I noticed there were a lot of YC companies trying to do similar things. I'm not sure how they think they have a shot against Copilot.
GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
181–190 of 333 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#182So GitHub has outright declared war on competence in programming. Great, just great. The code examples is this blog post are horrible…I'd be embarrassed to share any such demonstration of generated code offering these solutions. Reject that PR in production, for the love of god!
Funny that I already started migrating my personal projects off of GitHub and onto Codeberg over the weekend. I'll be rapidly accelerating that process after today. Copilot has gone from vaguely irritating (and of course I refuse to use it on ethical grounds) to an overall direction for the company I *intensely* disagree with.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#183Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years. I'm not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we're heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme prod…
Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded. Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing everything in Assembly. Python made it much easier to code than writing C. Both increased the demand for coders. Code is a liability, not an asset. The fact that less technical people and people who are not trained engineers can now make useful apps by generating mi…
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Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually i…
> And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures. Don't you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago. This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn't to do ever…
AI can’t write its own prompts. 10k people using the same prompt who actually need 5000 different things.
No improvements to AI will let it read vague speakers’ minds. No improvement to AI will let it get answers it needs if people don’t know how to answer the necessary questions.
Information has to come from somewhere to differentiate 1 prompt into 5000 different responses. If it’s not coming from the people using the AI, where else can it possibly come from?
If people using the tool don’t know how to be specific enough to get what they want, the tool won’t replace people.
s/the tool/spreadsheets
s/the tool/databases
s/the tool/React
s/the tool/low code
s/the tool/LLMs
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#185> and is expressly designed to deliver –not replace–developer creativity I'm not fooled by such corp speak.
If they could, they would!
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually i…
> And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures. Don't you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago. This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn't to do ever…
> But AI will continually improve
There is a bit of a fallacy in here. We don’t know how far it will improve, and in what ways. Progress isn’t continuous and linear, it comes more in sudden jumps and phases, and often plateaus for quite a while.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because we've been here before. Be it the ERPs of the 90s-00s, the low/no-codes of the 2010s, the SaaS and the chatbots of 2015. There was always hype about automating the job. At the end of the day, most of a programmer's job is understanding the business domain, it's differences and edge cases, and translating those into code. An LLM can do the latter part, the same way a compiler can do high-level java into…
I mean, I don't disagree! The leading coefficient of these tools successfully getting you to/near the goal is all about clearly articulating the domain and the job to be done Ergo, it's pretty important to craft experiences that make their core mechanic about that. And that's how Copilot Workspace was designed. The LLM generating the code is in some ways the least interesting part of CW. The effort to understand how…
But there is so much context that the LLM has no access to. Implicit assumptions in the system, undocumented workflows, hard edge cases, acceptable bugs and workarounds, Peter principle boundaries, etc... All these trade-offs need someone that understands the entire business domain, the imperfect users, the system' implementation and invariants, the company's politics and so much more. I have never encountered a single programmer, no matter intelligence and seniority, that could be onboarded on a project simply by looking at the code.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hardest part of software development is not writing code, full stop. It never has been and it never will be. The hard part is designing, understanding, verifying, and repairing complex systems. LLMs do not do this, even a little bit.
I guess my worst fear is not "no more jobs because AI can code" but "no more junior jobs because AI can code under the supervision of a senior". SWE jobs will exist, but only seniors will have them and juniors are never hired. Maybe the occasional "apprentice" will be brought on, but in nowhere near the same amount. Where my blind hope lies more specifically is in networking into one of those "apprentice" roles, or m…
Seniors don’t grow on trees, and they all were juniors at some point. And juniors won’t become seniors by only typing AI chat prompts. I wouldn’t fear.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#189While I've not used this product, I've created somewhat similar setup using open source LLMs that runs locally. After having used it for about three months, I can say that debugging LLM prompts was far more annoying than debugging code. Ultimately, I ended up abandoning my setup and going in favor of writing code the good old fashioned way. YMMV
I had ChatGPT output an algorithm implementation in Go (Shamir Secret Sharing) that I didn't want to figure out. It kinda worked, but everytime I pointed out a problem with the code it seemed more bugs were added (and I ended up hating the "Good catch!" text responses...) Eventually, figuring out why it didn't work made me have to read the algorithm spec and basically write the code from scratch, throwing away all of…
I just asked it the same question and this was the answer it gave me:
go get go.dedis.ch/kyber/v3
LOL...
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#190You can see my earlier comment somewhere here, but I feel obliged to remind everyone that the claim that Github Copilot made developers "55% more productive" came from a study where they asked 100 developers to implement an HTTP server in Javascript, split the group up roughly 50/50, and gave one group Github Copilot. The Copilot group did it in an hour and 11 minutes, whereas the control group got it done 2 hours an…
Do you not have a good experience with github copilot? I recently started using it and it will write functions that are 90% right based on comments, and I just modify what I want. I've felt at least a 2x speedup, maybe even 4x. That said I'm working on a new project where I'm writing a lot of code. For making small changes I could see how its much less valuable.
"I just modify what I want."
i think that's key, you use the llm to get something started and then change/fix/enhance to get what you want. That works for me too but the folks that want to prompt an llm from nothing to a finished application are in for a rough ride.