[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot X - Sign up for technical preview
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GitHub Copilot X - Sign up for technical preview
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 936 points
Date : 2023-03-22 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| No JetBrains in the preview :(
| gbuckingham89 wrote:
| This is a big disappointment
| mewmew07 wrote:
| how is this big?
|
| it's a preview for new features, calm down
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's big because I want it now!
| hu3 wrote:
| Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is
| at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the
| writing is on the wall.
|
| Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering
| food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will
| punish those who refuse.
|
| We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just
| like we need less manual labor in farms today.
|
| And coding is just one of the many applications where AI can
| replace brains.
|
| Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of
| people who became inferior to machines at almost everything.
| Universal Basic Income?
|
| It's amazing and terrifying at the same time.
|
| Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we
| created ourselves.
| ra1231963 wrote:
| At one time, people programmed without google or search
| engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read
| through them and then type out what they saw in the book.
| Today, that sounds absurd.
|
| Then came stack overflow and google. We search, pray we get a
| good result or someone else took the time to ask the question,
| then read (and sometimes copy+paste).
|
| Then AI assistants. I'm not exactly sure what's next, but I do
| think coding without some type of AI assistant will be
| extremely antiquated very soon. I already use it all the time.
| I never want to go back.
|
| The next generation will look at finding answers via SO,
| google, and random forums just as we look at people use used
| books -- as an absurdly inefficient way to do a job
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > At one time, people programmed without google or search
| engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read
| through them and then type out what they saw in the book.
| Today, that sounds absurd.
|
| Even if it's absurd I still like to buy physical books. The
| information is better structured and I like holding a book
| and turning pages.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a
| world of people who became inferior to machines at almost
| everything. Universal Basic Income?_
|
| Why would the machines want to pay us once we can no longer
| provide them value? Maybe they'll keep a few of us as pets and
| for sport, but the rest will be sent to the human equivalent of
| Bovine University.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| I use copilot, and I feel that it is useful about 40% of the
| time. Most of the time the suggestions are not what I'm going
| for, sometime the suggestions are close or help me think
| through the solution easier, and occasionally spot on and I can
| tab complete the code.
|
| I've noticed that the suggestion quality/usefulness varies
| considerably between projects and programming languages. For a
| self-contained bash script, it is incredibly useful. For a
| rails application, less so.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Still most of the time, the suggestions are not helpful, and
| it takes time to look at the suggestion and dismiss it. So
| I'm usually torn between is this useful or distracting.
| Curiosity keeps it around, but I keep getting closer to
| dropping it as the novelty wears.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| >We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance.
|
| We've always progressed to needing fewer developers to do what
| we currently do. Companies like Squarespace, Shopify, AWS, etc
| have allowed people to do more with less. Long gone are the
| days an artist would hire a developer to build them a website
| they could host a portfolio on.
|
| But growth has filled in the voids with more ambitious work.
|
| It's daunting, but you can also look at this from the opposite
| perspective. Why work for someone on a 5 person team, when you
| can try and run the same business with 1 person (i.e. you).
|
| The people who should be afraid are actually those that run
| companies like Meta and Twitter. Better developer productivity
| means competitors can chomp at their heels with much smaller
| teams.
| soiler wrote:
| > We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance.
| Just like we need less manual labor in farms today.
|
| When my team gets crunched, it's not usually because we can't
| write the code fast enough. It's because of product
| requirements (changing, needing to be fleshed out, being
| unrealistic, being understood properly by QA, being adapted to
| the realities of reasonable code, not existing, etc.).
|
| On top of that, needing fewer workers to do X work !== getting
| X work done cheaper. Quite often, it means getting 2X, 3X, 10X
| work done. As an overall trend, modern society has increased
| worker productivity dramatically over the last few decades, yet
| many work as many or more hours than they used to. We could get
| the same results with fewer workers, or we could make them work
| more. We know what 99% of CEOs will choose.
|
| Of course, maybe it will reduce developer jobs. I'm not ruling
| that out entirely. But when (not if) we create an alien
| intelligence that can wipe out our industry, we may have bigger
| concerns than steady employment.
| nbar1 wrote:
| > Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world
| of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything.
| Universal Basic Income?
|
| Try mass culling
| sharemywin wrote:
| I call it Universal Pet Income. Because at that point won't we
| just be AI's pets?
|
| Not that I'm against it. just call it for what it is.
