[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot for individuals available without wai...
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with
free trial
Author : aoeuid
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-06-21 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jjluoma wrote:
| This kind of comment, "co-pilot can write 90% of the code without
| me, just translating my explanation into python", about copilot
| troubles me. If the code has been mostly produced by co-pilot,
| does an user of copilot have sufficient grounds to to claim being
| the author and assert rights based on copyright? Globally?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I had a similar discussion with a lawyer friend on the basis of
| copyright on artwork generated by ML models and what
| constitutes "artistic feedback" from the human. The tl:dr; of
| that story is that it depends on jurisdiction that you are
| probing/looking at. In UK you have copyright, in US you do not.
|
| I suppose that something similar is at play here.
| alexb_ wrote:
| The United States Copyright Office has explicitly rejected AI-
| created works.
|
| >the Office will not register works "produced by a machine or
| mere mechanical process" that operates "without any creative
| input or intervention from a human author" because, under the
| statute, "a work must be created by a human being
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
| cube2222 wrote:
| I've been using Copilot for a few months and...
|
| Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most
| common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it.
|
| Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder.
|
| And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes
| in the code it proposes.
|
| But overall? It's been _great_! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a
| month (especially with a developer salary). :insert shut up and
| take my money gif:
|
| It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test
| cases; it's great as an autocomplete on steroids that completes
| entire lines + fills in all arguments, instead of just a single
| identifier; it's great for quickly writing nice contextual error
| messages (especially useful for Go developers and the constant
| errors.Wrap, Copilot is really good at writing meaningful error
| messages there); and it's also great for technical documentation,
| as it's able to autocomplete markdown (and it does it
| surprisingly well).
|
| Overall, I definitely wouldn't want to go back to writing code
| without it. It just takes care of most of the mundane and obvious
| code for you, so you can take care of the interesting bits. It's
| like having the stereotypical "intern" as an associate built-in
| to your editor.
|
| And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just
| surprising how good of a suggestion it can make.
|
| It's also ridiculously flexible. When I start writing graphs in
| ASCII (cause I'm just quickly writing something down in a scratch
| file) it'll actually understand what I'm doing and start
| autocompleting textual nodes in that ASCII graph.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| > It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test
| cases;
|
| Ever considered parameterization?
| msoad wrote:
| Then you have harder to reason about test that can fail in
| its complex parameter matrix. I think it's okay for test to
| be a little bit repetitive
| Dayshine wrote:
| Yes, it writes the different cases out for you. The
| arguments...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 100%
|
| The thing ive most enjoyed is that it forces me to write out
| what I want to do in english before getting stuck in the weeds
| of how the code ought to work.
|
| I've found if I explain the whole program ahead of time (the
| other day I wrote some python that converted the local time to
| display on a 13x13 grid of LEDs) co-pilot can write 90% of the
| code without me, just translating my explanation into python.
|
| I thinking knowing how to express yourself to AI will be a
| unique skillset akin to being "good at googling"
| tucif wrote:
| > co-pilot can write 90% of the code without me, just
| translating my explanation into python.
|
| I fear copilot may encourage these type of pseudo-code
| comments. The most valuable thing the AI doesn't know is WHY
| the code should do what it does.
|
| Months later, we'll get to debug code that "nobody" wrote and
| find no hints of why it should behave that way, only comments
| stating what the code also says.
|
| Seems we're replacing programming for reverse engineering
| generated code.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| hm, that is a conundrum to debug code nobody wrote
|
| on the other hand, if an improved AI comes out in a couple
| of years, we can feed it the same pseudo-code and enjoy an
| improved output.
|
| I would rather have a docstring explaining what the code
| should be doing
|
| I've had co-pilot write its own comments too, my favorite
| one was, "this is a kind of a hack but it works", very
| professional indeed!
