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Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#161

Post by goku12 »

hluska wrote: post #123
chubot wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but I think it will end up being more than 25 years behind schedule, taking into account the claims which is what people like Chris Urmson and Bill Gurley already said prior to 2018 (see my sibling comment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... We're going to end up with complete autonomy Ultimately you'll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you. I think that within…

25 years is far fetched. Again, you obviously have a bone to pick because HN disagreed with you, but this obsession with yours is such that you’re no longer making sense. 25 years?? Totally insane.

To be fair, I don't see any sort of technical arguments on either side to justify their claims. You need some clue about its internal design and its current state to make an educated guess about the expected development time. Without that, 25 years is as valid a guess as 5 years. But I won't dismiss any claims outright. I'm all ears if anyone has any explanation to offer.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#162

Post by watwut »

crazygringo wrote: post #150
dcminter wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.

> I've never seen that with useful tech tools before I've seen it all the time. Version control, code review, unit testing, all of these are top-down. Tech tools like git instead of CVS and Subversion, or Node instead of Java, may be bottom-up. But practices are very much top-down, so I see AI fitting the pattern very well here. It feels very similar to code review in terms of the degree to which it changes developer…

None of them was top down in companies I worked in at the time. They were all stuff developers read about and then pressured management and peers to start using.

Management caught up and started to talk about them only years later.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#163

Post by agilob »

For me Copilot keeps commenting something like "this changes typo in a documentation". The comment is now blocking automerge of the PR, so I have more work. I have to go to the PR and mark the comment as resolved. Thanks AI, thanks Microsoft, fantastic job burning electricity for this. At least Bitcoin created some value ;)

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#164

Post by goku12 »

immibis wrote: post #109
cmiles74 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The less I know about a thing the more useful an LLM seems to be. I’m working with a new-to-me enterprise code base, the LLM helps me find related (and duplicate) code. Even here it’s usefulness has an expiration date, eventually I’ll know where stuff lives and I’ll use it less and less. Life experience tells me I’m not unique and I suspect the constant cram-AI-into-the-thing is because the vendors are hoping, eventu…

Yes, they've legitimately good at a few things (e.g. very fuzzy search), but that doesn't justify the amount of investment.

The environmental damage is even worse than the investment. Those who have the money to invest in it usually care only about the returns and not the environment.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#165

Post by hannob »

acomjean wrote: post #38
ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…

If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity. I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/…

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#166

Post by dcminter »

crazygringo wrote: post #150
dcminter wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.

> I've never seen that with useful tech tools before I've seen it all the time. Version control, code review, unit testing, all of these are top-down. Tech tools like git instead of CVS and Subversion, or Node instead of Java, may be bottom-up. But practices are very much top-down, so I see AI fitting the pattern very well here. It feels very similar to code review in terms of the degree to which it changes developer…

Nope, all of those things were dev driven until they'd diffused out as far as management and only then did they start getting enforced top-down. Often in awful enterprise software ways actually.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#167

Post by bwfan123 »

dcminter wrote: post #131
hyperpape wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…

It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.

I felt the same way. The analogy I use is management dictating the tech-stack to use across the org. It does not make any sense ! They need to stay in their lanes, and let engineering teams decide what is best for their work.

Big tech's general strategy is get-big-fast - and then become too-big-to-fail. This was followed by facebook, uber, paypal, etc. The idea is to embed AI into daily behaviors of people whether they like it or not, and hook them. Then, once hooked, developers will clamor for it whether it is useful or not.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#169

Post by hannob »

sys_64738 wrote: post #107
ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…

Didn't sourceforge used to be the most friendly open source place then they did something which I forget which got them binned. I think the problem with Github is the low barrier to entry for another open source hosting entity if the typical MICROS~1 action of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish were practiced on GH.

They started shipping installers with de-facto-malware, but at a time when they were already on a downward slope. It was many years after "sourceforge was the default place to host FOSS".

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#170

Post by goku12 »

redox99 wrote: post #78
AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

Why wouldn't they do everything in their power to increase customer base?

I don't think that this is an effective strategy to achieve that. At some point, the same customer base is going to feel the AI fatigue and yearn for something cleaner.
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