Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

fast.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 201 posts

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#141

Post by UncleMeat »

outsomnia wrote: post #39
skohan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot is also almost certainly going to become better. For example, NVIDIA's DLSS was viewed as a failure at launch, but now it's almost magic in terms of offering better results at a lower performance cost.

Better at issuing haphazardly modified boilerplate that already exists... the real costs of writing code are about carefully choosing how pieces will fit together and deciding on minutae with that in mind. Copilot is the antithesis of designing good software.

Both parts matter. Making humans faster at writing the well isolated implementations means more time for the important stuff. Tons of productivity features could be foolishly dismissed with "well, the actually important bit is design so this is worthless".

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#142

Post by ashtonkem »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

Turning the free contributions of an enthusiastic community and turning it into private, closed source wealth is a bit of a Microsoft tradition. Arguably Bill Gates did exactly the same thing with Microsoft; it was picked by IBM specifically because the community recommended it, a community despised by Gates who thought they were “stealing” from him.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#143

Post by UncleMeat »

ignu wrote: post #28

Writing code is, uh, not remotely the hardest part of software development. Maintaining it is.

That's why everybody programs in base notepad, with no syntax highlighting or auto complete or live error notifications or linting or any other quality of life feature.

What you say here is true. Writing code is not remotely the hardest part of software engineering. But that does not mean that there is zero value in making it easier.

Shifting gears is not remotely the hardest part of safely driving a car. Yet automatic transmissions are a nice feature for tons of people.

I do not understand this dismissal based on the fact that copilot does not completely revolutionize software engineering in a way that no other product has ever come close to doing.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#145

Post by craftinator »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #119
toxik wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I ranted about this two weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724969

This is very true, and much like Tesla getting away with it for years (up until recently), GitHub will get away with this for a while as well. And so will the media decrying shit like "Is this the end of developers?!?"

> And so will the media decrying shit like "Is this the end of developers?!?"

Yeah, CoPilot already replaced my job. I used to be the office copypasta, going around to my coworkers desk all day long to fix their problems by googling them, then pasting in the first snippet to pop up. It didn't matter if the language matched or not, it was more the thought that counted. Now I've had to get a job as a loan rejection stamper at my local bank. It's not nearly as fun or exciting, but at least my effort makes a difference now. A big difference.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#147

Post by messe »

drran wrote: post #127
onion2k wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No part of any open source license says I have to like companies that extract billions in value from open source projects without contributing back to the project. My opinion is simply that once you get to a few million in revenue putting a few thousand back in to the code that got you there is a decent thing to do, and if you don't then you're not very nice. The fact that the license allows you to do this is great;…

GPL asks to release back changes to code made by a company, for which the company paid already, i.e. it's almost zero price for the company, and just look how much companies are afraid to donate zero ($0) worth of code back to the opensource project and prefer to pirate it instead, including such mega-rich companies as M$.

> GPL asks to release back changes to code made by a company

Only if the code is distributed. SaaS can be (and is) used to get around this.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#148

Post by lucis »

ALittleLight wrote: post #23

There's an interesting section that talks about what you want from a pair programmer - questioning your assumptions, spotting errors, debating design with you, etc, and how Copilot doesn't do this, but instead just spits out the code it thinks you want. That made me think that, when using Copilot, the human is actually the copilot. You're the one spotting bugs, picking different designs, and so on. I also think the d…

You might want to take a look in https://www.tabnine.com/

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#149

Post by michaelbuckbee »

lucis wrote: post #148
ALittleLight wrote: post #23

There's an interesting section that talks about what you want from a pair programmer - questioning your assumptions, spotting errors, debating design with you, etc, and how Copilot doesn't do this, but instead just spits out the code it thinks you want. That made me think that, when using Copilot, the human is actually the copilot. You're the one spotting bugs, picking different designs, and so on. I also think the d…

You might want to take a look in https://www.tabnine.com/

I've been using TabNine for a while and found it very helpful. It really does seem like more of a hyper-intelligent autocomplete than CoPilot which feels like it wants to write it for you.
Post reply on HN