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GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

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Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#141

Post by rybosworld »

brianmcc wrote: post #113

Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages." Not wanting to come across all Luddite about it, but we really ought not to stumble blindly into all this. That said, I remain sceptical. The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.

> The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.

Even so, is there any reason to believe that the other 90% won't also be automated?

As you said, the goal of these systems is to replace wages.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#142

Post by nonethewiser »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #95
nonethewiser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers. And GitHub certainly isn’t saying the goal is to replace developers. I accept that is how you are interpreting it and I can see the argument. But Github isnt trying to get one over in their messaging. And besides I just dont agree with the idea that it takes the developer out of the loop. Whose controlling this better version of…

The goal has always been to eliminate programmers. Nobody wants to pay a bunch of desk workers six figures to make their business go brr, but they currently they have no choice. Trust me, every executive resents this to their core and they want all the programmers to go away - including github executives. 20 years ago you would hire a few expensive architects who would try and design the product in so much detail che…

But who is copilot being marketed to?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#143

Post by mhnthrow »

throw83288 wrote: post #101
nickstinemates wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to thrive in this world you need to change your attitude ASAP. New tech waves happen all of the time. Embracing them is the path.

How? Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. I don't have any ideas anyway (I have only one "idea", and it's someone elses and I have no faith that it'll get me a foothold). Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues. Everything I can "change to" has a 2 year delta and that is a 100x capability change within the AI space right now.

what are you attempting to achieve with this idea? what kind of foothold? ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful. maybe you are thinking you need to make a startup or something to be successful.

i understand the feeling you have a little bit, but agree with the others that you don't need to despair too much about the industry, there is still a great need (and will be) for humans to understand the systems we are using and be able to get in the weeds to solve problems.

totally agree we might need less people writing/wrangling code, and it might put downward pressure on salaries... on the other hand, there might be upward pressure on salaries as developers will have a higher output and the ROI for hiring an effective developer in this environment will go up. especially when production is on fire, the AI that wrote the code that is on fire might not be the best source of how to solve it.

to me this is all basically a big unknown, without substantial reason to panic though, even if it feels overwhelming and hopeless from a certain perspective at the start of a career. currently a lot of development feels pretty sluggish to me, we fight with build tools and multiple languages and eke out these incremental improvements - if developers can work much much faster, that's great, but then we hit a limit to like... OK we need to let the product changes "settle" for a while and get user feedback about the changes, we can't actually ship 14 major product updates in a week because users will have no idea what the fuck is happening. but maybe we can do more advanced things with rapid split testing and automated success metrics to deploy pages that "self-optimize" or something, and there might be new second and third order ideas that come from this where it takes a human to manage and direct and build and solve things at that level.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#144

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

satvikpendem wrote: post #85
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.

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

It's hard to to rate the quality, I just feel like it does a better job of knowing the codebase and what I am working on via whatever mechanisms they have implemented.

I also find the DX better, I only really use the right click to mark code to talk about, and then the chat. The accept/reject changes UI works better imo.

In short, I barely have to do anything to use the AI features, just feels right.

---

Just try both, I didn't feel like Cursor suited my style much, Windsurf had me hooked instantly.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#145

Post by throw83288 »

mhnthrow wrote: post #143
throw83288 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. I don't have any ideas anyway (I have only one "idea", and it's someone elses and I have no faith that it'll get me a foothold). Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues. Everything I can "change to" has a 2 year delta and that is a 100x capability change within the AI space right now.

what are you attempting to achieve with this idea? what kind of foothold? ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful. maybe you are thinking you need to make a startup or something to be successful. i understand the feeling you have a little bit, but agree with the others that you don't need to despair too much about…

I dunno, a job? I don't think one other person's idea is enough.

> ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful

And water is everywhere but you need a boat to get across it. I don't think I have a boat. I don't know if I can build one. I don't know if anyone will let me on their boat. s/boat/idea generation/g.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#146

Post by skydhash »

throw83288 wrote: post #115
toprerules wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must be your first hype cycle then. Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before. There's always a 10% gap that makes it impossible to fully close the gap between needing a programmer and a machine doing the work. Nothing about the current evolution of LLMs suggests that they are close to solving this. The current messaging is basically, look how far we got this time, we will for sure reach A…

So Work=0.1^Ct where C is the development pace. Everything points to the C of AI being large. How quickly does Work become a rounding error? Sure, C=log(t), but it could also be C=ke^t. Everything to me feels like it's the latter, I really want to be wrong.

