I'm honestly surprised by so much hate. IMHO it's more important to look at 1) the progress we've made + what this can potentially do in 5 years and 2) how much it's already helping people write code than dismissing it based on its current state.
GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
291–300 of 372 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#292Which GitHub subscription level is required for the agent?
I found it very confusing - we have GH Business, with Copilot active. Could not find a way to upgrade our Copilot to the level required by the agent.
I tried using my personal Copilot for the purpose of trialing the agent - again, a no-go, as my Copilot is "managed" by the organization I'm part of.
Also, you will want to add more control over to who can assign things to Copilot Agent - just having write access to the repository is a poor descriminator, I think.
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#293> 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…
How strong was the push from leadership to use the agents internally?
As part of the dogfooding I could see them really pushing hard to try having agents make and merge PRs, at which point the data is tainted and you don't know if the 1,000 PRs were created or merged to meet demand or because devs genuinely found it useful and accurate.
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#294Some example PRs if people want to look:
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like updating documentation and feel that it's fairly important to be doing myself so I actually understand what the code / services do? I use all of these tools, but you also know what "they're doing"... I know our careers are changing dramatically, or going away (I'm working on a replacement for myself), but I just like listening to all the "what we're doing is really helping you ..."
I'd interpret the original statement as "tests which don't matter" and "documentation nobody will ever read", the ones which only exist because someone said they _have_ to, and nobody's ever going to check them as long as they exist (like a README.md in one my main work projects I came back to after temporarily being reassigned to another project - previously it only had setup instructions, now: filled with irreleven…
If we're talking about low quality tests and documentation that exists only to check a box, the easier answer is to remove the box and acknowledge that the low quality stuff just isn't needed at all.
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#296Earlier 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…
Do you think you're putting yourself or your coworkers out of work? If/when will this take over your job?
I'm honestly surprised that Microsoft (and other similarly sized LLM companies) have convinced or coerced literally hundreds of thousands of employees to build their own replacement.
If we're expected to even partially believe the marketing, LLM coding agents are useful today at junior level developer tasks and improving quickly enough that senior tasks will be doable soon too. How do you convince so many junior and senior level devs to build that?
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
integration is the bread and butter of Microsoft's business strategy.
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welp....Github was good product while it lasted.
Github and Copilot are separate products, nothing mandates you to use it.
Can copilot be disabled entirely in a GitHub repo or organization? I may very well have missed those settings, but if nothing else they are well hidden.
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#299> 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…
Yeah, Product Managers always swear by their products.
Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
#300Some example PRs if people want to look: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762
Thanks, that’s really interesting to see - especially with the exchange around whether something is the problem or the symptom, where the confident tone belies the lack of understanding. As an open source maintainer I wonder about the best way to limit usage to cases where someone has time to spend on those interactions.