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Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#131

Post by dcminter »

hyperpape wrote: post #86
AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…

It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#132

Post by _Algernon_ »

transcriptase wrote: post #49
layer8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s only real USP is network effects.

If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.

Git is designed so that you always have the full code you're working on copied to your local machine. Github being down for a short time from time to time should be only a minor inconvenience.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#133

Post by Rover222 »

chubot wrote: post #110
Rover222 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really your main point, but Tesla self driving is quite incredible, despite what internet clickbait says. They have a clear path to full autonomy with vision-only systems. But yeah, certainly 5-7 years behind the initial schedule. Which I guess was more of your point.

OK, but I think it will end up being more than 25 years behind schedule, taking into account the claims which is what people like Chris Urmson and Bill Gurley already said prior to 2018 (see my sibling comment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... We're going to end up with complete autonomy Ultimately you'll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you. I think that within…

Teslas are already driving an hour alone to deliver themselves from the factory.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#134

Post by rdm_blackhole »

I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow.

On bigger PRs, I regularly have diffs that take seconds to load. The actions also started hanging a lot more often and will run for 30 minutes stuck in some kind of loop unless they time out or I cancel them manually. This did not use to happen before or least not as frequently as now.

Finally when I try to cancel the hung actions, the cancel button never gets disabled after I click it and it is possible to click it multiple times without any effect. Once clicked, surely it shouldn't be possible to click it again unless the API calls failed.

Clearly there is a quality decrease happening here.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#135

Post by bgwalter »

hyperpape wrote: post #86
AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…

Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub.

"AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#136

Post by MangoToupe »

everdrive wrote: post #106
kelvinjps10 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't GitHub initially bootstrapped?

I'm not being flippant or contrary. What does "bootstrapped" mean in this context? I feel like I've never really understood it as a metaphor.

It refers to pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#138

Post by bee_rider »

chubot wrote: post #72
tho2342o349423 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% p…

They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago. Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit. In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It se…

Wonder how far along we’d be on the path to self driving without any hype cycles…

I suspect stuff like lane following assist and adaptive cruise control

1) will ultimately provide the path to self driving eventually

2) wasn’t particularly helped by the hype cycle

1 is impossible to say at his point, for 2 I guess somebody who works in the field can come along and correct me.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#139

Post by krinchan »

rossdavidh wrote: post #99
hyperpape wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…

All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince.…

As someone who started out a GenAI skeptic, I’ve found the truth is in the middle.

I write a TON of one off scripts now at work. For instance, if I fight with a Splunk query for more than five minutes, I’ll just export the entire time frame in question and have GHCP (work mandates we use only GHCP) spit out a Python script that gets me what I want.

I use it with our internal MCP tools to review pull requests. It surfaces questions I didn’t think to ask about half the time.

I don’t know that it makes me more productive, but it definitely makes me more attentive. It works great for brainstorming design ideas.

The code generation isn’t entirely slop either. For the vast majority of corporate devs below Principal, it’s better than what they write and its basic CRUD code. So that’s where all the hyper productive magical claims come from. I spend most of my days lately bailing these folks out of a dead end fox hole GHCP led them into.

Unfortunately, it’s very much a huge time sink in another way. I’ve seen a pretty linear growth in M365 Copilot surfacing 5 year old word documents to managers resulting in big emails of outdated GenAI slop that would be best summarized as “I have no clue what I’m talking about and I’m going to make a terrible technical decision that we already decided against.”

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#140

Post by jsheard »

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

GitHub isn't even the worst example of this at Microsoft, they didn't just force AI on Office users but also tricked them into paying extra for it. They unilaterally switched all personal and family accounts over to AI-enabled plans that were 30-40% more expensive, and hid the option to revert back to the old plan such that it's only offered as a last resort if you try to cancel your subscription.
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