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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#301

Post by _heimdall »

spooneybarger wrote: post #220
DeepYogurt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0] Similar to google. MS now requires devs to use ai

I know a lot of devs at MSFT, none of them are required to use AI.

The GitHub org is required to for sure, with a very similar mandate to the one Shopify's CEO put out.

LLM use is now part of the annual review process, its self reported if I'm not mistaken but at least at Microsoft they would have plenty of data to know how often you use the tools.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#303

Post by slashdev »

ai-skeptic wrote: post #185
timrogers wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that were possible it would happen anyway. You can’t hold back progress.

It’s very, very far from possible today.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#304

Post by _heimdall »

codebolt wrote: post #258
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…

Whatever the true stats for mistakes or blunders are now, remember that this is the worst its ever going to be. And there is no clear ceiling in sight that would prevent it from quickly getting better and better, especially given the current levels of investment.

That sounds reasonable enough, but the pace or end result is by no means guaranteed.

We have invested plenty of money and time into nuclear fusion with little progress. The list of key acheivments from CERN[1] is also meager in comparison to the investment put in, especially if you consider their ultimate goal to ultimately be towards applying research to more than just theory.

[1] https://home.cern/about/key-achievements

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#306

Post by _heimdall »

rcarmo wrote: post #250
lacoolj wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What was said?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#307

Post by nicative »

How does that compare to using agent mode in VS Code? Is the main difference that the files are being edited remotely instead of on your own machine, or is there something different about the AI powering the remote agent compared to the local one?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#308

Post by bencyoung »

acdha wrote: post #300
bencyoung wrote: post #294

Some 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.

Seems amazing similar to the changes a junior would make (jump to the solution that "fixes" it in the most shallow way) at the moment

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#309

Post by concats »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #118
eterm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Light edits are about 10 cents Some well-paid developers will excuse this with, "Well if it saved me 5 minutes, it's worth an order of magnitude than 10 cents". Which is true, however there's a big caveat: Time saved isn't time gained. You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back.

> You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back. What do you mean? If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save" 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs $5 and I pay $4, I saved $

I think one issue is that you won't always be able to invoice those extra 999 hours to your customer. Sometimes you'll still only be able to get paid for 1 hour, depending on the task and contract.

But the llm bill will always invoice you for all the saved work regardless.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#310

Post by 09thn34v »

timrogers wrote: post #44
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…

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…

re: 300 of your repositories... so it sounds like y'all don't use a monorepo architecture. i've been wondering if that would be a blocker to using these agents most effectively. expect some extra momentum to swing back to the multirepo approach accordingly
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