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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

github.blog

271–280 of 372 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#271

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[flagged]

That's exactly what senior executives who aren't coding are saying everywhere. Meanwhile, engineers are using it for code completion and as a Google search alternative. I don't see much difference here at all, the only habit to change is learning to trust an AI solution as much as a Stack Overflow answer. Though the benefit of SO is each comment is timestamped and there are alternative takes, corrections, caveats in…

> Meanwhile, engineers are using it for code completion and as a Google search alternative.

Yep, that's the usefulness right now.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Github and Copilot are separate products, nothing mandates you to use it.

It's nearly impossible though to escape the flood of Copilot buttons creeping into every corner of Github (and other Microsoft products like VSCode). This looks like Microsoft aims for deep integration, not separation.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#273

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…

> we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot I'm curious to know how many Copilot PRs were not merged and/or required human take-overs.

I'm curious how many were much more than Dependabot changes.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#274
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…

400 GitHub employees are using GitHub Copilot day in day out, and it comes out as #5 contributor? I wouldn't call that a success. If it is any useful, I would expect that even if a developer write 10% of their code using it, it would hold be #1 contributor in every project.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#275
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 want to know that Microsoft, the company famous for dog-fooding is using this day in and day out, with success."

They just cut down their workforce, letting some of their AI people go. So, I assume there isn't that much success.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#278
Is there anything that satisfies the people here ? Copilot today is perhaps the only AI that is actually assisting for something productive.

Microsoft, besides maybe Google and OpenAI, are the only ones that are actually exploring towards the practical usefulness of AIs. Other kiddies like Sonnet and whatnot are still chasing meaningless numbers and benchmarking scores, that sort of stuff may appeal to high school kids or immatures but burning billions of dollars and energy resources just to sound like a cool kid?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#279

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Given that PRs run actions in a more trusted context for private repos, this is a bit concerning.

As we've built Copilot coding agent, we've put a lot of thought and work into our security story. One of the things we've done here is to treat Copilot's commits like commits from a first-time contributor to an open source project. When Copilot pushes changes, your GitHub Actions workflows won't run by default, and you'll have to click the "Approve and run workflows" button in the merge box. That gives you the chance…

The announcement https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo... seems to position GitHub Actions as a core part of the Copilot coding agent’s architecture. From what I understand in the documentation and your comment, GitHub Actions is triggered later in the flow, mainly for security reasons. Just to clarify, is GitHub Actions also used in the development environment of the agent, or only after the code is generated and pushed?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#280

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 ;)

Unfortunately, you can't opt out of Co-Pilot in Github. Although I did just use it to ask how to remove the sidebar with "Latest Changes" and other non-needed widgets that feel like clutter.

Copilot said: There is currently no official GitHub setting or option to remove or hide the sidebar with "Latest Changes" and similar widgets from your GitHub home page.

I'm using this an example to show that it is no longer possible to set up a GitHub account to NOT use CoPilot, even if it just lurks in the corner of every page waiting to offer a suggestion. Like many A.I. features it's there, whether you want to use it or not, without an option to disable.

So I'm suss of the "pretty much every developer" claim, no offense.

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