Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

fast.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 201 posts

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#191

Post by junar »

b3morales wrote: post #190
mariusor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However you did give them permission to use your code by the fact that you acceded to their terms and conditions[1] when you created an account. IANAL, I don't know if this section would hold to scrutiny in a court of law, but I'm pretty sure this is what their legal team considers to cover them when it comes to training Copilot on code hosted with them. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-…

The TOS is not a blanket grant for them to do anything they like with the material. As I said elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27823862 > Certainly the GitHub TOS grants them some common-sense ability to copy the code you upload so that they can usefully host it. Can you point to the portion that allows them to use it for Copilot? > Because I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Section D4: > > This license does…

> You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time

> The “Service” refers to the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub, including any Beta Previews.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#192

Post by hboon »

kortex wrote: post #157
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using TabNine for a while and found it very helpful. It really does seem like more of a hyper-intelligent autocomplete than CoPilot which feels like it wants to write it for you.

The thing I love the most about tabnine is how it learns on your own code base. So if you have particular naming schemes or weird idioms, it eventually picks up on them.

I've installed it a few weeks ago but haven't found it very useful yet. May I ask, which language(s) do you use it for and was it worth paying (I paid).

I'm using it primarily for Swift and some Kotlin.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#193

Post by FeepingCreature »

toxik wrote: post #184
nojito wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you should have never released it. Fairly straight forward solution to your very unique problem.

The license for my software was written in a world where AI was not being used to replace me with my own code. Whatever license was chosen, was chosen to deal with the questions and issues known at the time. It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works. Furthermore, law is not ethics. I said it’s ethically questionable because that’s what ma…

> It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works.

It literally is though.

You don't get to change your mind on an agreement because something happened that you didn't expect.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#194

Post by ALittleLight »

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #187
ALittleLight wrote: post #23

There's an interesting section that talks about what you want from a pair programmer - questioning your assumptions, spotting errors, debating design with you, etc, and how Copilot doesn't do this, but instead just spits out the code it thinks you want. That made me think that, when using Copilot, the human is actually the copilot. You're the one spotting bugs, picking different designs, and so on. I also think the d…

> I'm imagining a pane in VS Code getting populated with Stack Overflow answers whenever I slow down. Right but realize how much of a marginal gain we're fighting for here. You can already do this with a separate window and some extra clicking and typing. Saving a little clicking and typing isn't a huge win, unless you're also willing to argue the most valuable work a SWE does is the clicking and typing. This whole t…

I think the utility is similar to instant search on Google. I get very little by Google autocompleting the term I'm trying to type. I get quite a bit by Google suggesting things I didn't even know to search for.

The automatic SO search pane I was describing might give the same benefits. Most of the time maybe it would be useless. Sometimes it would show what I knew I wanted and save me the trivial effort of a search. The real gain would come from when it hit something that I should have asked but didn't think to. Then, I'd have a valuable insight I never would've had otherwise sitting in some pane ready for me.

Maybe it's just my imagination - but that's how I think it could be good.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#195

Post by kortex »

hboon wrote: post #192
kortex wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I love the most about tabnine is how it learns on your own code base. So if you have particular naming schemes or weird idioms, it eventually picks up on them.

I've installed it a few weeks ago but haven't found it very useful yet. May I ask, which language(s) do you use it for and was it worth paying (I paid). I'm using it primarily for Swift and some Kotlin.

Python, works quite well, golang works super well. C++ and JS are reasonable. Rust, you might as well turn it off. The more popular the language overall, the better it does. Swift and Kotlin might have too little to have refined the model on.

Another thing: I was using the free version in beta so it was effectively the full blown version. It worked super well. I changed jobs, changed hardware, and haven't set up my key yet (hopefully still grandfathered in) but it's felt not as good - the output is a lot shorter, for one. I would likely get the paid version if I lose my beta key. But it's weird that you have the paid version and it's not useful.

It's also possible they nerfed the models over time in the name of some other tradeoff, like cpu or memory. May still be able to configure it. But I distinctly remember it spitting out entire lines or chunks of code, exactly as I would have written them.

It works best when you are writing stuff similar to your own codebase. Perhaps try vendoring some Swift or Kotlin in your project dir to get the engine to fine-tune on it?

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#196

Post by hboon »

kortex wrote: post #195
hboon wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've installed it a few weeks ago but haven't found it very useful yet. May I ask, which language(s) do you use it for and was it worth paying (I paid). I'm using it primarily for Swift and some Kotlin.

Python, works quite well, golang works super well. C++ and JS are reasonable. Rust, you might as well turn it off. The more popular the language overall, the better it does. Swift and Kotlin might have too little to have refined the model on. Another thing: I was using the free version in beta so it was effectively the full blown version. It worked super well. I changed jobs, changed hardware, and haven't set up my k…

Ah thanks. It’s a decent size Swift project. So it should have quite a bit to work off. Maybe it’s the settings. I’ll check what I can tweak.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#197

Post by 908B64B197 »

onion2k wrote: post #46
908B64B197 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry. I guess they felt the same ways when the first compilers were introduced. Or interpreters. > the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. There's already develope…

There's already developers on the market at an incredibly low price. Good luck getting code that compiles out of them, much less that is correct. I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and…

> I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code.

That has not been my experience at all.

There's this myth of the genius dropout in our industry, or that FAANG is basically luck, and yet it always fails to materialize.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#198

Post by rurban »

Neither of both. It's completely irrelevant, as you cannot and may not use it. You cannot use it for production code as it's merely a toy for managers.

And you may not use it as the license of the generated code is unclear at best, GPL at worst.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#199

Post by bluesign »

qiqitori wrote: post #182
bluesign wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about I train millions of tagged images, then when I write ‘mickey mouse’ it spits something very similar to ‘mickey mouse’? This is the what copilot does as far as I understand

Out of the replies I got so far, I liked this one best. Unfortunately the story is off the front page already, so I doubt there will be much more discussion. In my view, artists work the same way. If you ask them to draw Mickey Mouse, they (maybe) will. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are infringing on Disney's copyright by storing images of Mickey Mouse in their brain. But their version of Mickey Mouse won't be…

Thanks for the answer, but here is a bit difference though in our understanding of law, I think if I draw Mickey Mouse now, it is derivative work. Disney can sue me. I think there should be some reasonable difference like trademark cases, people will not see it as Mickey Mouse.

But I think eventually we are at level of what is the minimum required duplicate to define something as duplicate. (I think this is more of a problem of music, similar songs etc)

I think main problem is we are not yet there (exact simulation of human brain), we are more like 'convince people to you are exact simulation of brain' stage.

Also another problem here is 'self trained/directed' vs 'trained/directed by someone'. Imagine I have a human artist (never seen Mickey Mouse), and in front of me some Mickey Mouse art, if I am giving directions to draw a mouse, then saying make in cartoon style, then saying make ears bigger, etc. Till I get the Mickey Mouse reasonably similar, even maybe exactly to the pixel in front of me, is it copyright violation, I wouldn't maybe 100% yes, but I am very closer to that.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#200

Post by mikro2nd »

skohan wrote: post #174
mikro2nd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might also become worse. It seems to me that GitHub has opened themselves (well, this Copilot thing anyway) up to a form of DoS attack: Just imagine what might happen if a bunch of people opened up a number of public repos filled with utter crap? Not suggesting anything, here, just musing on a possibility.

Well, that's a solvable problem. You just need a classifier to filter good code from bad. I would imagine they're already using analytics on the popularity/usage of the repos to weight the training data.

LOL - I'm not sure about many humans' ability to tell good code from bad, given how prolifically they produce "bad" code.
Post reply on HN