replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks
any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers in the near future?
Replit's in-browser coding AI
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, sithlord is an anagram for shitlord. While the behavior of the CEO wasn't cool, the issue seems to have been resolved between all involved parties and everyone has moved on - we don't need to bring it up every time repl.it is mentioned.
This is the type of thing where goodwill is burned and it takes time to earn it back. I don't think we just brush it under a rug either. In my opinion, you don't just get to "resolve it" and then everyone forgets about it. For me, future decisions and importantly, actions, will help me personally move past this and "move on" as you say.
Ok, sounds good about it taking time - assuming perfect behavior, how long will it be before you stop referencing the affair whenever an unrelated repl.it story comes up?
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, sithlord is an anagram for shitlord. While the behavior of the CEO wasn't cool, the issue seems to have been resolved between all involved parties and everyone has moved on - we don't need to bring it up every time repl.it is mentioned.
I'll admit, every time I hear of repl.it mentioned, I think of the time the CEO threatened the intern. The CEO did a huge disservice to himself and the company that day in my mind
You're allowed to think that. My point is really about littering unrelated posts regarding repl.it with snipes about it.
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#44replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks
Curious, how large are teams in Replot usually? To me (programmer in Sweden) the largest single team I've been on was 14 people and that was _very_ large (indeed the largest in the tech department). We actually broke ourselves up into two more informal groups since we thought that was a more manageable team size.
Neat feature but yeah very small doesn’t seem like < 12 to me either (worked at big tech for a while). A two pizza team (standard amazon size) is 8-10, 12 starts to be on the larger size for a single team, but not abnormal. Very small to me would be if a team of 2-4 shipped it. Replit must be much larger then I expected for a startup.
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#45If this tool was trained on open source code, what license does the generated code have? At least with Codepilot people were able to generate verbatim GPL code with typos and everything. More importantly, I wonder if companies behind these type of tools offer legal or financial protections in case GPL code sneaks in and leads to expensive law suits.
No they weren't able to generate the same existing code, both because that code is not included anywhere in the model, and because Copilot (not "Codepilot") has safeguards against this kind of situation, should it arise in the highly unlikely situation that a snippet is repeated thousands of times across thousands of repositories. I've gotta let you know that people copy code snippets from all sorts of codebases with…
That's incorrect. CoPilot steals verbatim. Examples: https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#46A couple of questions here asked about the intellectual property rights. Has an answer been provided?
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#47If this tool was trained on open source code, what license does the generated code have? At least with Codepilot people were able to generate verbatim GPL code with typos and everything. More importantly, I wonder if companies behind these type of tools offer legal or financial protections in case GPL code sneaks in and leads to expensive law suits.
No they weren't able to generate the same existing code, both because that code is not included anywhere in the model, and because Copilot (not "Codepilot") has safeguards against this kind of situation, should it arise in the highly unlikely situation that a snippet is repeated thousands of times across thousands of repositories. I've gotta let you know that people copy code snippets from all sorts of codebases with…
I've spent hours looking over code before delivering to FAANG. Our company had put a clause into the contract that our code was free of any GPL'd code. It happened before and it was discoved. The whole thing was a very expensive excersice. I'm aware that many small startups, 90% of which go bust anyways, just ignore licenses but that doesn't work when you play with the big boys.
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#48> trained on publicly available code Fully respecting the licenses this code was published under, one would hope?
What do source code licenses say about using source code as training data? IANAL, I would imagine it's only relevant if the model spits out already existing licensed code, and that using the code as training data is largely irrelevant. For a simpler example than code-generating ML, if I write a program to recognize a directory of source code vs non-source code, and my logic is if (unbalanced parenthesis count in all…
I'm not sure if the training data would constitute an aggregation -- given the usually non-reversible nature of it -- but I found this.
"Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. "[0]
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#49Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools?
- Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code?
- Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much about the process of creating code, but mainly about the output (i.e., does the running program solves the issue at hand?)
- Senior developers who don't like to write boilerplate code?
I don't see myself as the target audience of Copilot or Ghostwriter. I do work as an employee, but I'm not a "feature machine". Usually the hardest part about my job is solving problems while communicating with other people. I don't need to write code "fast", and by the time I hit the keyboard to start coding, I don't really need that much help (granted, I'm not working on code that goes into space rockets... just normal e-commerce stuff)
I like to work on side projects and learn new technologies. When I was starting with programming, as part of the learning I liked to write boilerplate code (actually, that's how I learnt programming. I remember writing C boilerplate code by reading "The C Programming Language". Skipping the "boring" parts wouldn't have helped me in my learning).
If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code (because, when I work on side projects, 50% of the satisfaction comes from actually writing code for the sake of writing code. The other 50% comes from the ability to solve a problem). So, yeah, maybe for the people like me who does find the act of writing code for the sake of writing code (you know like painting or taking photographs), Copilot seems like an unneeded tool?
Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they weren't able to generate the same existing code, both because that code is not included anywhere in the model, and because Copilot (not "Codepilot") has safeguards against this kind of situation, should it arise in the highly unlikely situation that a snippet is repeated thousands of times across thousands of repositories. I've gotta let you know that people copy code snippets from all sorts of codebases with…
That's incorrect. CoPilot steals verbatim. Examples: https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...
No post body was provided.