| kapperchino wrote:
| Not AI's pets, but oligarch's pets
| RivieraKid wrote:
| No, the AI will work for us, it's our pet.
| klibertp wrote:
| That's completely backwards. Pets don't have to work. Try
| to convince my cat to do something useful. I'd switch
| places with him in heartbeat if could. If an AI, or anybody
| else for that matter, offers to make me their pet without
| me having to grow fur and losing the opposite thumb (but I
| still could learn to purr if needed), I'd be even more for
| it...
| mkaic wrote:
| Why would something smarter than us be our pet?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Because we will have full control over it. It will do
| what we ask. The AI has no motivation or personality,
| it's just a tool used by humans.
| pferde wrote:
| Maybe it's time to start differentiating between
| artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness?
| Surely I can't be the first one to think of this...
| mkaic wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but I also don't think such
| differentiation is possible, because we have no testable
| definition of consciousness. I genuinely look forward to
| the day we discover/understand the physical processes
| underlying our own consciousness, and how to
| detect/disprove it in machines, but until then... it's
| unfortunately unfalsifiable.
| cubefox wrote:
| Agentic AIs are more useful than mere tools, therefore
| they will be built, and agents have motivation. The
| alignment problem is how to give them exactly the right
| motivation, such that they keep us as pets instead of
| killing or factory farming us. Like humans keep cats.
| mkaic wrote:
| And what if a human tells it to control other people?
| What if a rogue third party terrorist group replicates
| OpenAI's latest and greatest in the year 2030, but
| explicitly tasks it with hurting people instead of
| helping them?
|
| I don't agree with "we will have full control over it."
| I'm more concerned about how much control it will have
| over us.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance.
| Just like we need less manual labor in farms today.
|
| I don't think that's right. Farms may have less manual labor
| but there's man, many times more people building farming tools,
| software, tech, etc.
|
| What will happen is you will be able to do more with your time.
| We are limited by how many people we can actually hire and the
| output of those people. Now each person can output more and
| more. So much that we want to build but we don't is because we
| are limited by output. We need to prioritize certain things for
| everything has an opportunity cost. Now we will be able to burn
| down more things more quickly.
|
| Also the math. Imagine developers just became about 30% more
| efficient. I want MORE of them now as my money is better spent!
| If my competitor downsizes to remain at their current capacity
| then I will crush them because I want 30% MORE developers that
| are coding 30% more efficiently allowing me to release 40% more
| things for the same money! I crush my competition then and they
| know this so they have to keep up as it's an arms race.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| > Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world
| of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything.
| Universal Basic Income?
|
| Inferior to machines at almost everything? Most jobs are safe,
| look at the 25 most common jobs in the US - cashier, food
| preparation worker, stocking associate, laborer, janitor,
| construction worker, bookkeeper, server, medical assistant,
| bartender, administrative assistant, marketing specialist,
| police officer, electrician, mechanic, etc.
|
| In theory, if all developers are replaced, they should be able
| to find a different job. The problem is that the different job
| may have lower pay and status.
|
| There's really no need for UBI.
| realharo wrote:
| If there is no more demand for developers for the kind of
| projects that most work on today, what do you think will be
| the next area that they'll all try to get into?
|
| Automating all the other stuff that's left on the table.
| waboremo wrote:
| Do you genuinely believe machines can't handle most of those
| jobs with ease?
|
| The only reason why they haven't already been replaced is
| because humans can be exceptionally cheap. Much easier to
| hire somebody to sit at a desk for $10/hour doing repetitive
| tasks than spend millions implementing systems across the
| board to do what they do (for now).
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| While we have seem some huge leaps in AI, robotics is still
| far behind human capability. Things like food preparation
| are not anywhere close to being feasible right now.
|
| So perhaps in the medium future humans will be "stuck"
| doing only physical tasks, while AIs take over everything
| that can be done virtually.
| czbond wrote:
| There is a display at Meow Wolf (absurdist immersive art
| experience) which paraphrased is "Thinking is for
| machines, labor is for humans". May turn to be true...
| intelVISA wrote:
| I'll reply to this once GPT4 provides a thought for me to
| borrow.
| czbond wrote:
| It should only cost you a few credits
| waboremo wrote:
| That is one of the common outcomes talked about.
| Certainly nothing more stable right now than being an
| Electrician or Machinist!