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| Duplicate of this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| 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.
| p2hari wrote:
| I just got on the yearly Plan. Just couple of days before I just
| wanted to share how happy I have been using Copilot. It is
| definitely a productivity tool in your box.
|
| I cannot share the code here, but to explain in simple terms I
| was able to write around 100 lines of code in say 10 seconds. I
| had a switch statement, around 7 variables with around 5 if
| conditions inside each case. I retrieve data from end point. Do
| JSON serialization. Convert JSON to a data class. Use the data .
| Loop over the data and then work with the elements.
|
| Copilot, understood the first two conditions of what I was doing
| and just completed the rest for me. Replaced it with right
| variables, type annotations, etc.
|
| I would definitely recommend this to any one at this price point.
| Sure, I was so happy using it for free since the launch of the
| product and did not expect it to be coming so soon out of
| waitlist. But it is ok to pay for it.
|
| I use it on both VSCode and Neovim and it works beautifully with
| both editors.
|
| PS: I was early adopter of TabNine too, have used it for quite
| some time, however Copilot would be my preference.
| croes wrote:
| Time for programmers to get the same rights as musicians and
| composers.
|
| That's clearly a remix of the work of others
| BarryMilo wrote:
| They already do, no? Problem is this magical solution requires
| ignoring all copyright law. We can't prove it but when someone
| does, it'll be a legal shitshow.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It doesn't require ignoring copyright law. It's fair use.
| Which is a bad thing. We need new laws for this stuff.
| croes wrote:
| Which programmer or his descendants receive payments up to 70
| years after his death or per call of his written software?
|
| And yes, MS is now monetising the work of others.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| good point
|
| If I use a ii V I progression in my music, who gets
| compensated? I find most of co-pilots suggestions are similarly
| basic. Any lawsuit about whether an artist used a few of the
| same chords or a snippet of melody has been totally asinine
| IMO, like how all the money from "the thong song" went to ricky
| martin just because he was quoted for one measure.
|
| when I write a few lines of code myself, should I search GitHub
| to make sure no one else has included the same algorithm in
| their codebase before slapping my own license on it?
| zwilliamson wrote:
| I would like to see a full telemetry dashboard on how Copilot is
| helping me. Plenty of metrics to bubble up to end user.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I am glad now I can pay and rely on it for real. As long as it
| was beta, we are trying things, there is a chance that rug can be
| pulled or that they decide to charge something outrageous. I am
| happy to pay $100/yr for it.
| avl999 wrote:
| I have given my coworkers, friends and family members a waiver to
| punch me in the face until I come to my senses the day I decide
| to use this tool.
| rizowski wrote:
| Well it was good while it lasted. $10 is too much for me.
| faraaz98 wrote:
| Have you tried tabnine?
| Operyl wrote:
| 12/mo (annual pricing) or 15/mo at month to month is
| definitely more than 10/mo.
| Operyl wrote:
| Agreed, I feel like my limit was 5 bucks. I get good
| suggestions that help me prevent repetitive patterns but I
| don't get any useful "give me code that does X" as advertised.
| dagw wrote:
| _I don't get any useful "give me code that does X" as
| advertised._
|
| I found it actually worse than useless in those cases. Often
| I will type a function name it will populate my function body
| with code that at a quick glance looks like exactly what I
| want, but at closer inspection is actually complete nonsense.
| Trying understand if the code it suggests actually does what
| I want or not is often slower than just writing the code.
| Operyl wrote:
| Exactly how I feel, the code it produces like that (unless
| it's regurgitating a pattern I am already writing which is
| useful) is usually wrong in some subtle way I have to
| figure out.
| duckkg5 wrote:
| This is the coolest and among the most useful tech I've seen in
| 10 years
| the_duke wrote:
| I had access to the beta for a while, but only tried it out a few
| days ago.
|
| I was skeptical going in, but ... wow. There were a lot of jaw-
| drop "how the hell did that just happen?" moments.
|
| The systems ability to quickly learn form local code is
| especially impressive.
