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

GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 333 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#221

Post by imiric »

lispisok wrote: post #194
imiric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are extrapolating from when we saw huge improvements 1-2 years ago. Performance improvements have flatlined. Current AI predictions reminds me of self-driving car hype from the mid 2010s

> Performance improvements have flatlined.

Multimodality, MoE, RAG, open source models, and robotics, have all been/seen massive improvements in the past year alone. OpenAI's Sora is a multi-generational leap over anything we've seen before (not released yet, granted, but it's a real product). This is hardly flatlining.

I'm not even in the AI field, but I'm sure someone can provide more examples.

> Current AI predictions reminds me of self-driving car hype from the mid 2010s

Ironically, Waymo's self-driving taxis were launched in several cities in 2023. Does this count?

I can see AI skepticism is as strong as ever, even amidst clear breakthroughs.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#222

Post by hackermatic »

lispisok wrote: post #147
msoad wrote: post #78

This should've been done in VSCode. Most developers don't want to write code in a browser. Once VSCode extension is built they could generalize it to other editors. I'm sure they are thinking of VSCode integration and I am hopping for that to be available soon

I wonder if AI tools is going to kill editor diversity. Every one of these tools VS Code is the first class citizen and other editors are an afterthought. Sure people can write their own Emacs package but that's only if the tool developers enable it and the experience is usually not as good as the official VS Code version. I can also see the future where not using VS Code is a signal you are less reliant on AI tools…

We used to say the same about Eclipse!

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#223

Post by obmelvin »

sroussey wrote: post #207
candiddevmike wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Once it writes the code, take that into a new session to fix a bug. Repeat with new sessions. Don’t let it read the buggy code, it will just get worse.

Interesting - I almost always iterate on code in the same session. I will try doing it with history off and frequently re-starting the session. I naively assumed the extra context would help, but I can see how it's also just noise when there are 5 versions of the same code in the context.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#224

Post by crooked-v »

heavyset_go wrote: post #213
studenthrow3831 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 You're posting under a thread where many seniors are discussing how they don't want this because it doesn't work. You cannot make a model understand anything. You can help a person understand something. You can accomplish that with a simple conversation with a junior enginee…

On that note, for anyone who hasn't run into the "looks like it understands, but doesn't" issue, here's a simple test case to try it out: Ask ChatGPT to tell you the heights of two celebrities, and ask it which would be taller if they were side-by-side. Regenerate the response a few times and you'll get responses where it clearly "knows" the heights, but also obviously doesn't understand how a taller-shorter comparison works.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#225

Post by heavyset_go »

srcreigh wrote: post #184
imiric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I agree with your point, just want to point out that models have been trained on AI generated prompts as synthetic data.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#226

Post by rurp »

lelandbatey wrote: post #151
sixhobbits wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

This makes sense to me. When updating anything beyond a small project, keeping things reliable and mantainable for the future is 10x more important than just solving the immediate bug or feature. Short term hacks add up and become overwhelming at some point, even if each individual change seems manageable at the time.

I used to work as a solo contractor on small/early projects. The most common job opportunity I encountered was someone who had hired the cheapest offshore devs they could find, seen good early progress with demos and POCs, but over time things kept slowing down and eventually went off the rails. The codebases were invariably a mess of hacks and spaghetti code.

I think the best historical comp to LLMs is offshore outsourcing, except without the side effect of lifting millions of people out of poverty in the third world.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#227

Post by Yeul »

qwertox wrote: post #205
studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student 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…

Don't forget that this is marketing. "You'll be the best cook if you buy the Mega Master Automated Kitchen Appliance (with two knives included)" That line is marketed at me, who does not know how to cook, they're telling me I'll be almost a chef. You'll hear Jensen say that coding is now an obsolete skill, because he's marketing the capabilities of his products to shareholders, to the press. It might well be that in…

All the famous chefs didn't become famous from their cooking. They became famous because of their charisma. Jamie Oliver looked really good on camera.

AI will never be able to bullshit the way humans can.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#228

Post by vizzier »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #51

I think Microsoft is going the wrong direction with Copilot (though it's a reasonable direction given their incentives). Right now Copilot is terrible at large changes to complex codebases; the larger and more complex, the worse. But it's great at suggesting very short snippets that guess exactly what you were in the middle of writing and write it for you. I wish Copilot focused more on the user experience at the sma…

proper insertion points in completions akin to older Visual Studio templates would probably be ideal, but you can use ctrl + right arrow in vscode to accept completions one word at a time, rather than a whole block with tab.

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#229

Post by hackermatic »

Lucasoato wrote: post #85

Am I the only one disappointed by Github copilot quality lately? I get much better responses by copying and pasting on ChatGPT, rather than the suggestions in the vscode plugin.

People have been anecdotally reporting and investigating similar problems since at least last year[0], and it's entirely possible that changes to improve one aspect of a model could make it much worse at other aspects without careful regression testing and gradual rollout. I think models intended to solve every problem make it very hard to guarantee they can solve any particular problem reliably over time.

Imagine if a million developers simultaneously got much worse at their jobs!

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/is-ch...

Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview

#230

Post by guluarte »

studenthrow3831 wrote: post #3

Student 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…

LLMs are autocomplete with context, for simple tasks they do OK but for complex tasks they get lost and produce crap
Post reply on HN