|
| I will say though, that for a lot of those jobs human-
| replicating robotics isn't even necessary. We exaggerate
| the difficulty required because we're still assuming that
| the exact current system should stay in place. However,
| sticking within food preparation example, look at those
| elaborate cake vending machines found primarily in asian
| countries. There really isn't a reason why McDonalds
| can't do the same for some of their offerings, after all
| most of their stuff is frozen anyways.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Yes, I believe machines can't handle most of the jobs I
| listed with ease.
| waboremo wrote:
| Cashiers, already replaced by self scanners, fewer and
| fewer of them are found in stores, even if you do get
| hired as a cashier you usually make horrible hours now.
| Food preparation is another one hit huge by automation,
| where it's become normal now for companies to announce
| automated locations (like McDonalds and Taco Bell did
| last year). Server, bartender, same thing applies. There
| have already been police officer bots being tested. I
| mean truly the list goes on, out of the ones you listed
| really only electrician, construction worker, and
| mechanic would be hardest to automate.
| gjulianm wrote:
| Honestly, this just seems like another tool. An amazing one,
| yes, but a tool nevertheless.
|
| > Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as
| delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because
| markets will punish those who refuse.
|
| The same way coding without Internet feels antiquated, or
| coding without autocomplete, or coding without fast compilation
| times...
|
| If anything, progression of tools has shown several things:
|
| - That the more tools we have, the faster we can work and
| iterate, the more value we can deliver in less time.
|
| - That IT work doesn't ever end. Tons of IT jobs exist only to
| support IT itself. The arrival of AWS made sysadmins "obsolete"
| but on the other hand created the need for SRE and DevOps
| engineers.
|
| - The existence of tools that let "laypeople" do IT work do not
| really delete those jobs. Tons of "nocode" tools exist so that
| people can build their own websites, applications, etc. But
| designers, coders still exist.
|
| - People still stay behind. Tons of companies still run on a
| crappy NFS that's hosted in the IT guy closet. Others don't
| have a webpage and use an @hotmail.com address for email (if
| they even have email!). The market punishes, yeah, but not
| _that_ hard.
| nodogoto wrote:
| [dead]
| CalinR2 wrote:
| Screenshooting both comments for a guaranteed agedlikemilk
| SergeAx wrote:
| We already had several tectonic shifts in software engineering
| in the last ~50 years, and there was never a consequential
| redice if engineering workforce, only otherwise.
| idkwhoiam wrote:
| Translating ideas into code has never been the bottle neck in
| software development. Well, not in web dev anyways. Developers
| spend very little time writing code compared to reading. You
| still need all your expertise to guide copilot & evaluate its
| suggestions.
|
| I see copilot as just another productivity tool. Combined with
| ChatGPT it may save a few roundtrips to Stack Overflow too.
| agentultra wrote:
| It feels absurd.
|
| A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate
| writing tests! Yay!
|
| Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it
| explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated
| specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from
| examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the
| reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense
| and specify the correct properties? Can Chat-GPT discover
| properties and prove theorems?
|
| We used to do this in code review where humans could explain
| their reasoning. Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a
| plausible-sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no
| sense. We have to read every line it generates and make sure it
| contains no errors, is properly specified, makes sense, etc...
| something we're extremely ill-equipped to do.
|
| The problem of programming, for me, hasn't been about how much
| code I write or how quickly I write it. It has always been
| about solving the right problems with elegant solutions. The
| code itself is an artifact of the real work.
|
| CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't understand
| specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It can't take a
| specification, generate a program, discover new abstractions
| that make the solution more elegant, and explain its reasoning.
| It can generate a heck of a lot of code though! Wow! Is it the
| right code? Maybe!
|
| But that's what we get with humans, right? No!
|
| Humans can explain their reasoning.
| wfeefwfwe wrote:
| this all sounds very plausible and convincing until this
| part:
|
| > But that's what we get with humans, right? No!
|
| > Humans can explain their reasoning.
|
| can you explain your reasoning as to why a language model
| would never be able to match a human's ability to explain its
| reasoning?
|
| i've met a lot of humans that are quite bad at this, and i
| will likely never know for sure why they wrote the unit tests
| that they wrote unless i rewrite those tests to myself.
|
| but if you have them explain their reasoning enough, and if
| that reasoning is plausible enough, and if the relationship
| between that reasoning and what they did is strong enough,
| consistently enough -- you start to trust them.
|
| you don't trust gpt4 to write code for you. which makes
| sense. but that doesn't mean as much as you think it means, i
| think.