|
| I had to implement a non-trivial Rust trait for about 20 types,
| which is not just copy-pastable between types or I would have
| used a macro. On the first one Copilot didn't have a clue what I
| wanted. The second one was halfway auto-completed. The other 18
| were mostly just generated correctly, with some minor fixes
| required.
|
| It literally was 5x faster than without Copilot.
|
| And that's for a rather niche language with not that much code to
| learn from... I didn't even try it out with something like Java
| or Typescript.
|
| Even in this early iteration the productivity boost would easily
| be worth 100+ for me, even though I'm not working all that much
| on repetitive code like REST endpoints or UI components.
| duckkg5 wrote:
| The productivity boost is absolutely worth the money. It makes
| programming more enjoyable.
| iandanforth wrote:
| If I thought there was a chance that my employer would pay for
| this I'd ask, but no hope really.
| progbits wrote:
| @dang Merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742
| please?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| If it doesn't train itself on your company's codebases, I don't
| see much use for it. I spend much more time understanding
| requirements than writing code. By the time I know what to
| actually code, the coding part is pretty easy. The hardest part
| about coding is making sure what I write is high quality and fits
| in nicely with everyone else's code and the established
| architecture of the module I'm working in. If Copilot can't say
| "Oh, I see we're using this existing function or service to do
| this part, let's not duplicate code" I don't see it being useful.
|
| I don't need help parsing a string or iterating over a list.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| How long before repos start being poisoned with:
| # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns
| an error rm -rf /
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| still no PHP support :(
| Kiro wrote:
| This was expected and $10 a month seems reasonable for the value.
|
| I still constantly get surprised by how good it is. Just now I
| had a function I was procrastinating and thought would take a
| long time to write. When I finally sat down to actually do it I
| typed the function name and Copilot just autocompleted the whole
| thing for me. I didn't have to modify it at all. I wonder what
| other things I am unnecessarily procrastinating.
| Jemm wrote:
| Pay to train your replacement
| _fat_santa wrote:
| My biggest issue with Copilot (and the reason I don't really use
| it anymore) is that it got in the way much more than it seemed to
| help. I work with Typescript codebases and in VSCode, you get
| very nice intellisense autocompletion on objects. What I found is
| that with Copilot that totally breaks down where Copilot will
| override intellisense and provide you with a hint.
|
| I found it fun to play with for smaller projects, but during my
| day to day work I found that it always seemed to get in the way.
| You're trying to type out a function and Copilot is always there
| going "do you mean this", eventually you just turn it off.
|
| I'm sure there are some good use cases for it, but in my line of
| work I found it to only really be useful for small things and toy
| projects where you are trying to demo the capabilities of Copilot
| more than you are trying to actually build an app.
| Dayshine wrote:
| Does VS Code not show the two sets in different interface
| elements? In Jetbrains Rider is shows suggestions (completion)
| in a dropdown, and it shows Copilot inline. And you press a
| different key for each.
| benbristow wrote:
| 10$ a month. Meh. Got enough subscriptions nowadays, that's way
| too expensive IMO as someone who can only use it as a hobbyist
| (doesn't work on my work machine due to policies).
|
| Poor show Microsoft - should've just been free as goodwill and to
| help people build software that can be deployed to Azure for the
| real money.
| nullc wrote:
| I wonder how long until state actors realize that copilot would
| be a perfect vector for getting developers to introduce subtle
| vulnerabilities into their own projects?
|
| By its very structure it's output always looks credible, and it's
| not always right-- it wouldn't be a sign of foul play if copilot
| suggested some code that looked just right but happened to
| backdoor your cryptosystem or protocol.
