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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#101

Post by petetnt »

doug_durham wrote: post #96
petetnt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about developers who do enjoy writing for example high quality documentation? Do you expect that the status quo will be that most of the documentation will be AI slop and AI itself will just bruteforce itself through the issues? How close are we to the point where the AI could handle "tricky dependency updates", but not being able to handle "most interesting and complex problems"? Who writes the tests that are r…

If find your comment "AI Slop" in reference to technical documentation to strange. It isn't a choice between finely crafted prose versus banal text. It's documentation that exists versus documentation that doesn't exist. Or documentation that is hopelessly out of date. In my experience LLMs do a wonderful job in translating from code to documentation. It even does a good job inferring the reason for design decisions.…

Documentation is not just translating code to text - I don't doubt that LLMs are wonderful at that: that's what they understand. They don't understand users though, and that's what separates a great documentation writer from someone who documents.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#102

Post by NicuCalcea »

nodja wrote: post #78
brushfoot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds. That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck was, but it hasn't come back. I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot, and it's snappy.

Here's a video of what it looks like with sonnet 3.7. https://streamable.com/rqlr84 The claude and gemini models tend to be the slowest (yes, including flash). 4o is currently the fastest but still not great.

For me, the speed varies from day to day (Sonnet 3.7), but I've never seen it this slow.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#103

Post by doug_durham »

petetnt wrote: post #101
doug_durham wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If find your comment "AI Slop" in reference to technical documentation to strange. It isn't a choice between finely crafted prose versus banal text. It's documentation that exists versus documentation that doesn't exist. Or documentation that is hopelessly out of date. In my experience LLMs do a wonderful job in translating from code to documentation. It even does a good job inferring the reason for design decisions.…

Documentation is not just translating code to text - I don't doubt that LLMs are wonderful at that: that's what they understand. They don't understand users though, and that's what separates a great documentation writer from someone who documents.

Great technical documentation rarely gets written. You can tell the LLM the audience they are targeting and it will do a reasonable job. I truly appreciate technical writers, and hold great ones in special esteem. We live in a world where the market doesn't value this.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#104

Post by quantadev »

I love Copilot in VSCode. I have it set to use Claude most of the time, but it let's you pick your fav LLM, for it to use. I just open the files I'm going to refactor, type into the chat window what I want done, click 'accept' on every code change it recommends in it's answer, causing VSCode to auto-merge the changes into my code. Couldn't possibly be simpler. Then I scrutinize and test. If anything went wrong I just use GitLens to rollback the change, but that's very rare.

Especially now that Copilot supports MCP I can plug in my own custom "Tools" (i.e. Function calling done by the AI Agent), and I have everything I need. Never even bothered trying Cursor or Windsurf, which i'm sure are great too, but _mainly_ since they're just forks of VSCode, as the IDE.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#105

Post by n2d4 »

sethammons wrote: post #89
overfeed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot I'm curious to know how many Copilot PRs were not merged and/or required human take-overs.

textbook survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias every bullet hole in that plane is the 1k PRs contributed by copilot. The missing dots, and whole missing planes, are unaccounted for. Ie, "ai ruined my morning"

It's not survivorship bias. Survivorship bias would be if you made any conclusions from the 1000 merged PRs (eg. "90% of all merged PRs did not get reverted"). But simply stating the number of PRs is not that.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#106

Post by dangoodmanUT »

qwertox wrote: post #77

In hindsight it was a mistake that Google killed Google Code. Then again, I guess they wouldn't have put enough effort into it to develop into a real GitHub alternative. Now Microsoft sits on a goldmine of source code and has the ability to offer AI integration even to private repositories. I can upload my code into a private repo and discuss it with an AI. The only thing Google can counter with would be to build too…

Or they'll just buy Cursor

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#108

Post by [deleted] »

literalAardvark wrote: post #98
overfeed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot I'm curious to know how many Copilot PRs were not merged and/or required human take-overs.

"We need to get 1000 PRs merged from Copilot" "But that'll take more time" "Doesn't matter"

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#109

Post by geodel »

qwertox wrote: post #77

In hindsight it was a mistake that Google killed Google Code. Then again, I guess they wouldn't have put enough effort into it to develop into a real GitHub alternative. Now Microsoft sits on a goldmine of source code and has the ability to offer AI integration even to private repositories. I can upload my code into a private repo and discuss it with an AI. The only thing Google can counter with would be to build too…

You win some you lose some. Google could have continued with Google code. Microsoft could've continued with their phone OS. It is difficult to know when to hold and when to fold.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#110

Post by philkuz »

candiddevmike wrote: post #17
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.

I think that models are gonna commoditize, if they haven't already. The cost of switching over is rather small, especially when you have good evals on what you want done.

Also there's no way you can build a business without providing value in this space. Buyers are not that dumb.

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