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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#321

Post by internet101010 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #260
petetnt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about developers who do enjoy writing for example high quality documentation? Do you expect that the status quo will be that most of the documentation will be AI slop and AI itself will just bruteforce itself through the issues? How close are we to the point where the AI could handle "tricky dependency updates", but not being able to handle "most interesting and complex problems"? Who writes the tests that are r…

I'd argue the only way to ensure that is to make sure developers read high quality documentation - and report issues if it's not high quality. I expect though that most people don't read in that much detail, and AI generated stuff will be 80-90% "good enough", at least the same if not better than someone who doesn't actually like writing documentation. > What is the job for the developer now? Writing tickets and revi…

I think just having devs attempt to feed an agent openapi docs as context to create api calls would do enough. Simply adding tags and useful descriptions about endpoints makes a world of difference in the accuracy of agent's output. It means getting 95% accuracy with the cheapest models vs. 75% accuracy with the most expensive models.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#322

Post by anonzzzies »

So can I switch this to high contrast Black on White on mobile instead? I cannot read any of this (in the bright sunlight where I am) without pulling it through a reader app. People do get why books and other reading materials are not published grey on black, right?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#323

Post by largolagrande »

timrogers wrote: post #171
dsl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor How does this align with Microsoft's AI safety principals? What controls are in place to prevent Copilot from deciding that it could be more effective with less limitations?

Copilot only does work that has been assigned to it by a developer, and all the code that the agent writes has to go through a pull request before it can be merged. In fact, Copilot has no write access to GitHub at all, except to push to its own branch. That ensures that all of Copilot's code goes through our normal review process which requires a review from an independent human.

HAHA. Very smart. The more you review the Copilot Agent's PRs, the better is gets at submitting new PRs... (basics of supervised machine learning, right?)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#324

Post by binarymax »

_heimdall wrote: post #296
echelon wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When the options are "do what we tell you and get paid" vs getting laid off in the current climate, the choice isn't really a choice.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#325

Post by Arubis »

nautilus12 wrote: post #217
Arubis wrote: post #210

I'm building RSOLV ( https://rsolv.dev ) as an alternative approach to GitHub's Copilot agent. Our key differentiator is cross-platform support - we work with Jira, Linear, GitHub, and GitLab - rather than limiting teams to GitHub's ecosystem. GitHub's approach is technically impressive, but our experience suggests organizations derive more value from targeted automation that integrates with existing workflows rather…

Why don't you focus on automating your CEO's job, a comparatively easy task compared to automating engineering tasks.

I know that's a bit kneejerk, but I actually think that's a pretty reasonable question.

Automating the reputation and network of an individual person doesn't seem like a good fit for an LLM, regardless of the person. But the _decisionmaking_ capacities for a position that's largely trend-following is something that's at the very least well-supported by interacting with a well-trained model.

In my mind, though, that doesn't look like a niched service that you sell to a company. That looks like a cofounder-type for someone with an idea and a technical background. If you want to build something but need help figuring out how to market and sell it, you could do a lot worse than just chatting with Claude right now and taking much of its advice.

That might just by my own lack of bizdev expertise, though.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#326

Post by karn97 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #114
mjr00 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pret…

[flagged]

A bwtter stack exchange search isn't that revolutionary

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#327

Post by lesuorac »

jappgar wrote: post #288
leptons wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I "save 1000 hours" then that could be distributed over 41.666 days, so no task would need to be performed during that period because "I saved 1000 hours". You could also say you saved 41.666 people an entire 24 hour day, by "saving 1000 hours", or some other fractional way. How you're trying to explain it as "saving 1000 hours each day" is really not making any sense without further context. And I'm sure if I had…

You're overthinking it. It's like this coupon booklets they used to sell. "Over $10,000 of savings!" Yes but how much money do I have to spend in order to save $10,000? There was this funny commercial in the 90s for some muffler repair chain that was having a promotion: "Save Fifty Dollars..." The theme was "What will you do with the fifty dollars you saved?" And it was people going to Disneyland or afancy dinner dat…

> Meanwhile there was zero talk about whether their cars needed muffler repair at all.

It's called "Thinking past the sale". It's a common sales tactic.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#329

Post by replwoacause »

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. I wonder what model they're using under the hood? I have such a good experience working with Cline and Claude Sonnet 3.7 and a comparatively much worse time with anything Github offers. These PRs are pretty consistent with the experience I've had in the IDE too. Incidentally, what has MSFT done to Claude Sonnet 3.7 in VSCode? It's like they lobotomized it compared to using it through Cline or the API directly. Trying to save on tokens or something?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#330

Post by karn97 »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #8

I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface). I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they do…

Average coders, terrible engineers
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