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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#151

Post by hollowturtle »

timrogers wrote: post #44
taurath wrote: post #13

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation. Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work. I think its somewhat telling that they can't share n…

We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today. So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contri…

> 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot

I'd like a breakdown of this phrase, how much human work vs Copilot and in what form, autocomplete vs agent. It's not specified seems more like a marketing trickery than real data

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#153

Post by sourdoughness »

skydhash wrote: post #128
doug_durham wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The market value good documentation. Anything critical and commonly used is pretty well documented (linux, databases, software like Adobe's,...). You can see how many books/articles have been written about those systems.

We’re not talking about AI writing books about the systems, though. We’re talking about going from an undocumented codebase to a decently documented one, or one with 50% coverage going to 100%.

Those orgs that value high-quality documentation won’t have undocumented codebases to begin with.

And let’s face it, like writing code, writing docs does have a lot of repetitive, boring, boilerplate work, which I bet is exactly why it doesn’t get done. If an LLM is filling out your API schema docs, then you get to spend more time on the stuff that’s actually interesting.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#155

Post by insin »

bamboozled wrote: post #139
tokioyoyo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know exactly what they meant, and you know they’re correct.

I like updating documentation and feel that it's fairly important to be doing myself so I actually understand what the code / services do? I use all of these tools, but you also know what "they're doing"... I know our careers are changing dramatically, or going away (I'm working on a replacement for myself), but I just like listening to all the "what we're doing is really helping you ..."

I'd interpret the original statement as "tests which don't matter" and "documentation nobody will ever read", the ones which only exist because someone said they _have_ to, and nobody's ever going to check them as long as they exist (like a README.md in one my main work projects I came back to after temporarily being reassigned to another project - previously it only had setup instructions, now: filled with irrelevent slop, never to be read, like "here is a list of the dependencies we use and a summary of each of their descriptions!").

Doing either of them _well_ - the way you do when you actually care about them and they actually matter - is still so far beyond LLMs. Good documentation and good tests are such a differentiator.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#156

Post by skydhash »

sourdoughness wrote: post #153
skydhash wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market value good documentation. Anything critical and commonly used is pretty well documented (linux, databases, software like Adobe's,...). You can see how many books/articles have been written about those systems.

We’re not talking about AI writing books about the systems, though. We’re talking about going from an undocumented codebase to a decently documented one, or one with 50% coverage going to 100%. Those orgs that value high-quality documentation won’t have undocumented codebases to begin with. And let’s face it, like writing code, writing docs does have a lot of repetitive, boring, boilerplate work, which I bet is exact…

A much better options is to use docstrings[0] and a tool like doxygen to extract an API reference. Domain explanations and architecture can be compiled later from design and feature docs.

A good example of the kind of result is something like the Laravel documentation[1] and its associated API reference[2]. I don't believe AI can help with this.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docstring

[1]: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x

[2]: https://api.laravel.com/docs/12.x/

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#157

Post by AdieuToLogic »

antihipocrat wrote: post #125
shepherdjerred wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's exactly what senior executives who aren't coding are saying everywhere. Meanwhile, engineers are using it for code completion and as a Google search alternative. I don't see much difference here at all, the only habit to change is learning to trust an AI solution as much as a Stack Overflow answer. Though the benefit of SO is each comment is timestamped and there are alternative takes, corrections, caveats in…

> I don't see much difference here at all, the only habit to change is learning to trust an AI solution as much as a Stack Overflow answer. Though the benefit of SO is each comment is timestamped and there are alternative takes, corrections, caveats in the comments.

That's a pretty big benefit, considering the feedback was by people presumably with relevant expertise/experience to contribute (in the pre-LLM before-time).

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#158

Post by kondu »

net01 wrote: post #95

on a other note https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/17700 GitHub's automated auto-merged DMCA sync PRs get automated copilot reviews for every single one. AMAZING

The worst thing about LLMs getting commoditized and becoming cheaper is seeing slop like this pollute every meaningful discussion on the internet

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#159

Post by echelon »

timrogers wrote: post #61
binarymax wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?

What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

Do you think you're putting yourself or your coworkers out of work?

If/when will this take over your job?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#160

Post by echelon »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #117
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…

$15 in an evening sounds like a great deal when you consider the cost of highly-paid software engineers

> highly-paid software engineers

For now.

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