GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#161

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #94

suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#162

Post by fhd2 » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #94

suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

I could tell you not to worry, but I don't think I will.

How about embracing it? Think it all the way through: If software development completely disappears as a profession, what impact would it have on other possible jobs, on society? What are the potential bad outcomes from that? What would that mean for your ability to survive and enjoy yourself? What would you do?

You'd find a way to make the best of it, I suppose. And the best is as good as it gets. Maybe this imaginary new world sucks, maybe not. You're young, from the sound of it. You get to be around for the future, when I'm long gone, that's kinda cool. I'm sure you'll find a way, you seem like a clever person.

I find there's something powerful about thinking the worst case scenario through, and feeling somewhat prepared for it. Makes it easier to focus on the present.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#163

Post by zzo38computer » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #87

suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. I hope I can turn this feature off, i.e. that it's not a feature other users can use on my repositories. I'm already getting AI slop comments suggesting unhelpful fixes on my open source projects, I don't need "the anointed one" sending over slop as well – while replacing t…

I thought there are restrictions about who can assign issues and who they can be assigned to? So, I would not expect that other users would be able to use it on your repositories (unless an exception is made, but I think it would be better if an exception is not made, so that other users can't use this feature on your repositories).

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#164

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #101

nickstinemates wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to thrive in this world you need to change your attitude ASAP. New tech waves happen all of the time. Embracing them is the path.

How? Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. I don't have any ideas anyway (I have only one "idea", and it's someone elses and I have no faith that it'll get me a foothold). Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues. Everything I can "change to" has a 2 year delta and that is a 100x capability change within the AI space right now.

> Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues

Don't get high on your own (industry's) supply. This foward-looking BS is targeted at clueless investors, Level 5 self-driving cars have been a "few years away" for almost 2 decades now, and here we are, still having to deal with ADAS like cavemen, and looking back at the trail of dead companies that believed they could solve self-driving.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#165

Post by ilrwbwrkhv » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #83

hassleblad23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github has completely abandoned the Intellij Copilot plugin it seems. Even model selection is not supported. This is good for Jetbrains though because they have their own competing AI service. Jetbrains AI doesn't support multiline edits in tab completion or chat, but it does in the inline prompt mode (although its limited to the same file only).

IntelliJ with Cursor-like autocomplete or Cursor with IntelliJ-quality general IDE tooling (lookup/rename symbol, diagnostics, and general UI) would be the ultimate editor. IntelliJ’s autocomplete was really bad last time I tried it, and if it’s still only single line it’s still bad. Fortunately GitHub copilot in IntelliJ is good, maybe as good as Cursor except that it can’t delete/rewrite code or jump to different l…

Try Augment https://www.augmentcode.com/

The IntelliJ integration works really well. Not sure why they aren't more widely known.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#166

Post by johnfn » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

reducesuffering wrote: post #56

johnfn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where programmers can be replaced, it's less clear to me that plumbers, janitors, electricians, construction laborers, etc, are also all out of a job.

Think secondary effects. What does a world in which almost every programmer can be automated look like? It looks like massive extremely fast technological development, how to build and program robotics will be solved almost instantly. With solved robotics goes every other labor. We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, unti…

I still don't see it. I think for quite a while replacing a single engineer will be costly and resource-intensive. I think many companies would be happy to replace all programmers with AI that are just as slow as programmers, but marginally cheaper. That doesn't mean that we'll suddenly have massive extremely fast technological development.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#167

Post by mystified5016 » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #94

suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

It will be fine. It may not be what you expected, and it may be harder than you expected, but programming and software engineering won't go away. The job is changing and we all have to either change with it or find something else.

Typist used to be a career. People's entire jobs revolved around being able to operate a typewriter quickly. That skill became obsolete as computers were introduced, but the role didn't go away (for a long time anyway). Plenty typists learned to use computers and kept doing transcription or secretarial work like they always had done. Some refused to learn and took other career paths while a new generation of computer users came in.

This has happened quite frequently in this industry. The skills we use now are about to be made obsolete, but our roles will still largely exist.

The scary part is that we know right now that our skills are about to be obsolescent, but we don't yet know what the next thing is actually going to be. It's hard to prepare.

I'm still fairly early in my career. I plan to cope by learning how to use these new AI tools. My core engineering skills will always be useful to some degree, but I have to stay with the times to stay competitive. That's it, that's the plan. Learn about the new thing as it's being built and try to stay ready.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#168

Post by bradchris » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:10 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #129

mywittyname wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in the industry long enough to have been around for a few crashes. My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever. I don't think LLMs are fundamentally more threatening than off shore developers were. Sure, we lost jobs during that time, but businesses realized eventually that the pro…

Your logic works for seniors, but honestly I'm unsure how it works for anybody that just wants to break in.

Isn’t that what everyone said about outsourcing too?

My view is LLMs will compete with outsourced developers (and contractors/consultants for one-off jobs), where job context and project scope is already subject to a communication gap.

A big role of full time employees is not just to code, but to interact to various degrees with PMs/Sales/Customers/the rest of the company stakeholders to varying degrees.

Ultimately someone has to know enough of the technical side of both the product and company to actually _know_ what to prompt/review for.

Sure, if the entire industry becomes agents selling agent-developed products to other agents and providing agent-on-agent support, then… yeah. But that is a shell game.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#169

Post by suyash » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #94

suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

Never loose hope, I'm assuming you are young if you're a student right now. Time is on your side, no matter where the industry goes, just flow with it, try to learn the new technologies so you're never behind others who are competing for same positions.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#170

Post by rurp » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

throw83288 wrote: post #94

suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

In addition to the good responses you've gotten about not overreacting to hype cycles I'll add that you should also try to spend less time worrying about the unknown. I understand the appeal of a straightforward career path of college major -> internship -> junior role -> mid-level -> senior all in the same field. That works out great for many people, but you should also be aware that there are a lot, and I mean a lot of people whose path ended up looking nothing like that and are leading happy comfortable lives.

Even if the worst case happens and the field gets wrecked by AI it won't be the end of the world. There will always be work for smart and reliable people. You might end up having to learn some new skills you weren't expecting to, but hey that's life. I have quite a bit of sympathy for someone with 30-40 years of experience who sees their career swiped away; retooling and getting hired in a new area can be quite hard at that stage. But for someone in their early 20s? There's absolutely nothing that can prevent you from adapting to whatever the new economy looks like in a few years.