Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

github.blog

161–170 of 372 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#161

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

The money won't be flowing forever. This will cost you $6,000 a year.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#162

Major scam alert, they are training on your code in private repos if you use this You can tell because they advertise “Pro” and “Pro+” but then the FAQ reads, > Does GitHub use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train GitHub’s model? > No. GitHub does not use either Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train its models. Aka, even paid individuals plans are getting brain raped

Might have been the case, but no longer:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing...

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#164
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…

They have released numbers, but I can't say they are for this specific product or something else. They are apparently having AI generate "30%" of their code.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-3...

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. This is a feature, not a bug. LLMs are going to be the next "OMG my AWS bill" phenomenon.

I think that models are gonna commoditize, if they haven't already. The cost of switching over is rather small, especially when you have good evals on what you want done. Also there's no way you can build a business without providing value in this space. Buyers are not that dumb.

They are already quite commoditized. Commoditization doesn't mean "cheap", and it doesn't mean you won't spend $15 a night like the GP did.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#166

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…

I don’t get it? Isn’t it just a monthly fixed subscription.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#167

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…

> 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.

I get paid for the mundane, boring, annoying tasks, and I really like getting paid.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at the time. We generally believed that automation would get rid of repetitive work that didn't require a lot of thought. And in many ways programming was seen almost at the top of the heap. Intellectually demanding and requiring high levels of precision and rigor. Who would've thought (except you) that this would be one of the things that AI would be especially…

Its interesting that even people initially skeptical are now thinking they are on the "chopping block" so to speak. I'm seeing it all over the internet and the slow realization that what supposed to be the "top of the heap" is actually at the bottom - not because of difficulty of coding but because the AI labs themselves are domain experts in software and therefore have the knowledge and data to tackle it as a proble…

I don't think I'm on the chopping block because of AI capabilities, but because of executive shortsightedness. Kinda like moving to the Cloud eliminated sysadmins, but created DevOps, but in many ways the solution is ill-suited to the problem.

Even in the early days of LLM-assisted coding tools, I already know that there will be executives who would said: Let's replace our pool of expensive engineers with a less expensive license. But the only factor that led to this decision is cost comparison. Not quality, not maintenance load, and very much not customer satisfaction.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ti…

The comments have the same value as the answers themselves. Kinda like annotations and errata on a book. It's like seeing "See $algorithm in The Art of Programming V1" in a comment before a complex code.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the motivation for restricting to Pro+ if billing is via premium requests? I have a (free, via open source work) Pro subscription, which I occasionally use. I would have been interested in trying out the coding agent, but how do I know if it's worth $40 for me without trying it ;).

Great question!

We started with Pro+ and Enterprise first because of the higher number of premium requests included with the monthly subscription.

Whilst we've seen great results within GitHub, we know that Copilot won't get it right every time, and a higher allowance of free usage means that a user can play around and experiment, rather than running out of credits quickly and getting discouraged.

We do expect to open this up to Pro and Business subscribers - and we're also looking at how we can extend access to open source maintainers like yourself.

Post reply on HN