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Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

fast.ai

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

#21

Post by minimaxir »

Whenever a new generative language model is released and discussed on Hacker News, there's always the comment that "it's worthless because it doesn't always generate coherent text" which I've always disliked because it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative.

However, in the case of Copilot, there has to be a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in terms of generated text than creative language models like GPT-2/GPT-3 to use it as a pair programmer where the overhead in working with the model is worth the time saved via the model.

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

#22

Post by Barrin92 »

minimaxir wrote: post #21

Whenever a new generative language model is released and discussed on Hacker News, there's always the comment that "it's worthless because it doesn't always generate coherent text" which I've always disliked because it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative. However , in the case of Copilot, there has to be a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in terms of generated text than creative language mode…

> it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative.

is that true though? Progress in natural(!) language processing is very iterative, but coding and code correctness is a very precise thing. Both semantically as well as literally. Code that's a 'little bit' wrong technically does not compile, and code that's a 'little bit' wrong semantically might produce catastrophic results.

Engineering doesn't become a natural language problem just because you throw a natural language model at it.

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

#23

Post by ALittleLight »

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 discussion around searching versus autocomplete is interesting. What we need is something that autogenerates a Google search based on your code context and shows you some promising results. I'm imagining a pane in VS Code getting populated with Stack Overflow answers whenever I slow down.

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

#24

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #17
robbedpeter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media synthesis means artists of all sorts will take a hit. Gpt means writers, programmers, journalists, and others will take a hit. Prompt engineering and larger models could mean any procedural use of knowledge in any context could be subject to automation. Consumer level robotics, drones, and battery tech is close to a level that manual labor, delivery, and such tasks can be automated. Maybe we should be preparing…

Copilot (and all other AI tools, and non-AI tools) will lead to more developer jobs, not less. The thing holding most industries back at the moment is the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. Literally every business has an opportunity to automate some process better than it does now, or to make an app to assist a business function, or to drive sales and growth through an application of new tech. T…

[deleted]

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

#25

Post by carschno »

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…

Something like the Stackoverflow Importer for Python? https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import

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

#26

Post by drpixie »

SilverRed wrote: post #12
bigyikes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the real curse is on the programmers who are going to be out of jobs much sooner than people anticipate. All the talk about the low quality of code got me thinking: if humans aren’t reading the code, then the only thing that matters is correctness. Correctness may be an easier problem to solve than readability and refactorability.

If copilot makes programming 10x faster, society will simply demand programs do 10x more.

Afraid not. We'll just accept programs 10x more bloated, and demand systems 10x faster to run them.

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

#29

Post by jimmygrapes »

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…

100% agreed; the copilot is human.

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

#30

Post by drpixie »

Now, imagine you're sitting with your boss, the average typically incompetent project manager or lead programmer ...

Them: type type type ... accept accept ... save (unaware or choosing not to understand the meaningless uncompilable garbage that's been generated)

Them: "There, that's the xxxx function. You'll have the rest done in 2 days, won't you!"

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