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GitHub Copilot is now available for free

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Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work, we have a directive to use AI as much as we can wherever possible. I was handed a codebase that's been working on by many, many, many different people over the past ~2 years and was written almost entirely with AI (starting with GPT 3) The only way you can deal with the codebase is to fully embrace the AI. Whenever I want to make anything beyond a simple API change, I have to boot up Cursor and give it…

It's hard to address just one point for how messed up this seems, but the first thing that stands out is that I would guess the code volume of this process has to be unsustainable. Humans themselves tend to write new code instead of using old code- a common problem- but with sensible code structures and CI, code will grow at a sustainable rate. LLMs continuously barf a steam of new code, never deleting anything. Then…

Yes - writing code myself, whenever I need to do something substantial the first question I ask is "is there already a function in this codebase somewhere that does this, or does something close enough to it that I can just tweak it?" and most of the time there is!

AI will just write a new function every time. You can also ask it to write tests, but I think that AI-written test coverage of AI-written code is just asking for trouble. When it breaks, you'll probably just ask an AI to fix it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just like the majority of communities moving to Discord over Forums. The barrier to entry might be a lot lower than getting a VPS and hosting phpBB or whatever, but the discoverability and searchabilty has gone towards 0. Everything is just moving into opaque black boxes.

Your comment sparked a thought -- maybe this is the "Dark Forest" of the Web: Either your site's content stays hidden behind discord, or an LLM's bot/minion scrapes all your content and makes visiting your site superfluous, thereby effectively killing your site.

This is an interesting thought because there is probably a real dynamic like this with some kinds of content, but as an HN comment it is also somewhat self-refuting.
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