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GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

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Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#51

Post by treesknees »

tikkun wrote: post #10

My mind is blown by the people saying $10/month is too much. $10 a month for this is an unbelievably good deal! If you value your time, this is a ridiculously good deal.

If you're looking at it from the perspective that my employer pays me $X/hour to write code, and CoPilot is less than that price, then it might be a bargain in that sense. On the other hand, my employer pays me for my experience and knowledge. Most of my time isn't spent writing code, so I don't think it's fair to just look at an hourly dollar amount when deciding whether it's worth it.

That being said, my biggest issue with CoPilot is that it's a ML system trained from open source and public repositories. Also straight from the website, "By using GitHub Copilot [...] you help to improve GitHub Copilot." I'm now paying for the privilege of handing over my data to GitHub so they can combine it with open source code to make more money off of people who are convinced it's somehow saving their company money.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#52

Post by Eliezer »

dchichkov wrote: post #11

Anyone is interested in starting to work on an open source alternative? I have a few terabytes of GitHub repository archives, a bit of experience and an non-profit umbrella (goal is AI Safety).

If your goal is safety, you shouldn't be pushing capabilities or general availability of capabilities.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#53

Post by pcthrowaway »

happyhardcore wrote: post #14

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works w…

Weird that it prints the error to stdout. I mean not that surprising really, I'd just expect error->stderr to be a pretty low-hanging association

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#54

Post by tomtheelder »

lelag wrote: post #42
happyhardcore wrote: post #14

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works w…

I totally agree. If you code professionally in a stack where copilot perform well, 10 usd/month is a steal. Assuming you are just 5% more productive with copilot, that would easily translate into hundreds of dollars of savings. It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally. It would have been nice of them to in…

This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#55

Post by rvz »

On the one hand, This is another clever pricing scam. Which Microsoft wins either way.

Unless you want to pay for your IDE + Copilot with JetBrains, this will still benefit only Visual Studio Code, which Microsoft knows that you cannot beat free. So this a great resurgence of 'Embrace' with free developer tools.

On the other hand, Co-pilot is going to probably ruin the Leetcode, Hackerrank, Codility candidate as a candidate can Co-pilot the solution if not checked properly.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#57

Post by lelag »

tomtheelder wrote: post #54
lelag wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. If you code professionally in a stack where copilot perform well, 10 usd/month is a steal. Assuming you are just 5% more productive with copilot, that would easily translate into hundreds of dollars of savings. It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally. It would have been nice of them to in…

This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.

I guess that makes sense. It's mostly useful when working on mundane tasks on popular stacks. Experts working on non-trivial use-cases won't see much benefits.

Personally, I'm not a in a coding position anymore and only code occasionally on stacks I'm mostly unfamiliar with: copilot is a godsend as it saves me from googling every other lines of code to figure out which api calls I'm suppose to do to accomplish the task at end.

I see it as a stackoverflow on steroids.

Even if I don't use it much, I guess I'll have to pony up the 10 usd because I would not want to go back to googling basic syntax for everything when I'm coding something.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#58

Post by hutzlibu »

croes wrote: post #33
rjh29 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, yeah. Consider how much programmers are paid per hour. Or how often you look up Stack Overflow or language documentation.

Isn't the lookup part of the learning? If you just get the solution the learning gets smaller.

Yes, but I do not want to learn all the internals of every random API, if copilot can help me with avoiding some, I am interested.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#59

Post by iasay »

rjh29 wrote: post #17
iasay wrote: post #12

Was this even useful? I have to review a lot of absolute shit from humans. I can’t even imagine the damage that such a large corpus of humans plus an AI can generate.

It's useful in the right hands - it can suggest functions/language features you don't know about it, it can do some handy stuff automatically (like reverse a list in place) so you have more mental bandwidth to think about other stuff. It also produces a ton of horrible, nonsense code. I totally agree that if github's corpus starts to fill with that stuff, the overall quality of github will tank and I wonder how they'…

That’s really my worry. ML is crap in crap out. If you train it with more crap it’s an exponential decaying curve.

Now I have to gate declining quality marketed as a time saver. It really just moves the cost elsewhere.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#60

Post by bladegash »

rjh29 wrote: post #8

This is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month. The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.

I don’t mind the cost although I do wish it was a single charge along with my existing GH subscription instead of separate ones. Seems like a missed opportunity to bundle things.

I don’t care about getting a discount, just dislike being billed on two different billing cycles and it seems like a missed opportunity for them to get more devs on their paid tier.

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