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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#341

Post by AstroBen »

timrogers wrote: post #173
leptons wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I get paid for the mundane, boring, annoying tasks, and I really like getting paid .

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.

The only reason to listen to this would be to be naive about how capitalism works. Come on..

The goal here is for it to be able to do everything, taking 100% of the work

2nd best is to do the hard, big value adds so companies can hire cheap labor for the boring shit

3rd best is to only do the mundane and boring stuff

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#342

Post by sensanaty »

th0ma5 wrote: post #200
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like the typical junior developer, then.

No, not at all. Why do people keep saying shit like these thought terminating sentences. Try to see the glass of Kool Aid please. People are trying to understand how to communicate important valuable things about failure states and you're advocating ignorance.

Because the marketing started with "This is literally the singularity and will take over everything and everyone's jobs".

Then people realized that was BS, so the marketing moved on to "This will enhance everyone's jobs, as a companion that will help everyone".

People also realized that was pure BS. A few more marketing rebrands later and we're at the current situation where we try to equate it to the lowest possible rung of employee they can think of, because surely Junior == Incompetent Idiot You Can't Trust Not To Waste Your Time†. The funny part is that they have been objectively and undeniably only getting better since the early days of the hype bubble, yet the push now is that they're "basically junior level!". Speaks volumes IMO, how those goal posts keep getting moved whenever people actually use these systems in the real work.

---

† IMO every single Junior I've ever worked with has been some of the best moments of my career. It allowed space for me to grow my own knowledge, while I get to talk to and help someone extremely passionate if a bit overeager. This stance on Juniors is, frankly, baffling to me because it's so far from my experiences with how they tend to work, oftentimes they're a million times better than those "10x rockstars" you hear about all the time.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#343

Post by mrmansano »

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…

Oh, the savings calculator in your website made me sad, that's the first time I've seen it put that way. I know it's marketing but props to you for being sincere. At least you're not hiding the intentions of your service (like others).

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#344

Post by Arubis »

mrmansano wrote: post #343
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…

Oh, the savings calculator in your website made me sad, that's the first time I've seen it put that way. I know it's marketing but props to you for being sincere. At least you're not hiding the intentions of your service (like others).

Yeah, the ROI calculator's target audience is the folks with the checkbook, so it needs to be a dollar figure. My _actual_ hope is that this lets engineers focus on feature work (which is typically more rewarding anyway) without constantly bashing their heads against the tech debt and maintenance work they're effectively barred from performing until it becomes emergent and actively blocking.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#345

Post by timrogers »

taurath wrote: post #193
timrogers wrote: post #44

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…

> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor - so we really are using Copilot coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;) Thats a fun stat! Are humans in the #1-4 slots? Its hard to know what processes are automated (300 repos sounds like a lot of repos!). Thank you for sharing the numbers you can. Every time a product launch is announced, I feel like its a gleeful a…

Humans are indeed in slots #1-4.

After hearing feedback from the community, we’re planning to share more on the GitHub Blog about how we’re using Copilot coding agent at GitHub. Watch this space!

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#346

Post by timrogers »

miroljub wrote: post #274
timrogers wrote: post #44

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…

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.

The #5 contributor thing is a stat from a single repository where we’re building Copilot coding agent.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#347

Post by jagged-chisel »

rcarmo wrote: post #254
jagged-chisel wrote: post #201

I’ve been trying to use Copilot for a few days to get some help writing against code stored on GitHub. Copilot has been pretty useless. It couldn’t maintain context for more than two exchanges. Copilot: here’s some C code to do that Me: convert that to $OTHER_LANGUAGE Copilot: what code would you like me to convert? Me: the code you just generated Copilot: if you can upload a file or share a link to the code, I can h…

Be more methodical, it isn’t magic: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/05/13/2230

I’m sure you have no idea what my method is. Besides, this whole “you’re holding it wrong” mentality isn’t productive - our technology should be adapting to us, we shouldn’t need to adapt ourselves to it.

Anyway, I can just use another LLM that serves me better.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#349

Post by SkyBelow »

quantadev wrote: post #197
SkyBelow wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the agent mode instead of the ask mode? With just a bit more prompting, it does a pretty good job of finding the files it needs to use on its own. Then again, I've only used it in smaller projects so larger ones might need more manual guidance.

I assumed I was using 'Agent mode' but now that you mentioned it, I checked and you're right I've been in 'Ask mode' instead. oops. So thanks for the tip! I'm looking forward to seeing how Agent Mode is better. Copilot has been such a great experience so far I haven't tried to keep up with every little new feature they add, and I've fallen behind.

I find agent mode much more powerful as it can search your code base for further reference and even has access to other systems (I haven't seen exactly what is the other level of access, I'm guessing it isn't full access to the web but it can access certain only info repositories). I do find it sometime a little over eager to do instead of explain, so Ask mode is still useful when you want explanations. It also appears that agent has the search capabilities while ask does not, but it might also be something recently added to both and I just don't recall it from being in ask mode as I'm use to the past when it wasn't present.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#350

Post by xeromal »

overfeed wrote: post #76
timrogers wrote: post #44

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 see number of PRs as modern LOC, something that doesn't tell me anything about quality.
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