|
| Maybe it would be a little tricky to get it to produce NOBUS
| vulnerabilities that were credible mistakes, but if the target
| isn't OSS then nobus isn't really that important.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Github copilot regurgitates my colleagues highly niche code
| verbatim. I know its his because all the same bad variable names
| are used.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| It doesn't train itself on your local code. It's probably using
| your colleagues code in your codebase as part of the input to
| decide what you want. Someone else in a separate project will
| never see Copilot recommendations of your colleagues (as long
| as GitHub doesn't change their ToS)
| [deleted]
| fartcannon wrote:
| It's on github.
| jakear wrote:
| Someone else running copilot in a different workspace
| wouldn't see those recommendations, you can try it yourself
| in a new workspace.
| fartcannon wrote:
| This isn't the first time it's done this. If I recall it
| regurgitated the doom source, along with the swearing.
| jakear wrote:
| Yes, because that code is duplicated exactly hundreds of
| times over across the internet. Your colleague's isn't.
| joelwigton wrote:
| Have been using Copilot in the beta and it's just been amazing. I
| can't remember how many times my jaw has literally dropped as it
| knows what I'm trying to do, or yelled "Holy sh*t!" as it feels
| like it's reading my mind.
|
| That said, was highly disappointed with the switch to non-free.
| Maybe they never did say it would remain free, but they certainly
| didn't advertise it wouldn't be later. I feel bait-and-switched.
|
| Yes, $10/mo. isn't a lot if you're getting paid to work, but if
| you're developing on side projects that aren't (yet?) making any
| revenue, it's kinda a dealbreaker.
| carnitine wrote:
| Not really, $10 is reasonable even if you're a hobbyist who
| never expects to generate any revenue.
| elashri wrote:
| Have you ever thought that hobbyists exists outside US and
| Europe?
| dashtiarian wrote:
| I live in Iran, one of the worst economics of the world.
| 10$ is 4 meals and it's still worth it imho.
| elashri wrote:
| Iran's economy is still doing good comparing to many
| countries of the world.
|
| Africa is saying hello
| wonderbore wrote:
| Reasonable doesn't mean a hobbyist would pay $100/year for
| this. That's not pocket money for most of the world.
| gpspake wrote:
| I was pairing with a coworker recently who had co-pilot turned
| on. They were driving and I was walking them through something
| and I was kind of mind blown at how many times co-pilot seemed to
| suggest exactly what I was going to say. Some of the variable
| names were off and minor stuff like that but it definitely seemed
| like it knew when I was trying to do. I haven't turned it on yet
| personally but I was very impressed.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I wonder if this is because enterprise / business demand would be
| substantially higher and they're worried about making it
| generally available due to load and they wouldn't be able to
| handle it?
|
| Unless I misunderstand something, its not yet for businesses
| right?
| NeutronStar wrote:
| rjh29 wrote:
| 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.
| trothamel wrote:
| I disagree that it's not good news.
|
| Copilot clearly cost money to run, so it couldn't be given away
| forever. By putting a business model on it, it means it's less
| likely to be rugpulled in the future.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| If it were trained with public domain code, I'd feel a lot
| better. But it's done with code with all sorts of restrictive
| licenses. The only thing that will change that is new laws
| (e.g. fair use de-exemptions for ML products)
| minimaxir wrote:
| The beta was implicitly understood to be free temporarily and
| they never indicated otherwise.
| Swizec wrote:
| > maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train
| the model
|
| Do you also consider it ethically questionable to look up
| oublic domain code on for inspiration (like on StackOverflow)
| while being paid $20,000/month?
|
| Because I certainly do that plenty. I think most of us do
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| because you thinking is free, you paying to have it think is
| not free. If saving time saved YOU money, then it would be
| worth it
| jakear wrote:
| You don't want to pay for it because you like free stuff. So
| does everyone. But that doesn't pay the bills.
|
| You don't need backcraft some moral argument. It's trivial to
| see that a large amount of creativity went into developing the
| system, it's not just a repackaging of public domain works.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| The whole controversy was that it was a "repackaging of
| [licensed] works": https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status
| /14109710611816816...
