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Replit's in-browser coding AI

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Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#71

Post by risyachka »

maep wrote: post #26

If 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.

I mean people are also trained on GPL code and I bet you can find a ton of functions copies from GPL projects in million other projects.

But as long as these are tiny parts of codebase (which will most probably be the case), I doubt anything can be done with that. No one will go to court because of a few generic functions.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#72

Post by still_grokking »

notwhereyouare wrote: post #31
googlryas wrote: post #30

Earlier 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

Oh, internet drama. I love internet drama! So I looked it up as I never heard this story before.

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the social media fire all in all.

Also he doesn't look very smart, imho:

https://amasad.me/meta

Big LOL here! The abstract things are the simplest, yeah! That's why progress in something like math or theoretical physics is made by the dumbest people, in contrast to something like sociology where you need genius level of intelligence to come up with some new ideas. Sure, sure.

But that's of course not everything this dude got completely backwards.

Would explain why replit is the most useless of all the online IDEs: It has no direction, no true value proposition. It's not a good cloud coding environment. It never was a good code snippet playground (actually one of the worsts). Now they even require accounts, so the quick code snippet aspect is also gone. Also they badly positioned in the education space…

Of course I wish them luck!

But I guess they have no chance against something like Gitpod, Github, or OpenShift codespaces, which are light-years ahead.

OK, maybe the exit-strategy is "just" to be visible enough that at some point they get bought by one of the above. (Which doesn't look like the most ethical thing to do ;-)).

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#73

Post by aryamaan »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #69
aryamaan wrote: post #35

I was on beta list used this for golang. It blew my mind half of the times. It was like it knew what I was going to do. The other times it was dumber than the standard auto complete. It doesn't have any awareness of already defined variables and doesn't use them to complete halfwritten variables. Hope this gets better soon.

Have you tried Copilot? That seemed to work very well for me.

Will give a try. I like Replit's ready to use key-value db and also, a click deployment (running is deployment).

Overall, I like my Jetbrains IDE but Replit is coming with appealing features for the side projects specially. Easy to use auth, db, analytics, deployment...

I wish either Replit levels up its IDE game or Jetbrains(or community) build plugins to match the state of art/joyful experience of programming.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#74

Post by zamalek »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who'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 abo…

> If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code

I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe.

If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happens in my head, putting it into an editor is just process. I still also have to check it's work whenever I use it, so I'm still deeply embedded in the coding process.

I believe it's akin to an easel vs Krita/Photoshop. Some people enjoy interacting with the physical medium, others enjoy the creative process.

I would strongly recommend trying it out in anger (i.e. a reasonably real codebase), at least for 30 minutes. Form a better opinion after that (which may well be the same as yours right now).

For reference: I've been coding since I was 8 (almost 30 years).

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#75

Post by version_five »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who'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 abo…

I admit I haven't used it (I have used IDE autocomplete features and don't like them)

For me, same as writing actually, the thinking of what I want to do is everything, and the doing it is nearly trivial. I don't picture having copilot write nontrivial code for me and then reviewing it would be different than writing it, even if I didn't know the exact syntax and had to look it up. So I agree, it feels like a solution to a problem I don't have, like is solves something that I don't spend time on.

Cynically, like GPT-3 probably help write content farm stuff, copilot probably helps write some junk code for something, but there are probably domain specific low code tools that do that better as well

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#76

Post by version_five »

zamalek wrote: post #74
sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who'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 abo…

> If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe. If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happ…

Interesting to read (see my other comment in the thread). It sounds like I should try it

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#77

Post by gonehome »

zamalek wrote: post #74
sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who'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 abo…

> If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe. If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happ…

I'd guess it'd be really great for seeing examples and learning.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#78

Post by nstart »

m00x wrote: post #56
maep wrote: post #26

If 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.

If you look at licensed code, then write new code, do you also bring in those licenses? It's been proved in court that AI does not infringe on copyright or licenses since it generates things from an understanding of the whole, instead of directly stealing, just like the human brain does.

That is going to need a source. All I see in these AI data gathering exercises is that if the industry isn’t a well established litigious one, the companies will happily suck in all the data, license be damned. Code and art both fall under this. But when it comes to music which is heavily litigated, suddenly the only content a company like stable AI will use is open and voluntary because in that case they worry about “overfitting and legal issues”. (Refer Harmon ai)

Hypocrisy dressing up as progress in the machine learning field has been one of the most embarrassing scenes in software engineering recently. The genie may be out of the bottle but the fact is that a bunch of software engineers with a “move fast ethics later” attitude are the ones who let it out and they shouldn’t get to shrug it off for free.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#79

Post by davidmurdoch »

version_five wrote: post #76
zamalek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe. If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happ…

Interesting to read (see my other comment in the thread). It sounds like I should try it

I've used it for a long time and my favorite thing it can do is write documentation and code comments.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#80

Post by googlryas »

selykg wrote: post #58
googlryas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can I ask why you're so defensive about it? I feel like, if there's ANYTHING we have learned in the past decade or two it's that people who defend a company tend to be doing so for the wrong reasons. See Sony or Microsoft, or Apple or Android, etc. Defending a company is just weird. I look at replit as a tool, run by people. The tool might be cool, but the CEO made a bad decision and now I judge the product on that C…

I'm just tired of seeing the same low effort comments on HN when a given topic comes up.

Google => when will they cancel this?

Meta => metaverse what a joke

Etc...

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