Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 446 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#361

Post by blub »

wokwokwok wrote: post #313
b215826 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because I've been using it for weeks and it makes me read these types of comments as "I don't understand the value of the internet" or "what's the purpose of owning a phone". And yet apart from making this very inaccurate comparison you haven't made any argument for why such a thing as Copilot would be useful to anyone. How do you personally find Copilot useful? And why do you think someone whose job demands more t…

> The onus is on you to convince the skeptics. Is it? Look, I don't care at all if you use copilot; you can use notepad to write your code if that floats your boat; do whatever you want. What the parent post said is: Copilot is useful; it helps you write code with autocomplete suggestions. If you think that you don't get productivity gains from an IDE or you're in the 'no IDE makes you more hardcore and better progra…

That sounds about as useful as Tesla's "auto-pilot" - good when it works but you have to always pay attention that it's not trying to kill you (or your code in this case).

A bad proposition for most people, because you can't trust it.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#362

Post by edwinyzh »

abalaji wrote: post #236
bastardoperator wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait til stackoverflow sues everyone into oblivion! Letting your intern blindly commit to your code base seems like the bigger issue here. The entire purpose of an internship is to learn and to be guided by professionals, not to be treated as a cheap laborer. You don't hire interns, you train interns. Have you used copilot or are you speculating?

Stackoverflow content is generally creative commons not GPL unless I'm missing something. ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing )

I was just wondering this

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#363

Post by adminscoffee »

mewse wrote: post #213

I’ve never understood the value proposition for Copilot. In terms of difficulty, writing code is maybe on average a two out of ten. On average, maintaining code you wrote recently is probably a three out of ten in terms of difficulty, and maintaining code somebody else wrote or code from a long time ago probably rises to around a five out of ten. Debugging misbehaving code is probably a seven out of ten or higher. Gi…

i've actually grown to like it, it seems like it's getting better with each use

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#364

Post by matsemann »

anigbrowl wrote: post #342
matsemann wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// Create a redis client Writing that probably takes a longer time than just doing it with the IDE help in jetbrains, though? Press "r", press "." to autocomplete so it now says "redis.", then write "cC" and it suggests createClient (or write "create" or "client" if you're not sure what you're looking for). Now it says "redis.createClient()". Press ctrl+alt+v to extract a variable or write ".const" and press tab to a…

The power of something like Copilot is in building out stuff you're not familiar with or don't have templates set up. It's probably not as helpful when you already have a clear idea of what you want to do and just need it rather than think about it. +1 for the variable extraction thing, I've been using their IDE for ages and it never occurred to me to look for such a thing.

I use it especially much when writing old school java. Instead of writing "MyClass myclass = new MyClass()", I just write "new MyClass()" and get the typing for free. Even better when you do longer expressions and don't want to think about the type up front. Like working with streams or so.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#365

Post by mikeywazowski »

giuseppeciuni wrote: post #206
mikeywazowski wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined the waitlist at the end of June and got an invite yesterday. So 4 months? However, I imagine a lot of people signed up just before me, so I was probably at the end of a long list. The wait wouldn't be this long if you sign up today, I reckon. I'm just guessing though.

I signed up copilot on june... still received nothing unfortunately!!!

I'm sure it'll be coming soon - a colleague of mine signed up shortly after me and received an invite today.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#366

Post by speedgoose »

ponyous wrote: post #198
speedgoose wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's not very shinning there. I would also throw the error instead of printing the error to the console and returning undefined.

You are in a callback there. Goodbye your error!

Oh right. I once made a layer on top of the redis client to use promises because callbacks are a pain to deal with.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#367

Post by IshKebab »

kadoban wrote: post #185
IshKebab wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I - a human - read your code, learn from it, and then use that knowledge to write my own code? Am I stripping your license off and ignoring it? Clearly it's not as simple as you imagine.

It depends how much you "learn from it" and then write your own code vs how much you copy/paste. Copilot is pretty commonly just copy/pasting. You can get it to spit out exact copied code, including comments. p.s. "it's not as simple as you imagine" is pretty dickish. Why include that?

> It depends how much you "learn from it" and then write your own code vs how much you copy/paste.

I think this is the crux. It doesn't matter that they used GPL code for training. It only matters if someone uses CoPilot to make a close copy of that code.

Fortunately Copilot is actually not commonly just copy/pasting. They did a study on that if you search for it (admittedly not an independent study but it's the only one we have).

> Why include that?

Because so many people are making the assumption that the law agrees with their overly simple interpretation before it's even been decided. It's a bit tedious.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#368

Post by bjarneh »

wokwokwok wrote: post #313
b215826 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because I've been using it for weeks and it makes me read these types of comments as "I don't understand the value of the internet" or "what's the purpose of owning a phone". And yet apart from making this very inaccurate comparison you haven't made any argument for why such a thing as Copilot would be useful to anyone. How do you personally find Copilot useful? And why do you think someone whose job demands more t…

> The onus is on you to convince the skeptics. Is it? Look, I don't care at all if you use copilot; you can use notepad to write your code if that floats your boat; do whatever you want. What the parent post said is: Copilot is useful; it helps you write code with autocomplete suggestions. If you think that you don't get productivity gains from an IDE or you're in the 'no IDE makes you more hardcore and better progra…

> Literally, I can go above a function and type "/*" and it'll suggest a comment.

Finally we can getting somewhere with this AI stuff....

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#369

Post by grenoire »

thamer wrote: post #222
e0a74c wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised no one has suggested using `requests` considering how easy, safe and readable it is: >>> import requests, pprint >>> >>> >>> url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php" >>> resp = requests.get( ... url, ... params=dict( ... action="query", ... list="geosearch", ... format="json", ... gsradius=10000, ... gscoord=f"{latitude.value}|{longitude.value}" ... ) ... ) >>> >>> pprint.pprint(resp.json()) {'batchco…

For what it's worth, Copilot can do it. I typed the following prompt: def search_wikipedia(lat, lon): """ use "requests" to do a geosearch on Wikipedia and pretty-print the resulting JSON """ And it completed it with: r = requests.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=geosearch&gsradius=10000&gscoord={0}|{1}&gslimit=20&format=json'.format(lat, lon)) pprint.pprint(r.json())

That's what the rest of the thread is complaining about, it's still slapping the strings in there with basic formatting. No different than the top level approach.

Re: GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim

#370

Post by monkeydust »

A product perspective:

- Co-pilot will not replace software engineers, however ...

- I do think it will in some cases help them be more productive as some have expressed in this thread already.

- Once they open it up to fine-tuning on your own codebase I suspect it can be used to bring new engineers upto speed faster plus it get will get more trustworthy.

- I do have concerns about the legal aspect of selling software built with assistance if co-pilot but a lawyer could probably get me comfortable (or not!)

- I have personally found it useful for data science type tasks especially getting familiar with new libraries.

Post reply on HN