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

Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

fast.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 201 posts

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#41

Post by elviswolcott »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

While I agree with your concerns about licensing and copilot, this criticism doesn't seem particularly relevant to the article that was shared.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#43

Post by nxpnsv »

It is tempting to apply Betteridge's Law and answer no. But, perhaps the answer is yes. It probably can be a blessing, once you're used to it. And it certainly can be a curse, writing code that is incorrect, buggy, or just not understood by the programmer. It would be nice if it better could explain its reasons and add references relating to the snippets. Maybe one day. Until then, I think I'll just google stackexchange as I've been doing for so long...

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#44

Post by thorum »

The article mentions TabNine as an alternative. I think TabNine’s approach of providing one-line autocomplete suggestions is a nice middle ground where you’re still in charge of writing code but can do it faster with AI assistance.

Unlike Copilot you don’t have to give it instructions - it guesses what you’re trying to do from context. And since it works on a single line of code at a time, providing multiple completions which you can glance at and decide whether to use or ignore, you the programmer are still in charge of planning the function and making choices.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#45

Post by zaptheimpaler »

elviswolcott wrote: post #41
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

While I agree with your concerns about licensing and copilot, this criticism doesn't seem particularly relevant to the article that was shared.

IMO any place where Copilot is mentioned is a relevant place to put this. I don't know how anyone working in software can just turn a blind eye to shit like this. Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft.

We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. If even devs aren't calling bullshit on Copilot, the media won't care, courts won't care, and it will be declared legal, and future theft will be normalized.

Its ridiculous how we all see the big tech companies doing various kinds of terrible shit and then the next new shiny thing comes along and everyone forgets all about it? Are you goldfish? What will it take to get someone to actually give a shit and stop supporting this kind of product/behavior?

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#46

Post by onion2k »

908B64B197 wrote: post #20
onion2k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot (and all other AI tools, and non-AI tools) will lead to more developer jobs, not less. The thing holding most industries back at the moment is the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. Literally every business has an opportunity to automate some process better than it does now, or to make an app to assist a business function, or to drive sales and growth through an application of new tech. T…

> The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry. I guess they felt the same ways when the first compilers were introduced. Or interpreters. > the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. There's already develope…

There's already developers on the market at an incredibly low price. Good luck getting code that compiles out of them, much less that is correct.

I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code.

I'm afraid we'll see more and more of these, since now they'll be able to cycle through completions and try until it seems to pass all tests.

In which case the value will lie in defining the tests, and the people who do that will earn the most. That's fine.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#47

Post by robbedpeter »

908B64B197 wrote: post #20
onion2k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot (and all other AI tools, and non-AI tools) will lead to more developer jobs, not less. The thing holding most industries back at the moment is the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. Literally every business has an opportunity to automate some process better than it does now, or to make an app to assist a business function, or to drive sales and growth through an application of new tech. T…

> The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry. I guess they felt the same ways when the first compilers were introduced. Or interpreters. > the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. There's already develope…

It's not like gpt models are some sort of random walk or Markov bot. They produce nuanced text with deep semantic relationships between large segments of text. There's a direct relationship between the algorithms human brains used to produce the training data and the algorithms being approximated by these models. No, gpt-3 isn't human level generally, but it is human level competent in some domains.

These tools are effectively less then a year old in production, but we're already seeing the potential for huge disruption in lots of markets based on relatively straightforward uses of the tech.

I can't wait to see what a skillful and artfully sophisticated use will be. I don't think we've even scratched the surface.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#48

Post by beltsazar »

> In this case, I felt like the Copilot approach would be worse for both experienced and beginner programmers. Experienced programmers would need to spend time studying the various options proposed, recognize that they don’t correctly solve the problem, and then would have to search online for solutions anyway. Beginner programmers would likely feel like they’ve solved the problem, wouldn’t actually learn what they need to understand about limitations and capabilities of regular expressions, and would end up with broken code without even realizing it.

This is similar to what I thought—replace "experienced" and "beginner" with "curious" and "lazy"—when I first read the tagline of GitHub Copilot on its landing page:

> Skip the docs and stop searching for examples. GitHub Copilot helps you stay focused right in your editor.

We need docs and examples for things that we aren't familiar with. Skipping them means that we blindly trust Copilot to generate correct code. And even if the generated code is correct, we still need to understand why and how it's correct.

One use case I see the best fit for Copilot is for generating boilerplates that we are already familiar with and understand.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#49

Post by singularity2001 »

RandomBK wrote: post #35

Having used Copilot for a couple of hours on a Typescript/React codebase, I've encountered a very wide range of results. Sometimes, the model correctly guesses exactly what I'm trying to write, and gives me non-trivial contextually correct suggestions. More than once I've been impressed enough to pause and take a screen recording of what it generated. Other times, it's a complete mess that competes with the local lan…

makes me wonder whether one can extend the system to filter/correct types/names

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#50

Post by grammarnazzzi »

ignu wrote: post #28

Writing code is, uh, not remotely the hardest part of software development. Maintaining it is.

I agree.

The challenging part of coding is converting domain knowledge into correct code.

An AI has no high-level understanding of the domain and desired solution. It just guesses at what you might want and glosses over all the edge cases and exceptions that actually need to be considered and resolved. The issues that only come to light after a real intelligence studies the problem, and works through correct steps to implement a solution.

It's an iterative process, because the solution is arrived at only after attempting a solution, learning what you don't know or haven't considered about the problem, then resolving those ambiguities, and producing a revised and more correct solution.

When responsible programmers realize that they don't know what they don't know, they ask questions and apply the answers.

AI never realizes when it makes mistakes because it has no domain knowledge. It just pulls a best guess out it's ass and says, "Here you go. Check my work."

Post reply on HN