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GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

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Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#131

Post by filoleg »

macspoofing wrote: post #13
rjh29 wrote: post #8

This 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?

That one would be easy to measure for yourself, because that "worth it" depends on your number of hours worked a month and your compensation.

Let's be on a more conservative end and say that an engineer gets paid $60/hour (i know that most engineers are salaried, so you will need to divide the monthly pay number pre-tax by 160 hours to get that hourly number). If copilot saved more than 10 minutes of your time a month, then yeah, it is worth more than $10/mo.

Do the math on this one yourself, based on how many hours you work in a month on average + your compensation for that time period.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#132

Post by nullc »

I wonder how long until state actors realize that copilot would be a perfect vector for getting developers to introduce subtle vulnerabilities into their own projects?

By its very structure it's output always looks credible, and it's not always right-- it wouldn't be a sign of foul play if copilot suggested some code that looked just right but happened to backdoor your cryptosystem or protocol.

Maybe it would be a little tricky to get it to produce NOBUS vulnerabilities that were credible mistakes, but if the target isn't OSS then nobus isn't really that important.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#133

Post by alexb_ »

jjluoma wrote: post #120

This kind of comment, "co-pilot can write 90% of the code without me, just translating my explanation into python", about copilot troubles me. If the code has been mostly produced by co-pilot, does an user of copilot have sufficient grounds to to claim being the author and assert rights based on copyright? Globally?

The United States Copyright Office has explicitly rejected AI-created works.

>the Office will not register works “produced by a machine or mere mechanical process” that operates “without any creative input or intervention from a human author” because, under the statute, “a work must be created by a human being

https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#134

Post by sverhagen »

Slartie wrote: post #72
bombcar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many many scripts that ignore STDERR and just print everything normally.

Yes, but that's a perfect illustration for one of copilot's essential flaws: "a lot of flies eat poop" (side note: is that actually a saying? Asking because in German it is, and it fits perfectly here). A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.

So, Copilot is a _junior_ developer. Isn't that a matter of just managing expectations?

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#135

Post by zamfi »

croes wrote: post #19
happyhardcore wrote: post #14

I'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.

Or maybe they’ll replace a junior dev with copilot and make the more experienced folks spend more time “fixing” broken copilot code.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#136

Post by chongli »

oceanplexian wrote: post #94
chongli wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law is opposed to these sorts of changes due to the business model of the law firm. In the law firm world billable hours are king. Automation reduces billable hours. No law firm wants to do that.

I think this really depends on what kind of firm you're talking about. You could make the same case for contractors i.e. "billable hours are king". Take the example where you need to paint a house. You could hire someone off the street who does it with a paintbrush and rollers or hire a pro with a sprayer and prep knowledge to do it in 1/4 the time and with 10x the quality. In this context automation could be a tool…

A lot of contractors in painting/drywall do piecework rather than hourly. My roommate has been a drywall taper for 20+ years. When he quotes a job it’s a flat rate and then he tries to finish as fast as possible by using his best tools to speed up the job. On the other hand, if someone hires him on an hourly basis he puts away those fancy tools and does a lot more manual work, getting the job done slowly.

His rationale: why put wear and tear on his expensive tools if it’s just going to reduce his income in the end? Needless to say he prefers piecework because he likes to move from one job to the next as quickly as he can. He makes a lot more money that way.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#137

Post by sirsinsalot »

tomtheelder wrote: post #54
lelag wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. If you code professionally in a stack where copilot perform well, 10 usd/month is a steal. Assuming you are just 5% more productive with copilot, that would easily translate into hundreds of dollars of savings. It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally. It would have been nice of them to in…

This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.

Is copilot then not teaching you bad habits that you can't see due to lack of familiarity? Is that a good thing?

The idea of learning via copilot, producing poor code and having copilot learn from that code ... the whole feedback loop ... Is worrisome.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#138

Post by mrkwse »

Dayshine wrote: post #92
_fat_santa wrote: post #47

My biggest issue with Copilot (and the reason I don't really use it anymore) is that it got in the way much more than it seemed to help. I work with Typescript codebases and in VSCode, you get very nice intellisense autocompletion on objects. What I found is that with Copilot that totally breaks down where Copilot will override intellisense and provide you with a hint. I found it fun to play with for smaller projects…

Does VS Code not show the two sets in different interface elements? In Jetbrains Rider is shows suggestions (completion) in a dropdown, and it shows Copilot inline. And you press a different key for each.

I’m not sure which keybinds you have enabled (possibly through VS Studio style?), but in PyCharm/Rider for me (IDEA keybinds) both completions and Copilot use tab to complete, which as the user you replied to has said, tends to get in the way and trip me up as often as the relevant suggestions provide something of benefit.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#139

Post by sirsinsalot »

If GitHub charge money for a tool producing derivative works of other people's code (maybe without permission, OSS or not) perhaps they should be compensated.

To use a famous example: if an AI were taught to perform heart surgery by viewing footage of skilled surgeons ... would it not be fair that those surgeons earn an on-going amount for their input? An input that is essential to the AIs function.

I worry this is the pointed end of the data hoarding big Co Internet. Our data is used to train models that (potentially, in future) degrade _our_ value while giving nothing back despite being used, unwillingly, to train their models.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#140

Post by sirsinsalot »

lelag wrote: post #57
tomtheelder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.

I guess that makes sense. It's mostly useful when working on mundane tasks on popular stacks. Experts working on non-trivial use-cases won't see much benefits. Personally, I'm not a in a coding position anymore and only code occasionally on stacks I'm mostly unfamiliar with: copilot is a godsend as it saves me from googling every other lines of code to figure out which api calls I'm suppose to do to accomplish the ta…

Do you think you learn as well or deeply?

Is the act of finding a help for learning?

Do you retain as much? Do you need to? Is that important?

I hope this whole thing ends up like a space saving tool like Google did. I don't need to memorise that API because I can Google the docs. Now maybe that goes a level higher.

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