Is this sort of like a response to Devin? I'm having a hard time understanding what this is.
GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
311–320 of 333 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#312Watching the examples and other people's demos, I get the sense that this product completely ignores what makes good software. It has no "big picture" plan or contextual awareness required to make those nuanced yet critical decisions in the far ends of applications. Those cases where you badly need domain expertise, understanding of how the user interfaces with the product, awareness of existing technical debt, and s…
A lot of software doesn't need to be good. I could see using this to prototype internal tools fast.
Also, it doesn't need to be good yet - whoever has the best tooling infrastructure when the models get better will win.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also used the neovim plugin. I'm on a fiber connection in the Midwest, so that is likely a factor. Latency was on the order of 2-5s consistently, which is way more than enough to interrupt my flow.
Interesting indeed! Do you normally experience high latencies >1s from your connection or is copilot more of an outlier? I have noticed that when I travel to the midwest I will get latencies around 70 to 90 ms rather than my current 30 ms, but It's not something I really notice too much, though that tends to be in major cities.
Most people in the midwest likely have cable or DSL internet which adds 30-50ms~ of latency out of the gate. My high speed business fiber connection to my apartment gets 28ms to github.com and 36ms to api.github.com, so it's probably not that, though it depends on where the Copilot datacenters are.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#314I'm not sure why they insist on code spaces instead of running this inside vs code? Setups/working looks pretty similar to aider [1] that I've been using and liking, Aider is smaller steps than plandex, but plandex went into some kind of loops a couple of times so I stoped using it for now. [1] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider
We definitely intend to explore a VS Code extension in the not too distant future. And we decided to build a web client + integrated cloud terminal, simply because that allowed us to create an experience that is one-click away from an issue, and could be accessed from anywhere and any device (i.e. we’ve deeply optimized CW for mobile, and I do quite a bit of code thinking in that modality). In the meantime, when you…
> simply because that allowed us to create an experience that is one-click away from an issue,
That's indeed pretty cool and as you said it's not an either-or. Thanks for providing more background.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#315I'm not sure why they insist on code spaces instead of running this inside vs code? Setups/working looks pretty similar to aider [1] that I've been using and liking, Aider is smaller steps than plandex, but plandex went into some kind of loops a couple of times so I stoped using it for now. [1] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider
> plandex went into some kind of loops a couple of times so I stoped using it for now. Hey, Plandex creator here. I just pushed a release today that includes fixes for exactly this kind of problem - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/releases/tag/cli%2Fv0.... -- Plandex now has a much better 'working memory' that helps it not to go into loops, repeat steps it's already done, or give up too early. I'd love to hear…
Actually I got the newsletter, will definitely again!
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded. Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing everything in Assembly. Python made it much easier to code than writing C. Both increased the demand for coders. Code is a liability, not an asset. The fact that less technical people and people who are not trained engineers can now make useful apps by generating mi…
I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually i…
A large amount of the problems in the world don't require computer programs over a few hundred lines long to solve, so LLMs will still see use by DIY types.
People may underestimate how difficult it is for an LLM to write a long or complex computer program though. It makes sense LLMs do very well at pumping out boilerplate and leetcode answers or trivial programs, but it doesn't nessecarily track that it would be they would that good at writing complex sophisticated and unique custom software. It may in fact be much further away from doing that than a lot of people anticipate, in a self-driving is just around the corner kind of way.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copilot is a decent autocomplete saving you half a line here and there, that's about it.
I can regularly get it to autocomplete big chunks of code that are good. But specifically only when it's completely mind numbingly boring, repetitive and derivative code. Good for starting out a new view or controller that is very similar to something that already exists in the codebase. Anything remotely novel and it's useless.
I have strange documentation habits and sometimes when you document everything in code comments up front, Copilot does seem to synthesize from your documentation most of the "bones" that you need. It often needs a thorough code review, but it's not unlike sending a requirements document to a very Junior developer that sometimes surprises you and getting back something that almost works in a PR you need a fine tooth comb on. A few times I've "finished my PR review" with "Not bad, Junior, B+".
I know a lot of us generally don't write comments until "last" so will never see this side of Copilot, but it is interesting to try if you haven't.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually i…
> And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures. Don't you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago. This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn't to do ever…
I predict the rate in progress in LLMS will diminish over time, whereas the difficulty of an LLM writing an accurate computer program will go up exponentially with complexity and size. Is an LLM ever going to be able to do what say, Linus Torvalds did? Heck I've seen much less sophisticated software projects than that which it's hard to imagine an LLM doing.
On the lower end, while Joe Average is going to be able to solve a lot of problems with an LLM, I expect more bugs will exist than ever before because more software will be written, and that might end up not being all that terrible for software developers.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded. Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing everything in Assembly. Python made it much easier to code than writing C. Both increased the demand for coders. Code is a liability, not an asset. The fact that less technical people and people who are not trained engineers can now make useful apps by generating mi…
People also forgets that coding is formal logic that describe algorithms to computer which is just a machine. And because it’s formal, it’s rigid and not prone to manipulation. Instead of using LLMs you’d better off studying a book and add some snippets to your editor. What I like about Laravel is their extensive use of generators. They know that part of the code will be boilerplate. The nice thing about Common Lisp…
A way that I like to describe something like this is that code is long form poetry with two intended audiences: your most literally minded friends (machines), and those friends that need and want a full story told with a recognizable beginning/middle/end (your fellow developers, yourself in the future). LLMs and boilerplate generators (and linters and so many other tools) are great about the mechanics of the poetry forms (keeping you to the right "meter", checking your "rhymes" for you, formatting your whitespace around the poem, naming conventions) but for the most part they can't tell your poem's story for you. That's the abstract thing of allegory and metaphor and simile (data structures and the semantics behind names and the significance of architecture structures, etc) that is likely going to remain the unique skill set of good programmers.
Re: GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about the rest of the developers in the world but my dream come true would be a computer that can write all the code for me. I have piles of notebooks and files absolutely stuffed with ideas I'd like to try out but being a single, measly human programmer I can only work on one at a time and it takes a long time to see each through. If I could get a prototype in 30 seconds that I could play with and then…
If that will be the case then in a finite and small amount of time all your ideas will already have a wide range of implementations/variations because everybody will do the same as you. It is like now LLMs are on the way to take over (or destroy) content on the web and will take over posts on social media thus making anyone create anything so fast that the incentive to put manual labor into a piece of content is beco…
Honestly, I don't care if other people are creating similar things to what I am. Actually, I prefer if there are more people working on the same things because it means there are other people that I can talk to about those things and collaborate with. Even if I don't want to work with others on a project I'm not discouraged by other implementations existing, there's always something that I would want to do differently from what's out there. That's the whole point of building my own things after all; if I were happy with using whatever bog standard app I could find on the web then why would I need to build it? It isn't just about making it my own either, it's also about the fun of diving into the guts of a system and seeing how things work, having a machine capable of producing that code gives me the fantastic ability to choose only the parts I'm interested in to do a deep dive on while skipping the boring stuff I've done 1000x times before and I don't have to type the code if I don't want to, I can just talk to the computer about the implementation details and explore various options with it. That in itself is worth the time spent on it but the awesome side effect is you get a new toy to play with too.