Anyone is interested in starting to work on an open source alternative? I have a few terabytes of GitHub repository archives, a bit of experience and an non-profit umbrella (goal is AI Safety).
GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
11–20 of 153 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#12Was this even useful? I have to review a lot of absolute shit from humans. I can’t even imagine the damage that such a large corpus of humans plus an AI can generate.
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#13This is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month. The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.
>The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it..
Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#14I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying
# Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error
if ! some_program
then
echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m"
exit 1
fi
Purely from the amount of time I've saved I'd say it's well worth the $10/mo for my employer (it only has to save a few minutes a day to be worthwhile). Very excited to see how they improve it in the future!
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#15This is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month. The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.
>The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it.. Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?
Uh, yeah. Consider how much programmers are paid per hour. Or how often you look up Stack Overflow or language documentation.
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#16Well it was good while it lasted. $10 is too much for me.
Agreed, I feel like my limit was 5 bucks. I get good suggestions that help me prevent repetitive patterns but I don’t get any useful “give me code that does X” as advertised.
I don’t get any useful “give me code that does X” as advertised.
I found it actually worse than useless in those cases. Often I will type a function name it will populate my function body with code that at a quick glance looks like exactly what I want, but at closer inspection is actually complete nonsense. Trying understand if the code it suggests actually does what I want or not is often slower than just writing the code.
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#17Was this even useful? I have to review a lot of absolute shit from humans. I can’t even imagine the damage that such a large corpus of humans plus an AI can generate.
It's useful in the right hands - it can suggest functions/language features you don't know about it, it can do some handy stuff automatically (like reverse a list in place) so you have more mental bandwidth to think about other stuff.
It also produces a ton of horrible, nonsense code. I totally agree that if github's corpus starts to fill with that stuff, the overall quality of github will tank and I wonder how they'll continue to train the model.
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#18Github copilot regurgitates my colleagues highly niche code verbatim. I know its his because all the same bad variable names are used.
It doesn’t train itself on your local code. It’s probably using your colleagues code in your codebase as part of the input to decide what you want. Someone else in a separate project will never see Copilot recommendations of your colleagues (as long as GitHub doesn’t change their ToS)
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#19I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works w…
Maybe they can replace you with copilot and an unexperienced cheaper user.
Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
#20I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works w…
I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention.
Yea, that is basically my experience as well. On balance I feel I wasted about as much time debugging broken copilot code as I've saved from using it.