhelpful fixes on my open source projects, I don't need "the anointed one" sending over slop as well – while replacing the work of real humans, to boot.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#88

Post by diggan »

someothherguyy wrote: post #74
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…

What else would the goal of agentic generative AI be other than to replace humans doing the same work?

For me that's a no-brainer also. I guess my question is more about why their messaging is so messy and direction-less. Why not just say outright what their plan is?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#89

Post by diggan »

ndiddy wrote: post #84
diggan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some extensions are MS only though Is that really true? According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931088 ("VSCode Marketplace Web Pages No Longer Allow Direct VSIX Downloads"), you can still manually download extensions via cURL et al, if you really want to. Probably will disappear in the future though.

One example: Microsoft's closed-source Pylance extension (their replacement to the previous open source Python language server) has DRM that will refuse to run on non-Microsoft builds of VS Code.

Wow, I had no idea. Been test driving VS Code for a little while, and while the constant popups/notifications are distracting and annoying, extensions with DRM in them kind of makes it a lot less interesting.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#90

Post by ks2048 »

So what happens when GitHub's auto-SWE is good enough to take on "Write me a GitHub clone, but with additional features X,Y, and Z"? Will they have regret it?

I know this is slightly far-fetched and AI-coders are coming regardless of if GitHub is working on it, but it does seem like these companies are destroying part of their moat (codebase and SW infrastructure). (I also realize their bigger moat is brand and existing user base).

Post reply on HN