Why all these approaches have not succeeded is that to close the gap, you have to backtrack on all the effort made so far. Like choosing a shortcut and stumbling on an impassable ravine. The only way is to go back.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#147

Post by cruffle_duffle »

konart wrote: post #111
throw83288 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

>Call me a doomsday prepper >Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. Don't worry. As the other commenter said it: we've seen it all a few times already. I clearly remember how some people reacted to Ruby on Rails as if it's going to replace them just because it provides... well a framework. LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. People who's main job was creating landi…

Oh man the hype around RoR was nuts. You’d get these enterprise Java developers getting their first taste of a “python/php/ruby” language and they’d all make gushing blog posts about how quickly they put together some (rather simple) app. They’d all say how many orders of magnitude more productive they were thanks to RoR.

And to be fair they weren’t wrong. RoR was one of the first “opinionated” platforms of its kind, really. (Well, that isn’t really true but we’ll just pretend it is… it sure was hyped that way). It did make a lot of the pain points of web apps easier… it handled database migrations, testing, ORM stuff, template stuff, etc. It was opinionated. It had some very vocal people pushing it (DHH of 37signals). It was the zeitgeist of the time.

Hell Twitter was started on rails, from what I remember. Eventually they turned into a java shop but yeah. But that was going to be the natural progression. People found all the edges of RoR and we learned what worked and what didn’t and where to apply it and where it doesn’t belong.

But things like RoR didn’t make developers less valuable it made them more valuable.

And to somehow tie it back to LLM’s… it will be the same thing. Software will eat the world and all LLM’s will do is accelerate it. But we don’t know all the edges yet because the story is still unfolding. But I promise it won’t be the end of developers… anybody who uses LLMs daily can already tell you they’ll never be able to replace a dev. They are developer assistants not replacements no matter what the hype says.

…end ramble (which is clearly not the output of an LLM)

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#148

Post by wholinator2 »

throw83288 wrote: post #115
toprerules wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must be your first hype cycle then. Most of us who are senior+ have been through these cycles before. There's always a 10% gap that makes it impossible to fully close the gap between needing a programmer and a machine doing the work. Nothing about the current evolution of LLMs suggests that they are close to solving this. The current messaging is basically, look how far we got this time, we will for sure reach A…

So Work=0.1^Ct where C is the development pace. Everything points to the C of AI being large. How quickly does Work become a rounding error? Sure, C=log(t), but it could also be C=ke^t. Everything to me feels like it's the latter, I really want to be wrong.

Cmon man, look at nature, exponential curves almost never are actually exponential. Likely it's the first part of a logistic curve. Of course you can sit here all day and cry about the worst outcome for an event in the long list of things no one can predict. It sounds like you've made your mind up anyways and refuse to listen to reason, so why keep replying to literally everyone here telling you that your buying into the hype too much.

You're young, and so we'll give you a pass. But as stated, _the entire point of tech is evolving methods_. Are you crying because you can't be one in a room of hundreds feeding punchcards to a massive mainframe? Why not? It's _exactly_ the same thing! Technology evolved, standards changed, the bar raised a bit, everyone still went to work just fine. Are you upset you won't have a job in a warehouse? Are you upset you aren't required to be a farmer to survive? Just chill out man, it's not as terrifying as you think it is. Take a page out of everyone who ever made it and try to actually listen to the advice of people who've been here a while and stop just reflex-denying any advice that anyone gives you. Expand your mind a bit and just consider the idea that you're actually wrong in some way. Life will be much easier, less frantic, and more productive

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#149

Post by cruffle_duffle »

827a wrote: post #81
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…

GitHub is way to established to course correct. Their entire sales channel is enterprise. They structurally can’t see what makes cursor and stuff so much better.

Plus I think they have to much money sloshing around to care. Unlike the scrappy startups they have beefy enterprise accounts as cash cows.

It’s a tail as old as time, really.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#150

Post by phil917 »

I feel like anytime I try these "agentic" programming tools they always fall on their face.

Devin was pretty bad and honestly soaked up more time than it saved. I've tried Cursor Composer before and came away with bad results. I tried Copilot again just now with o3-mini and it just completely hallucinated up some fields into my project when I asked it to do something...

Am I taking crazy pills or do these tools kinda suck?

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