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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#131

Post by evantbyrne »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #114
mjr00 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pret…

[flagged]

It's just tooling. Costs nothing to wait for it to be better. It's not like you're going miss out on AGI. The cost of actually testing every slop code generator is non-trivial.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#132

Post by bamboozled »

dsl wrote: post #127
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today. So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contri…

> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor How does this align with Microsoft's AI safety principals? What controls are in place to prevent Copilot from deciding that it could be more effective with less limitations?

Haha

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#133

Post by bamboozled »

timrogers wrote: post #61
binarymax wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?

What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates

So they won’t like working on their job ?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#134

Post by kenjackson »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #126
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today. So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contri…

When I repeated to other tech people from about 2012 to 2020 that the technological singularity was very close, no one believed me. Coding is just the easiest to automate away into almost oblivion. And, too many non technical people drank the Flavor Aid for the fallacy that it can be "abolished" completely soon. It will gradually come for all sorts of knowledge work specialists including electrical and mechanical eng…

I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at the time. We generally believed that automation would get rid of repetitive work that didn't require a lot of thought. And in many ways programming was seen almost at the top of the heap. Intellectually demanding and requiring high levels of precision and rigor.

Who would've thought (except you) that this would be one of the things that AI would be especially suited for. I don't know what this progression means in the long run. Will good engineers just become 1000x more productive as they manage X number of agents building increasingly complex code (with other agents constantly testing, debugging, refactoring and documenting them) or will we just move to a world where we just have way fewer engineers because there is only a need for so much code.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#135

Post by hidelooktropic »

UX-wise...

I kind of love the idea that all of this works in the familiar flow of raising an issue and having a magic coder swoop in and making a pull request.

At the same time, I have been spoiled by Cursor. I feel I would end up preferring that the magic coder is right there with me in the IDE where I can run things and make adjustments without having to do a followup request or comment on a line.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#136

Post by tokioyoyo »

bamboozled wrote: post #133
timrogers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates So they won’t like working on their job ?

You know exactly what they meant, and you know they’re correct.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#137

Post by PhilipRoman »

shwouchk wrote: post #67

I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.

This is something I've noticed as well with different AIs. They seem to disproportionately trust data read from the web. For example, I asked to check if some obvious phishing pages were scams and multiple times I got just a summary of the content as if it was authoritative. Several times I've gotten some random chinese repo with 2 stars presented as if it was the industry standard solution, since that's what it said in the README.

On an unrelated note, it also suggested I use the "Strobe" protocol for encryption and sent me to https://strobe.cool which is ironic considering that page is all about making one hallucinate.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#138

Post by rsoto2 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #114
mjr00 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pret…

[flagged]

AIs are boring

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#139

Post by bamboozled »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #136
bamboozled wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates So they won’t like working on their job ?

You know exactly what they meant, and you know they’re correct.

I like updating documentation and feel that it's fairly important to be doing myself so I actually understand what the code / services do?

I use all of these tools, but you also know what "they're doing"...

I know our careers are changing dramatically, or going away (I'm working on a replacement for myself), but I just like listening to all the "what we're doing is really helping you..."

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