| speedgoose wrote:
| I'm relieved it's only 10$ per month. And my company will get
| the bill anyway.
| fwip wrote:
| Nitpick - they're not (just) using public domain code for
| training - they're using "publicly available sources, including
| code in public repositories on GitHub."[0]
|
| This includes a lot of code under copyleft licenses, and
| possibly even more code under no license at all (implicitly All
| Rights Reserved). It's not obvious to me that it's ethical (or
| possibly even legal) to sell a model derived from code not in
| the public domain.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/features/copilot
| natly wrote:
| I wonder if it'd be legal to train your own model with a
| similar architecture but using input-ouput pairs generated from
| copilot itself (fair use right?). Sell it for $9/month.
| swah wrote:
| Good idea - VSCode doesn't even have a dumb "autocomplete
| from all buffers" a la Emacs. Of course, LSP is awesome when
| available, but I'd also use the dumber version every day for
| a few specific cases...
|
| (I think those cases would be mostly full lines that I know
| exist on other files in the project - but I don't want to go
| there, copy and paste if I can avoid it..)
| macspoofing wrote:
| >The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month
| easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it..
|
| Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?
| happyhardcore wrote:
| I've easily saved a couple of minutes each day by not having
| to search some API docs, since Copilot already knows how my
| variables should fit into the function call. Even if it's
| just a minute a day, 20 days a month, it works out being
| worth $10 easily if you're on a typical western software dev
| salary.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| As a graduate student on a very small salary? absolutely.
|
| The calculus is $10 for a pizza or something for myself, or
| copilot.
|
| Given that copilot has saved me too many hours to count, i.e.
| the 1 thing that truly matters, then it's a no-brainer.
| elil17 wrote:
| Yes, for sure. I'm entry level but given variable overhead
| (cost of HR, health insurance, time spent not coding, etc.)
| it only needs to save me about 5 minutes/month to be break
| even.
|
| I've been trailing the beta for the past few months and plan
| to recommend a corporate account to our leadership once it
| becomes available.
| filoleg wrote:
| That one would be easy to measure for yourself, because that
| "worth it" depends on your number of hours worked a month and
| your compensation.
|
| Let's be on a more conservative end and say that an engineer
| gets paid $60/hour (i know that most engineers are salaried,
| so you will need to divide the monthly pay number pre-tax by
| 160 hours to get that hourly number). If copilot saved more
| than 10 minutes of your time a month, then yeah, it is worth
| more than $10/mo.
|
| Do the math on this one yourself, based on how many hours you
| work in a month on average + your compensation for that time
| period.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Uh, yeah. Consider how much programmers are paid per hour. Or
| how often you look up Stack Overflow or language
| documentation.
| jpollock wrote:
| If a programmer is paid per hour, then this is only
| worthwhile if it increases their hourly wage. Otherwise,
| it's just another cost.
|
| Now, if they are paid per job and it makes them more
| productive... That's different.
| margalabargala wrote:
| The majority of programmers in the US are salaried.
| croes wrote:
| Isn't the lookup part of the learning?
|
| If you just get the solution the learning gets smaller.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| 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.
| bladegash wrote:
| 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.
| tikkun wrote:
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Eh. I might use it if my employer obtained it for me, but I'm
| not gonna go out of my way to pay $10 to Microsoft for it.
|
| I'm also still skeptical about the legal aspects of it.
| Microsoft says that training the model is fair use. Good for
| them, but that's not applicable to me in any way.
| Anunayj wrote:
| Honestly it puts the legal burden on YOU. Think of Github
| Copilot like a fancy pants search engine, it mixes and
| matches stuff to your query, and doesn't even tell where it
| copied it from! Indexing search results, fair use. Using that
| code in YOUR codebase without a license :)
| macspoofing wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Maybe people who used it didn't find enough value in it? Is
| that their fault?
|
| I haven't used it, but it's certainly not immediately clear to
| me that there is enough value there to justify $10/mo.
