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GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

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Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#241

Post by konart »

bdangubic wrote: post #116
konart wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Call me a doomsday prepper >Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. Don't worry. As the other commenter said it: we've seen it all a few times already. I clearly remember how some people reacted to Ruby on Rails as if it's going to replace them just because it provides... well a framework. LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. People who's main job was creating landi…

LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc. except of course they have already … in many places … and counting :)

Any examples maybe?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#242

Post by chipgap98 »

diggan wrote: post #45
chipgap98 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think those are contradictory. The agent is iterating on the code it writes in order to be more useful.

> When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add. This makes it seem like a very basic/rudimentary developer could be repl…

Ah sorry I missed that part. You are right that this sounds like more replacement for people

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#243

Post by mercenario »

brianmcc wrote: post #113

Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages." Not wanting to come across all Luddite about it, but we really ought not to stumble blindly into all this. That said, I remain sceptical. The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.

> Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages."

You know that your job as software engineer is automating tasks that other people could be doing manually, right?

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#244

Post by mhnthrow »

throw83288 wrote: post #145
mhnthrow wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you attempting to achieve with this idea? what kind of foothold? ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful. maybe you are thinking you need to make a startup or something to be successful. i understand the feeling you have a little bit, but agree with the others that you don't need to despair too much about…

I dunno, a job? I don't think one other person's idea is enough. > ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful And water is everywhere but you need a boat to get across it. I don't think I have a boat. I don't know if I can build one. I don't know if anyone will let me on their boat. s/boat/idea generation/g.

can you describe how any idea of this form connects to a job? I think what I'm saying is you don't need any "idea" - it's enough to have skills. You might be overestimating the bar you need to it or what it takes to get jobs in general.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#245

Post by acedTrex »

kristopolous wrote: post #201
acedTrex wrote: post #78

I am so over this LLM obsession. Please let it end

Sorry, this is as paradigmatic a shift as microcomputers, the consumer internet and smartphones. If you really really hate it, you'll either have to leave the industry or stay way out of the mainstream.

Those shifts were plainly and immediately obvious.

LLMs have yet to deliver on any of their promises and every interaction with them shows the fundamental limitations.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#246

Post by aja12 »

throw83288 wrote: post #94
suyash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully te…

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my ent…

Pivot into cybersecurity? As a pentester, a mountain of security bugs in a mountain of AI produced slop that no one understands is the ideal provider of job security, I guess

Maybe pentesting can be partly automated, but "the devil is in the details" and a pentester's primary quality is to look where the automated software won't.

I don't know, truly. The future is somewhat foggy.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#247

Post by gopher_space »

skydhash wrote: post #154
gopher_space wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-code database work was solved with Filemaker Pro decades ago. It turned out that you also need an attention span and an interest in the subject. Most of the flowchart automation software I've been playing around with is already good enough. The Python ecosystem is good enough. Ollama is good enough. The small, purpose built models people seem compelled to make are good enough. If I can replicate your SaaS business…

As always, the edge cases, which you will be aware of by talking to domain experts or the experience of managing the production services for years. There's a reason we're still running decades old software written in no longer maintained programming languages. The only valuable specs was always the code.

Totally agree with your point, and in fact my first programming gig was encapsulating COBOL next to these domain experts. Very generally speaking the edge cases exist because you are trying to be all things to all people.

Rebuilding an existing, predefined service for exactly one use case is straightforward. The tools available are "good enough" to do the job for one person. That person hasn't been building another SaaS, they've been posting well designed documentation on github.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#248

Post by simonw »

singularity2001 wrote: post #230
simonw wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answer those kinds of questions by piping my entire codebase into a large context model (like Claude or o3-mini or Gemini) and prompting it directly. Here's a recent example: files-to-prompt datasette tests -e py -c | \ llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp -u \ 'which of these files contain tests that indirectly exercise the label_column_for_table() function' https://gist.github.com/simonw/bee455c41d463abc6282a5c9c132c...

doesn't it get very expensive quickly if you don't use prompt cashing

I've had the occasional large prompt that cost ~30c - I often use GPT-4o mini if I'm going to ask follow-up questions because then I get prompt caching without having to configure it.

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#249

Post by Jarie_Tuytens »

How is anyone surprised by their incentive to replace SWE jobs? SWE's have an immensely big piece of the companies budget, and that pain is what has led us to where we are now.

Remember, this pain is also human made. We created how software was made, people latched onto it, acted as if it was a science, not realizing that humans can also CHANGE the way software is made.

You can't change physics, but you can change human made concepts (up to a certain degree ofcourse, CS itself is still key).

Re: GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

#250

Post by tarrrooon »

debian3 wrote: post #192
alach11 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been switching back and forth a bit at work recently, and I find Cursor still has a slight edge.

I use both too. 1 year ago Cursor was way ahead. Copilot had only one model and it was 4k input 4k output and it was forgetting about the previous reply. It was horrible. One year later, the input context is at 128k token if you use vs code insider (64k for stable). You have multiples models, etc. they still cut corner like o1 barely answer (I guess they severely restrict the amount of output token) but sonnet 3.5 wo…

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