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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#241

Post by gen220 »

BeetleB wrote: post #227
gen220 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you tried Gemini 2.5? It's cheaper and scores higher on the Aider leaderboard.

I haven’t yet, I’ll give it a shot!

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#242

Post by GenshoTikamura »

timrogers wrote: post #61
binarymax wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?

What I'm most excited about is 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. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

What will you be most excited about when the most interesting and complex problems are out of the Overton window and deemed mundane, boring or annoying as well, or turn out to be intractable for your abilities?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#243

Post by GenshoTikamura »

tjpnz wrote: post #181
timrogers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm most excited about is 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. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

>Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and complex problems. Where does the most come from? There's a certain sense of satisfaction in knowing I've tested a piece of code per my experience in the domain coupled with knowl…

He does not feel that way, he's just salespitching for Microsoft here

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#244

Post by cuu508 »

timrogers wrote: post #61
binarymax wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?

What I'm most excited about is 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. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

But isn't writing tests and updating documentation also the areas where automated quality control is the hardest? Existing high quality tests can work as guardrails for writing business logic, but what guardrails could AI use to to evaluate if its generated docs and tests are any good?

I would not be surprised if things end up the other way around – humans doing the boring and annoying tasks that are too hard for AI, and AI doing the fun easy stuff ;-)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#246

Post by krainboltgreene »

n2d4 wrote: post #105
sethammons wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

textbook survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias every bullet hole in that plane is the 1k PRs contributed by copilot. The missing dots, and whole missing planes, are unaccounted for. Ie, "ai ruined my morning"

It's not survivorship bias. Survivorship bias would be if you made any conclusions from the 1000 merged PRs (eg. "90% of all merged PRs did not get reverted"). But simply stating the number of PRs is not that.

Given that Github is continuing with the product and marketing to us it feels sufficient to count that as a conclusion.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#248

Post by GenshoTikamura »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #126
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…

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…

history/1950/people-in-swimming-pool-drinking-wine-served-by-a-robot.png

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#249

Post by rcarmo »

twodave wrote: post #23
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…

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…

That quote was completely misrepresented.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#250

Post by rcarmo »

lacoolj wrote: post #164
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…

They have released numbers, but I can't say they are for this specific product or something else. They are apparently having AI generate "30%" of their code. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-3...

That article is wrong, that is not what was said.
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