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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#151

Post by cube2222 »

I've been using Copilot for a few months and...

Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it.

Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder.

And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes.

But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :insert shut up and take my money gif:

It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test cases; it's great as an autocomplete on steroids that completes entire lines + fills in all arguments, instead of just a single identifier; it's great for quickly writing nice contextual error messages (especially useful for Go developers and the constant errors.Wrap, Copilot is really good at writing meaningful error messages there); and it's also great for technical documentation, as it's able to autocomplete markdown (and it does it surprisingly well).

Overall, I definitely wouldn't want to go back to writing code without it. It just takes care of most of the mundane and obvious code for you, so you can take care of the interesting bits. It's like having the stereotypical "intern" as an associate built-in to your editor.

And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just surprising how good of a suggestion it can make.

It's also ridiculously flexible. When I start writing graphs in ASCII (cause I'm just quickly writing something down in a scratch file) it'll actually understand what I'm doing and start autocompleting textual nodes in that ASCII graph.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#152

Post by exyi »

andrewallbright wrote: post #111

This has probably been talked about but... If most code is "bad" code (any definition works) and this AI was trained on all/most code on GitHub, does that mean that this AI mostly helps to produces bad code?

I have been using copilot for some time... I'd say yes and no. It helps you a lot when you are writing repetitive code, so in a way it encourages you to write the repetitive BS instead of making a function for that or something. But it's also helpful for writing tests and nice error message. You just type

     if (x.length
And it figures out the rest. So while sometimes it encourages bad code, when you know how to use it well, it helps you write the good things I'd normally be too lazy to write

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#153

Post by speedgoose »

andrewallbright wrote: post #111

This has probably been talked about but... If most code is "bad" code (any definition works) and this AI was trained on all/most code on GitHub, does that mean that this AI mostly helps to produces bad code?

It depends. I have not collected data to prove my observations, but I find the rust suggestions better quality on average than the python suggestions. Some people do terrible things in Python.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#154

Post by capableweb »

password4321 wrote: post #101
dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

> train on open source projects To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely leaving the Copilot user responsibl…

Not to mention that just because the code is public, doesn't mean you can use it however you want. You can publish code and still retain copyright. Wonder if GitHub looked at the license when they gathered the data for the model.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#155

Post by natefinch »

FinalBriefing wrote: post #86
dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

Yea...does this mean it will stop working until I pay? It's been really nice for autofilling console logs and boilerplate code...but $10? It's a novelty that is nice when it works, but that's a steep price point for what it is, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

People in the technical preview get a 60 day free trial, but yes, after that, you'll have to pay.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#156

Post by tmalsburg2 »

greatpatton wrote: post #126
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it help you to speed up development but not be worth 10$/month. Your hourly rate can’t be that low.

It's great when it works, and can also be costly when it doesn't or when you blindly trust it.

Which is just another way of saying that it doesn’t really work, except perhaps for party tricks.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#157

Post by exyi »

metadat wrote: post #28

I tried GHCP but found it overall unhelpful and kind of stressful to use, because of potential bugs I might overlook and "import" into my project. Definitely does not seem worth paying for me to end up more stressed out, haha.

So it depends if you prefer writing or doing code review :) You'd maybe need another tool which converts review work to writing work

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#158

Post by MereInterest »

jstummbillig wrote: post #90
dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

> has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself Sure it has: Time. In terms of economics it's really simple: Does Copilot free up more than 10$ worth of your time per month? If the product works at all as I understand it (I haven't tried), the answer should be a resounding "yes, and then some" for pretty much any SE, given the current market rates. If the answer is no (for example because it pro…

> I don't know why it would feel any more icky than making money off of open source in other ways.

For me, this entirely comes down to the philosophy of how a deep learning model should be described. On the one hand, the training and usage could be thought of as separate steps. Copyrighted material goes into training the model, and when used it creates text from a prompt. This is akin to a human hearing many examples of jazz, then composing their own song, where the new composition is independent of the previous works. On the other hand, the training and usage could be thought of as a single step that happens to have caching for performance. Copyrighted material and a prompt both exist as inputs, and the output derives from both. This is akin to a photocopier, with some distortion applied.

The key question is whether the output of Copilot are derivative works of the training data, which as far as I know is entirely up in the air and has no court precedent in either direction. I'd lean toward them being derivative works, because the model can output verbatim copies of the training data. (E.g. Outputting the exact code with identical comments to Quake's inverse sqrt function, prior to having that output be patched out.)

Getting back to the use of open source, if the output of Copilot derives from its training data in a legal sense, then any use of Copilot to produce non-open-source code is a violation of every open-source licensed work in its training data.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#160

Post by [deleted] »

ahnick wrote: post #11
notamy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the criteria for being considered "a maintainer of a popular open source project"? The FAQ [0] says > A maintainer of a popular open source project is defined as someone who has write or admin access to one or more of the *most popular open source projects* on GitHub (emphasis added) [0] https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-ca...

Ummm, yes, that was my original point. What does "one or more of the most popular open source projects on GitHub" mean exactly? Do you need a certain number of github stars on your project? Are you listed on some "most popular github projects specific page"? or what?

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