231–240 of 372 posts
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.
So like the typical junior developer, then.
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From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pret…
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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.
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> I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions That doesn’t matter anymore when you’re vibe coding it. No human is going to look at it anyway. It can all be if/else on one line in one file. If it works and if the LLMs can work at, iterate and implement new business requirements, whil…
Wild take. Let’s just hand over the keys to LLMs I suppose, the fancy next token predictor is the capitan now.
This is a common view, and I think will be the norm on the near-to-mid term, especially for basic CRUD apps and websites. Context windows are still too small for anything even slightly complex (I think we need to be at about 20m before we start match human levels), but we'll be there before you know it.
Engineers will essentially become people who just guide the AIs and verify tests.
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> I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. Consider using Aider, and aggressively managing the context (via /add, /drop and /clear). https://aider.chat/
I, too, recommend aider whenever these discussions crop up; it converted me from the "AI tools suck" side of this discussion to the "you're using the wrong tool" side. I'd also recommend creating little `README`'s in your codebase that are mainly written with aider as the intended audience. In it, I'll explain architecture, what code makes (non-)sense to write in this directory, and so on. Has the side-effect of bein…
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> 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.
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Copilot only does work that has been assigned to it by a developer, and all the code that the agent writes has to go through a pull request before it can be merged. In fact, Copilot has no write access to GitHub at all, except to push to its own branch. That ensures that all of Copilot's code goes through our normal review process which requires a review from an independent human.
Tim, are you or any of your coworkers worried this will take your jobs?
I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is…
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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…
When I repeated to other tech people from about 2012 to 2020 that the technological singularity was very close, no one believed me. Coding is just the easiest to automate away into almost oblivion. And, too many non technical people drank the Flavor Aid for the fallacy that it can be "abolished" completely soon. It will gradually come for all sorts of knowledge work specialists including electrical and mechanical eng…
We absolutely have not reached anything resembling anyone's definition of a singularity, so you are very much still not proven correct in this. Unless there are weaker definitions of that than I realised?
I think you'll be proven wrong about the economy too, but only time will tell there.
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I, too, recommend aider whenever these discussions crop up; it converted me from the "AI tools suck" side of this discussion to the "you're using the wrong tool" side. I'd also recommend creating little `README`'s in your codebase that are mainly written with aider as the intended audience. In it, I'll explain architecture, what code makes (non-)sense to write in this directory, and so on. Has the side-effect of bein…
Why create READMEs and not just comments in the code?
For example “this module contains logic defining routes for serving an HTTP API. We don’t write any logic that interacts directly with db models in these modules. Rather, these modules make calls to services in `/services`, which make such calls.”
It wouldn’t make sense to duplicate this comment across every router sub-module. And it’s not obvious from looking at any one module that this rule is applied across all modules, without such guidance.
These little bits of scaffolding really help narrow down the scope of the code that LLMs eventually try to write.