| havelhovel wrote:
| > can you explain your reasoning as to why a language model
| would never be able to match a human's ability to explain
| its reasoning?
|
| It's a language model, not a reasoning model. A lot of its
| training data happens to be logical, so it sounds logical,
| but it's still just acting on probability. Thinking it's
| "explaining" anything it produces is a mistake.
| adambard wrote:
| Copilot user here.
|
| Copilot (the existing gpt-3 one) definitely helps at writing
| unit tests. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't nail it, but one thing
| it can do reliably is to repeat a pattern, and I don't know
| about you, but my unit tests tend to repeat the same pattern
| (with some tweaks to test this-or-that-case). Quite often it
| infers the correct change from the name I gave the test
| method, but even if it doesn't it'll write a 90% correct case
| for me. I imagine the GPT-4 version will do more of the same
| with better results.
|
| It cannot replace reasoning, but it can augment it (by
| suggesting patterns and implementations from its latent space
| that I hadn't thought of), and worst case it can replace
| quite a bit of typing.
|
| Long-term, it remains to be seen how far
| bigger/better/stronger LLMs can push the illusion of
| rationality. In many fields, they may be able to simply build
| their ability to pattern-match to beyond some threshold of
| usefulness. Perhaps (some subset of) programming will be one
| of them.
| Xelynega wrote:
| > one thing it can do reliably is repeat a pattern
|
| Isn't this something we've built into every modern
| language(and arguably the entire point of languages)? If
| you have multiple pieces of code that share code with
| tweaks(to test this or that case for example), shouldn't
| you parameterize the bulk of the code instead of getting
| autocomplete to parameterize it for you and dump it into
| your source file multiple times?
| thornewolf wrote:
| Testing best practices have the opposite philosophy for
| the most part. Avoid abstraction as much as possible. Do
| repeat yourself. Because a bug in tests is insidious, so
| you want to minimize that. One of the best ways to
| minimize bugs is to explicitly avoid abstraction.
| simonw wrote:
| Copilot helps me write parametrized unit tests. You might
| find this example useful:
| https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/writing-test-with-
| copilot
| adambard wrote:
| Oh shit, you're right, I forgot about loops. Guess I'll
| go uninstall copilot now.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I have a "Generate... -> Test for function" in my JetBrais
| IDE out of the box for several years, and it takes care of
| boilerplate pretty well.
| adambard wrote:
| That just generated an empty test function in a
| convenient place for me. I'm not just talking about
| boilerplate, it's definitely a more... organic-feeling
| sort of pattern matching. In fact, one of the things I
| find most interesting about it is the sort of mistakes it
| makes, like generating wrong field names (as if it simply
| took a guess). This is the sort of thing that I've grown
| to expect the deterministic tooling of IDEs to get right,
| so it always surprises me a bit.
|
| By the same token, often it takes a stab at generating
| code based on something's name (plus whatever context
| it's looking at) and does a better job than the IDE
| could, because the IDE just sees datatypes and code
| structure. It really does feel like a complementary tool.
| rat9988 wrote:
| You haven't tested how powerful copilot is, have you?
| IanCal wrote:
| Just a note I think it's 3.5 for the code work. 4 would
| probably be prohibitively expensive to run and they carefully
| mention that they use 4 for the PRs and a few other bits but
| not the code gen - there they just talk about chatgpt. I'd
| love to be wrong about this.
| bavila wrote:
| > Can it explain its reasoning?
|
| Yes, actually, it can.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| That's interesting, considering the fact that it doesn't do
| any reasoning. Sure, it can generate plausible sounding
| explanations, but it generates those just like it generates
| everything: one token at a time, based on the expected
| probability of that token appearing next if this text were
| found in the wild.
| deeviant wrote:
| Based on your statement, I feel you haven't used GPT based
| code much. The code it generates is generally beautifully
| organized and commented.
|
| Sure, it can be flat out wrong, but it is always eminently
| readable. Self-documentating code _with_ clean comments, far
| above the standard I see on average human code. That 's about
| as good as "explaining it's reasoning" as you get.
|
| Also, you can literally ask chatGPT to explain the code, line
| by the line, and it will. So there's that.
|
| Is it ready now? Certainly not if it will be expected to the
| do the entire job of a SWE. But it is already extremely
| useful, especially to less experienced devs as both a
| production for specific tasks and as learning tool. And it
| will only get better.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can
| it explain its reasoning?
