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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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81–90 of 372 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#81

Post by nodja »

BeetleB wrote: post #74
nodja wrote: post #37

I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is…

Several minutes? Something is seriously wrong. For most models, it takes seconds.

2m27s for a partial response editing a 178 line file (it failed with an error, which seems to happen a lot with claude, but that's another issue).

https://streamable.com/rqlr84

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#82

Post by qwertox »

fvold wrote: post #80

The biggest change Copilot has done for me so far is to have me replace my VSCode with VSCodium to be sure it doesn't sneak any uploading of my code to a third party without my knowing. I'm all for new tech getting introduced and made useful, but let's make it all opt in, shall we?

Care to explain? Where are they uploading code to?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#83

Post by NitpickLawyer »

timrogers wrote: post #44
taurath wrote: post #13

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation. Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work. I think its somewhat telling that they can't share n…

We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today. So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contri…

> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor - so we really are using Copilot coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;)

Really cool, thanks for sharing! Would you perhaps consider implementing something like these stats that aider keeps on "aider writing itself"? - https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#84

Post by yen223 »

danielbln wrote: post #71
abraham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have it write tests for everything and then you've got a well tested codebase.

Caveat empor, I've seen some LLMs mock the living hell out of everything, to the point of not testing much of anything. Something to be aware of.

I've seen too many human operators do that too. Definitely a problem to watch out for

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#85

Post by ilaksh »

binarymax wrote: post #70
ilaksh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a completely nonsensical question given how quickly things are evolving. No one has a five year project timeline.

Absolutely the wrong take. We MUST think about what might happen in several years. Anyone who says we shouldn’t is not thinking about this technology correctly. I work on AI tech. I think about these things. If the teams at Microsoft or GitHub are not, then we should be pushing them to do so.

He asked that in the context of an actual specific project. It did not make sense way he asked it. And it's the executive's to plan that out five years down the line.. although I guarantee you none of them are trying to predict that far.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#86

Post by petetnt »

timrogers wrote: post #61
binarymax wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?

What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

What about developers who do enjoy writing for example high quality documentation? Do you expect that the status quo will be that most of the documentation will be AI slop and AI itself will just bruteforce itself through the issues? How close are we to the point where the AI could handle "tricky dependency updates", but not being able to handle "most interesting and complex problems"? Who writes the tests that are required for the "well tested" codebases for GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to work properly?

What is the job for the developer now? Writing tickets and reviewing low quality PRs? Isn't that the most boring and mundane job in the world?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#87

Post by [deleted] »

lukehoban wrote: post #52
jerpint wrote: post #7

These kinds of patterns allow compute to take much more time than a single chat since it is asynchronous by nature, which I think is necessary to get to working solutions on harder problems

Yes. This is a really key part of why Copilot coding agent feels very different to use than Copilot agent mode in VS Code. In coding agent, we encourage the agent to be very thorough in its work, and to take time to think deeply about the problem. It builds and tests code regularly to ensure it understands the impact of changes as it makes them, and stops and thinks regularly before taking action. These choices would…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#88

Post by aegypti »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #69
aaroninsf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question you may have a very informed perspective on: where are we wrt the agent surveying open issues (say, via JIRA) and evaluating which ones it would be most effective at handling, and taking them on, ideally with some check-in for conirmation? Or, contrariwise, from having product management agents which do track and assign work?

Check out this idea: https://fairwitness.bot ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44030394 ). The entire website was created by Claude Sonnet through Windsurf Cascade, but with the “Fair Witness” prompt embedded in the global rules. If you regularly guide the LLM to “consult a user experience designer”, “adopt the multiple perspectives of a marketing agenc”, etc., it will make rather decent suggestions. I’ve been h…

Tell Claude the site is down!

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#89

Post by sethammons »

overfeed wrote: post #76
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today. So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contri…

> we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot I'm curious to know how many Copilot PRs were not merged and/or required human take-overs.

textbook survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

every bullet hole in that plane is the 1k PRs contributed by copilot. The missing dots, and whole missing planes, are unaccounted for. Ie, "ai ruined my morning"

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