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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#11

Post by tmpz22 »

olex wrote: post #5
r0ckarong wrote: post #2

Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.

> Once Copilot is done, it’ll tag you for review. You can ask Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull request. To me, this reads like it'll be a good junior and open up a PR with its changes, letting you (the issue author) review and merge. Of course, you can just hit "merge" without looking at the changes, but then it's kinda on you when unreviewed stuff ends up in main.

A good junior has strong communication skills, humility, asks many good questions, has imagination, and a tremendous amount of human potential.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#12

Post by falcor84 »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #8

I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface). I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they do…

> LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt

I wonder if the next phase would be the rise of (AI-driven?) "linters" that check that the implementation matches the architecture definition.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#13

Post by taurath »

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation.

Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work.

I think its somewhat telling that they can't share numbers for how they're using it internally. I want to know that Microsoft, the company famous for dog-fooding is using this day in and day out, with success. There's real stuff in there, and my brain has an insanely hard time separating the trillion dollars of hype from the usefulness.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#14

Post by DeepYogurt »

olex wrote: post #5
r0ckarong wrote: post #2

Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.

> Once Copilot is done, it’ll tag you for review. You can ask Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull request. To me, this reads like it'll be a good junior and open up a PR with its changes, letting you (the issue author) review and merge. Of course, you can just hit "merge" without looking at the changes, but then it's kinda on you when unreviewed stuff ends up in main.

Management: "Why aren't you going faster now that the AI generates all the code and we fired half the dev team?"

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#16

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

tmpz22 wrote: post #10
boomskats wrote: post #6

My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at least 8 times now. I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe have tried a fourth time.

I’m always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects because they’re getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every day. I’d love for this to blow past cursor. Will definitely tune in to see it.

>I’m always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects because they’re getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every day.

I'm senior enough that I get to frequently see the gap between what my dev team thinks of our work and what actual customers think.

As a result, I no longer care at all what developers (including myself on my own projects) think about the quality of the thing they've built.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#17

Post by candiddevmike »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #8

I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface). I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they do…

> I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening.

This is a feature, not a bug. LLMs are going to be the next "OMG my AWS bill" phenomenon.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#18

Post by OutOfHere »

postalrat wrote: post #3
r0ckarong wrote: post #2

Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.

Now developers can produce 20x the slop and refactor at 5x speed.

In my experience in VSCode, Claude 3.7 produced more unsolicited slop, whereas GPT-4.1 didn't. Claude aggressively paid attention to type compatibility. Each model would have its strengths.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#19

Post by unshavedyak »

boomskats wrote: post #6

My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at least 8 times now. I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe have tried a fourth time.

What specific keynote are they referring to? I'm curious, but thus far my searches have failed

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#20

Post by jstummbillig »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #8

I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface). I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they do…

If you want to use Cline and are at all price sensitive (in these ranges) you have to do manual context management just for that reason. I find that too cumbersome and use Windsurf (currently with Gemini 2.5 pro) for that reason.
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