News.yc commenter copilot.
GitHub Copilot
881–890 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot
#882I don't understand what this has to do with pair programming. It's just a glorified auto complete for function bodies. You still have to come up with everything else. Filling in function bodies isn't what makes pair programming valuable.
How long have you tried Copilot before you came to this conclusion?
Re: GitHub Copilot
#883i’m sort of a Luddite so take this with a grain of salt. I don’t see this going anywhere. If it’s really good and we can actually have 1 developer instead of 2 now why would any developer want to do this? this would basically be a piece of automation that diminishes the value we are creating. If it’s crap it’s going to create mountains of verbosity and code written to pump up the LOC numbers. It’s terrible. After tha…
No idea why you are downvoted.
I am skeptical and against the hype of this "replacing" programmers which it certainly won't as the AI engine that it uses (GPT-3) is limited and the code itself can also generate garbage or introduce insecure and vulnerable code as well. This is why it will always be 'assistive' rather than going to 'replace' anything. 10 years later, self-driving cars are still unsafe and immature.
The hype squad of this tool know it is limited but they want to capitalise on the 'AI' automation narrative to those who don't know any better.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#884I don't understand what this has to do with pair programming. It's just a glorified auto complete for function bodies. You still have to come up with everything else. Filling in function bodies isn't what makes pair programming valuable.
How long have you tried Copilot before you came to this conclusion?
I didn't try it because you have to sign up. I looked at all the examples though and I don't see how it relates to pair programming.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#885GitHub says you don't need to credit GitHub for any of the code suggestions, but since it's trained on public sources of code, anyone have a clue on potential licensing pitfalls?
(not a lawyer) my interpretation of GPLv2 is that at the very least the model would be licensed under GPL if it was trained on GPL code. The model is a derivative work. Whether the generated code coming out of the model is GPL is trickier. I would lean towards yes but I'm not entirely sure.
I think talking about exact text matches to existing code is a red herring. If you took GPL code and ran it through an obfuscator that changed every byte of the code to new code, that resulting code would be derivative and would need to be licensed under GPL too.
Thank you Microsoft for ushering in a new era of free software.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#886I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…
I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers. I know that I'm not the first one. My best days are when I'm removing code. I'm very wary from using frameworks and huge libraries. I learned few frameworks and libraries, I've chosen few that correspond to my style and I'm very careful when it comes to adapting new ones. I prefer to spend a week coding auth layer rather than…
> I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers.
There’s a huge difference between:
1. Writing the core logic for an algorithm from scratch
2. “Connecting things”: e.g. writing the “click” handler for a button press, adding an auth middleware to a HTTP request handler
The latter consists mostly of boilerplate code: code that thousands of developers have already written. Copilot is useless for the former, and great for the latter. It has no idea what algorithm you want to implement, since you may be the first to write it, but it has seen the code of countless other individuals who needed to write the same boilerplate.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#887Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.
I assume this will also work alright on other languages that aren't in the demo, e.g. C++?
Re: GitHub Copilot
#888I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…
Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?
Nah, we will just all be low-code function couplers instead of coders..
Re: GitHub Copilot
#889Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been using the Alpha for two weeks as well. I'm impressed by how GitHub Copilot appears to know exactly what I want to type. Not often it even suggests code I was going to peek, such as a snippet to a context menu or completing an array with all Romanian postcodes. Copilot is particularly helpful when working on Angular components where it makes mesmerising predictions. I see technology like Copilot becoming a…
Is this a joke? Top 3 comments follow almost an identical format?
It's a direct reply to the other comment you mention and it parses like it's autogenerated but then swerves off into another language. I'm pretty sure it's a joke.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#890GitHub Copilot may suggest old or deprecated uses of libraries and languages This raises two questions. - is there a way (right now or planned for the future) for library maintainers to mark suggestions to be removed from the suggestions? I can foresee Copilot being used as a source of 'truth' among less experienced developers, and getting people turning up in the Issues or Discord asking why the suggestion doesn't w…
I'd be pretty worried about this based on how many times an SO question has new better answers months/years later. I find that platform self-corrects reasonably well, with the newer better answer ending up at the top, but no idea how that'd happen here.
> I find that platform self-corrects reasonably well, with the newer better answer ending up at the top, but no idea how that'd happen here.
I don't. Very often I run into an outdated accepted response with much better and more recent replies below it.