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GitHub Copilot is now available for free

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Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#401

Post by ManuelKiessling »

jgalt212 wrote: post #180
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to feel personally offended if Jetbrains drops the ball on this. Seriously, this here right now is the precise moment in time where people will either look back at wondering how such a clear leader managed to sink into insignificance, or not. I love IntelliJ more than my own kids, but if they don't add "the AI does not just talk about what code to create, it actually creates it, across multiple files and fo…

Very impressive. Was it a React application?

PHP/Symfony/Twig with TailwindCSS.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#402

Post by Breza »

forty wrote: post #313
throw234234234 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way - that those things/people doing that will fail? Or the tooling will get better that this is no longer a problem? Completely different outcomes with very different consequences.

I think people will realize those AI are not worth the cost (both money wise and environment wise). Right now money is raining on everything AI, but at some point they will want to have a return and most projects will shut down, and we can move on

I'm inclined to agree with you. There are two directions of pressure. First, the tech just doesn't work as well as it needs to, and it's not clear if that will change in the next decade. Second, the companies are losing money. The investment bet is that the AI companies will make rapid advances in their models such that they'll be able to charge enough to turn a profit before the bubble pops. I'm not convinced.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#403

Post by _heimdall »

pabs3 wrote: post #381
_heimdall wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license used isn't important in my opinion, when talking about open source the question is whether the source code is available to be modified and reviewed/interpreted. Photoshop, or any compiled binary, isn't meant to be open source and the code isn't meant to be reviewable. Llama is called open source, though the most important part isn't publicly available for review. If llama didn't claim to be open source I…

The source data for the training needs to be public and freely licensed too, otherwise its IMO not an open source model.

Is that really necessary if the resulting model was actually available and comprehensible?

Personally I can't say I care as much about what the training set is, I want to know what's actually in the model and used at runtime/interpretation.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#404

Post by _heimdall »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #382
fragmede wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license aside, the question is what can be done with a carefully arranged blob of binary? Without additional software (Windows) I can't really do anything with Photoshop.exe. Similarly, Llama.gguf is either useful, with Ollama.app, or not, standing alone. So (looking past the difference in license), would you consider Photoshop.exe similar in that it's a binary blob that's useless by itself, or is it a useful col…

I think this discussion is silly in the context of a modern LLM. Nobody really understands how an LLM works, and you absolutely do not actually want to retrain Llama from scratch. When I said "it's not really open source", I was referring to the fact that there are restrictions on who can use Llama.

Well that's a much deeper rabbit hole - we shouldn't be using such massive systems or throwing so many resources at them when no one even knows how they work.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#405

Post by pabs3 »

_heimdall wrote: post #403
pabs3 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source data for the training needs to be public and freely licensed too, otherwise its IMO not an open source model.

Is that really necessary if the resulting model was actually available and comprehensible? Personally I can't say I care as much about what the training set is, I want to know what's actually in the model and used at runtime/interpretation.

Yes, you can't know what kind of poisoning was done in the initial training data set, and you can't review the data, you can't review any human inputs, and you can't retrain from scratch. All those are things the model author can do, downstream folks/companies/governments should be able to do them too. Otherwise it isn't open source.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#406

Post by Eupolemos »

acc_297 wrote: post #32

Interesting, I cancelled my plan a couple weeks ago so I suppose it's nice to know my vscode plugin won't stop working at the end of the month. If I ever pay for a different AI product I would prefer a pay-by-the-token plan vs a monthly charge since there are often spans of several weeks where I'm not using the tools at all.

We got Copilot for free at work, but I found it to be so annoying I disabled it after a week or so.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#407

Post by d3vr »

TowerTall wrote: post #364
TowerTall wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can. It can modify the active document. In the chat sidebar dialog there are two submit buttons. The one labelled "chat" cannot edit the active file and when you chat using that submit button it doesn't understand your code base. The submit button labelled "Codebase chat" on the other hand can update the active document and has knowledge about your project. In the codebase chat dialog it will print the suggested c…

An alternative is aider that can edit multiple files at once. It performs a git commit after each changes which drove me nuts and didn't fit into my workflow. With cursor you decide when to commit to git which i like better.

You can actually disable that default behavior through the config file .aider.conf.yml [1]: auto-commits: false

Or if you prefer in .env [2]: AIDER_AUTO_COMMITS=false

[1]: https://aider.chat/docs/config/aider_conf.html

[2]: https://aider.chat/docs/config/dotenv.html

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#408

Post by legalcto »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #43

Copilot in VSCode is so far behind Windsurf, not terribly excited about this and still happy to pay for a Codeium pro account. My only fear is someone buying them and screwing up model access, but maybe it’s fine if that is Anthropic. GPT-4 is terrible at coding and o-1 isn’t tell tiene for practical use.

Copilot VSCode felt like a Walmart product. Cursor was pretty good but I had to bail because of the bug where it deletes files when you reject a multi-file change: https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1gkj4xr/reject_chan...

Windsurf has been great. First week, no complaints. Seems to have the best responses too, although the hallucination level of all these is still too high for me to use it beyond trivial cases.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#409

Post by nunez »

jodrellblank wrote: post #387
nunez wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know why this was downvoted. This is an interesting take that I, at least, haven't seen before.

A good conspiracy can be interesting even if it's false, so I don't criticise you for finding it interesting ; but I downvoted because I didn't - HN is chock full of "Microsoft bad, Embrace Extend Extinguish" and it's fucking tiresome. I wrote 1700 words on how that comment makes no sense but I'll reduce it: - Have you ever read a PR and thought "this code is useless" and the result was you deciding that "kLOC is gre…

I mean I didn't say I agreed with it! :D

That said, this conspiracy theory does line up with the corporate retraction from open source writ large that's happened over the last few years (i.e. HashiCorp moving to BUSL; Red Hat ending CentOS; VMware pulling back after Broadcom ate them; etc.)

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#410

Post by martin-t »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #64

Working with people who use this stuff a lot has made my current job just so so much harder in every way its astonishing. I used to solve problems with code, now I feel like hermeneut or dream analyzer: absent of human intention, codebases quickly become these weird piles of different idioms, even without considering the hallucinations (those have definitely cost me a few sleepless nights now either way). But I am ju…

I feel you.

I started programming because I enjoy understanding something deeply and building things with that understanding. I like to write code that works on the first try because that means my mental model is correct. If I end up writing a bug, I try to avoid using a debugger. Instead, I take a step back, analyze what the code is doing and where my model differs from reality and fix it, often while finding more issues in my original understanding.

There are programmers who take a different approach, they write code that take a naive approach and works 90% of the time, then move on. When a bug manifests (it was there from the start but unless it manifested itself, it didn't bother them), they make a naive fix and move on. Sometimes fixing the bug for real, sometimes causing new ones. Eventually the amount of bugs reaches an equilibrium and they ship it.

LLMs are the second approach on steroids. Since they have no understanding, only statistical correlations between tokens, they produce code of the second kind. I mean, they don't even run their code to check it works. And they sure as fuck don't ask the programmer additional questions. Let alone the user. But they do it extremely fast so it's good from a business perspective. Better to have a shitty product now and beat competition on advertising, then be second.

I used to like open source because it attracted people of the first kind and there was cooperation instead of competition. But lately every project seems to ask for donations and it increasingly attracts people of the second kind.

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