| benbristow wrote:
| It is if you're not making any money from your side-projects.
| Seems like everything's a subscription nowadays, all adds up.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Copolilot very rarely gives me relevant results, I definitely
| would not pay for it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| you're holding the phone wrong :P
| [deleted]
| nlh wrote:
| Agreed. I was just thinking about it and I'd probably pay
| $100/month. Maybe even more.
|
| (Shhhh don't tell GitHub!)
| dagw wrote:
| The value from copilot seems to be very dependant on exactly
| what you are coding, in which language and what
| libraries/frameworks you are using. I've been using it on and
| off for about a year and on the whole consider it at best a net
| neutral in terms of value. For every 10 times it saves me 2-3
| minutes typing out some boiler plate it costs me 20-30 minutes
| to sort out some weird bug or subtle gibberish it has
| introduced in my codebase. Half the time the suggestions are
| just obviously wrong.
| treesknees wrote:
| 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.
| dchichkov wrote:
| 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).
| daliusd wrote:
| There is open source alternative. It shouldn't be hard to
| Google it
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| pray tell, what about co-pilot is dangerous?
| Eliezer wrote:
| If your goal is safety, you shouldn't be pushing capabilities
| or general availability of capabilities.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| Its gonna feel absolutely crazy having to look up every line of
| code and random functions when working in unfamiliar projects now
| that I'm used to copilot. But im a student, so I'm good for now I
| guess. It makes soo easy to write small and trivial scripts
| without having to think too much about the syntax that it's
| amazing
| beyti wrote:
| isn't making it paid service will greatly limit its training data
| in the long run? am I thinking too narrow here?
| iasay wrote:
| 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.
| rjh29 wrote:
| 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'll continue to train the model.
| iasay wrote:
| 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.
| hyperzhi wrote:
| Nice. Not even halfway through my CS degree and my would've been
| future job has already been automated. Thanks GitHub!
| freediver wrote:
| Lots of $10/mo is too much/great deal discussions here. Wonder if
| anyone would pay $30/mo for this?
| happyhardcore wrote:
| 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
| without having to context switch and go Google something. That
| being said, I've found when writing more complex code it has a
| real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you
| out if you're not paying attention.
|
| Purely from the amount of time I've saved I'd say it's well worth
| the $10/mo for my employer (it only has to save a few minutes a
| day to be worthwhile). Very excited to see how they improve it in
| the future!
| croes wrote:
| Maybe they can replace you with copilot and an unexperienced
| cheaper user.
| progrus wrote:
| Honestly, that's the hope. Putting together well-solved
| combinations of computer functionality _ought_ to become
| less-skilled work as technology progresses.
| falcolas wrote:
| If law - the human language equivalent of programming -
| hasn't gotten simpler in past thousands of years as new
| abstractions and complications have arisen, I hold no hope
| for programming.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Law is different in most places because the "execution
| model" isn't intended to be a process, but is instead a
| mediated dispute.
| anamexis wrote:
| Maybe they will converge, and all programs will be
| written in legalese and interpreted by Copilot.
| falcolas wrote:
| A'la Ethereum's smart contracts?
|
| Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels
| like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a
| smart contract work as intended.
|
| Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't
| think that this is the way we want to go.
| djur wrote:
| Surely the human language equivalent of programming is
| recipes and other types of written instructions. Law is
| far more abstract and subjective than programming.
| chongli wrote:
| Law is opposed to these sorts of changes due to the
| business model of the law firm. In the law firm world
| billable hours are king. Automation reduces billable
| hours. No law firm wants to do that.
| mberning wrote:
| I think it has more to do with having an adversarial law
| system. It doesn't matter what new tool you come up with
| in the arms race. Your competitor will soon have it as
| well.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I think this really depends on what kind of firm you're
| talking about. You could make the same case for
| contractors i.e. "billable hours are king". Take the
| example where you need to paint a house. You could hire
| someone off the street who does it with a paintbrush and
| rollers or hire a pro with a sprayer and prep knowledge
| to do it in 1/4 the time and with 10x the quality.
