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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#211

Post by taurath »

worldsayshi wrote: post #100
literalAardvark wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We need to get 1000 PRs merged from Copilot" "But that'll take more time" "Doesn't matter"

I do agree that some scepticism is due here but how can we tell if we're treading into "moving the goal posts" territory?

I think the implied promise of the technology, that it is capable of fundamentally changing organizations relationships with code and software engineering, deserves deep understanding. Companies will be making multi million dollar decisions based on their belief in its efficacy

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#212

Post by nozzlegear »

timrogers wrote: post #175
hollowturtle wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot I'd like a breakdown of this phrase, how much human work vs Copilot and in what form, autocomplete vs agent. It's not specified seems more like a marketing trickery than real data

The "1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot" datapoint is specifically referring to Copilot coding agent over the past 2.5 months. Pretty much every developer at GitHub is using Copilot in their day to work, so its influence touches virtually every code change we make ;)

> Pretty much every developer at GitHub is using Copilot in their day to work, so its influence touches virtually every code change we make ;)

Genuine question, but is CoPilot use not required at GitHub? I'm not trying to be glib or combative, just asking based on Microsoft's current product trajectory and other big companies (e.g. Shopify) forcing their devs to use AI and scoring their performance reviews based on AI use.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#213

Post by nautilus12 »

timrogers wrote: post #44
taurath wrote: 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…

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…

Welp....Github was good product while it lasted.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#214

Post by nautilus12 »

timrogers wrote: post #173
leptons wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

But would you rather get paid to spend your time doing the interesting and enjoying work, or the mundane and boring stuff? ;) My hope is that agents like Copilot can help us burn down the tedious stuff and make more time for the big value adds.

Id just rather get paid

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#215

Post by nautilus12 »

ai-skeptic wrote: post #185
timrogers wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But would you rather get paid to spend your time doing the interesting and enjoying work, or the mundane and boring stuff? ;) My hope is that agents like Copilot can help us burn down the tedious stuff and make more time for the big value adds.

Though I do not doubt your intentions to do what you think will make developers' lives better, can you be certain that your bosses, and their bosses, have our best interests in mind as well? I think it would be pretty naive to believe that your average CEO wouldn't absolutely love not to have to pay developers at all.

But this way the developers can spend all their time working on the truly interesting problems, like how to file for unemployment.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#216

Post by nautilus12 »

timrogers wrote: post #44
taurath wrote: 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…

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…

Why don't you focus on automating your CEO's job, a comparatively easy task, rather than automating your fellow engineer's jobs?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#217

Post by nautilus12 »

Arubis wrote: post #210

I'm building RSOLV ( https://rsolv.dev ) as an alternative approach to GitHub's Copilot agent. Our key differentiator is cross-platform support - we work with Jira, Linear, GitHub, and GitLab - rather than limiting teams to GitHub's ecosystem. GitHub's approach is technically impressive, but our experience suggests organizations derive more value from targeted automation that integrates with existing workflows rather…

Why don't you focus on automating your CEO's job, a comparatively easy task compared to automating engineering tasks.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#218

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

nautilus12 wrote: post #216
timrogers wrote: post #44

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…

Why don't you focus on automating your CEO's job, a comparatively easy task, rather than automating your fellow engineer's jobs?

Spoken by someone who's apparently never run a real business

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#219

Post by avs733 »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #137
shwouchk wrote: post #67

I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.

This is something I've noticed as well with different AIs. They seem to disproportionately trust data read from the web. For example, I asked to check if some obvious phishing pages were scams and multiple times I got just a summary of the content as if it was authoritative. Several times I've gotten some random chinese repo with 2 stars presented as if it was the industry standard solution, since that's what it said…

>They seem to disproportionately trust data read from the web.

I doubt LLM's have anything like what we would conceptualize as trust. They have information, which is regurgitated because it is activated as relevant.

That being said, many humans don't really have a strong concept of information validation as part of day to day action and thinking. Development theory talks about this in terms of 'formal operational' thinking and 'personal epistemology' - basically how does thinking happen and then how is knowledge in those models conceptualized. Learning Sciences research generally talks about Piaget and formal operational before adulthood and stages of personal epistemology in higher education.

Research consistently suggests that about 50% of adults are not able to consistently operate in the formal thinking space. The behavior you are talking about is also typical of 'absolutist' epistemic perspectives where answers are right or wrong and aren't meaningfully evaluated - just identifed as relevant or not. Evaluating the credibility of information is that it comes from a source that is trusted - most often an authority figure - it is not the role of the person knowing it.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#220

Post by spooneybarger »

DeepYogurt wrote: post #75
twodave wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0] In any case, I think this is the best use case for AI in programming—as a force multiplier for the developer. It’s for the best benefit of both AI and humanity for AI to avoid diminishing the creativity, agency and critical thinking skills of its human operators. AI should be task oriented, but high level decision-making and…

> I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0] Similar to google. MS now requires devs to use ai

I know a lot of devs at MSFT, none of them are required to use AI.
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