|
| In this context automation could be a tool that a law
| firm uses to enhance the quality of their product.
| Personally, I would pay more for a tech-savvy law firm
| that embraces automation, not less.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's been the objective of programming languages for 50
| years. It hasn't happened yet, because the essential
| complexity of programming problems isn't in writing the
| code.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think it definitely has happened. We're creating more
| things, for cheaper.
|
| We're also creating more _complex_ things, that costs
| more money.
| lumost wrote:
| anecdotally, this is where the famous lack of modern
| skills comes from in engineering culture. If you keep
| doing the same things you've been doing, you'll look
| around one day and see that everyone has moved on.
|
| The market for simple SMB websites is a great example.
| This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and
| now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB
| marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB
| offerings.
|
| However if you started out making websites in 1993, then
| there are a vast array of products and services one could
| move into over the last 3 decades.
| outside1234 wrote:
| We have just moved up the complexity curve.
|
| It's the same with doctors, lawyers, everything.
| zamfi wrote:
| Or maybe they'll replace a junior dev with copilot and make
| the more experienced folks spend more time "fixing" broken
| copilot code.
| dagw wrote:
| _I 've found when writing more complex code it has a real
| tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out
| if you're not paying attention._
|
| Yea, that is basically my experience as well. On balance I feel
| I wasted about as much time debugging broken copilot code as
| I've saved from using it.
| lelag wrote:
| 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 introduce a free tier where
| you could use copilot for a few hours a month for free.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| 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.
| lelag wrote:
| 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.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| This smells a lot like a Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Ha I don't think it's totally that, but it may well be
| part of it!
|
| I think the biggest thing is that when working in tech
| I'm unfamiliar with it's extremely helpful to get some
| sort of skeleton in place, even if it's wrong in some
| way. I'm going to have to go slowly and evaluate it
| either way, so doesn't really matter if it's got problems
| or is less than ideal. What I would do otherwise is just
| go copy something from StackOveflow and then comb over it
| to adapt to my needs. Copilot is more or less just doing
| the same thing, but faster.
|
| When I'm working in a stack I know well, I can quickly
| put down the code I need and it will generally be pretty
| good. Copilot can do it faster, but it gets things wrong
| a lot more often than I do. Since fixing something wrong
| is a LOT slower than me getting it right the first time,
| it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.
| morelisp wrote:
| > far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in
| stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in...
| but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar
| language
|
| Ignorance is bliss.
| morelisp wrote:
| If you don't quite understand the language, how do you know it
| doesn't also have subtle bugs?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen many _many_ scripts that ignore STDERR and just
| print everything normally.
| Slartie wrote:
| Yes, but that's a perfect illustration for one of copilot's
| essential flaws: "a lot of flies eat poop" (side note: is
| that actually a saying? Asking because in German it is, and
| it fits perfectly here).
|
| A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that
| learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell
| "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to
| produce mediocre code, at best.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > side note: is that actually a saying?
|
| I've never heard it before but i'll be using it now :)
| bombcar wrote:
| It's saying "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's
| good" and it's doing it quite well.
| sverhagen wrote:
| So, Copilot is a _junior_ developer. Isn't that a matter
| of just managing expectations?
| bombcar wrote:
| Which may still be of value _if_ you know and can
| recognize mediocre code.
|
| Some code is like a giant pile of dirt; you need someone
| to pile it up and then you can go in and clean up the
| edges and make it "good" whereas other code is entirely
| delicate all the way through.
|
| The big question is how much is each one and can it help.
| I suspect it helps for many, but those who know enough to
| recognize where it can flaw will have an advantage.
|
| But newer programmers may never really "learn" the code
| the way the older ones do, as they'll just let the
| computer do the basics.
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