|
| In my own project I've got it generating solutions to errors,
| and if possible, it also generates simple unit tests to
| validate the fix. What I haven't implemented yet (and likely
| won't, because Copilot does it now) but I have tested is
| generating a pull request describing the fix, why it works,
| and the same for the tests.
|
| > Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a plausible-
| sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no sense.
|
| With limited scopes, it works quite well. For example,
| something fails because a DOM reference is undefined in a
| React component. GPT will add a condition to assert that the
| reference is present, then generate a simple test which
| mounts the component with stubbed references that are present
| or undefined using jsdom. The tests makes sense. A quick scan
| shows they're sensible, and upon running them, they do work.
|
| I began adding a recursive feature which would automatically
| debug issues with its own solutions, but it can get a little
| weird in some cases. Likely due to bad prompting - I haven't
| dedicated enough time to it. But it can also make it so tests
| with errors are revised and corrected so they will at least
| run.
|
| All of that with a coherent explanation of what was changed,
| why, tests, and why they assert the fix is valid.
|
| Is it perfect? No. Could it be useful? Absolutely. I'm a
| little sad Copilot makes my project redundant because it was
| actually very exciting to build. There is real potential
| here. I started the project in order to learn and validate
| GPT, and I'm very convinced it has genuine utility and
| massive potential.
|
| > CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't
| understand specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It
| can't take a specification, generate a program, discover new
| abstractions that make the solution more elegant, and explain
| its reasoning. It can generate a heck of a lot of code
| though! Wow! Is it the right code? Maybe!
|
| I think the key is limited scopes. Like with the React
| component example, the solution is small, easy to reason
| about, and tedious to resolve yourself. I understand why it
| doesn't work, I get the error, and spinning up an entire
| branch and PR to clean up the mistake is a bad use of my
| time. I don't want Copilot/AI to work magic, but I'm okay
| with it resolving minor mistakes and misuses of languages and
| libraries here and there.
|
| I do think it will grow from here to do more and actually be
| good at it, though.
| waboremo wrote:
| I'm not sure this works out in the long run. We're currently
| using extremely generalized tools here, it's difficult for it
| to establish any "reasoning" when it does not have a
| "history" to rely on so to speak. Which is where our
| reasoning stems from, history. We opt for Solution B because
| we previously tested Solution A in another similar project.
|
| I just don't see this as being a barrier for too long. Not
| when more companies opt into training data internally.
| geraneum wrote:
| That won't happen only using text. Language does not
| capture the full spectrum of thought which is what is at
| work in case of an expert. Companies training their custom
| models or increasing the model size, etc. won't change this
| fundamentally but it might help in some aspects. We need
| models that can observe/capture the "history" from
| everything else (i.e. physical world) in addition to text.
| Or perhaps mix LLMs with other models in order for our
| models to posses something we call "common sense". This
| common sense is needed when you transition from "Solution
| B" to "because we previously tested Solution A in another
| similar project". There are a LOT going on with this
| transition between A and B that might not be apparent to
| you.
|
| But in general I agree with the basic premise of what you
| say in that, it will eventually happen.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Why is it absurd? If it writes readable code, you can check
| it. Writing the first version often takes a long time, so
| this is clearly a breakthrough.
| joshvm wrote:
| Then there's a vicious circle. You need to have technical
| expertise to evaluate whether the code from these models is
| fit for purpose. Until these models get sufficiently
| reliable that you can use them without worrying if the
| results are correct then you still need developers. This
| may be much better than Stack Overflow, but I imagine it
| will still suffer from the same problems with regard to
| copying "answer" code.
|
| I would give an answer from ChatGPT where it confidently
| told me that I should evaluate an object detection model by
| ranking matches using negative IoU (and it indeed generated
| code to do it and gave a confident explanation of how this
| was normal in computer vision, but it was completely
| backwards).
| bhj wrote:
| I would much rather use it as a code review tool than
| become the code review tool. I suspect the latter will
| happen at a lot of companies, though.
| sh4rks wrote:
| Why? When the latter is just as effective but also much
| quicker?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It isn't just as effective for me. No matter how much I'd
| like to, I can't review code with the same thoughtfulness
| and thoroughness that I apply when I write it. I know the
| same is true for the people who have reviewed my PRs as
| well, but maybe its different for others. I do use
| Copilot but mostly it only generates one liners for me
| that save a little time.
| agentultra wrote:
| Empirical studies on large-scale projects employing
| informal code review (the study I'm talking about
| monitored the Qt project repositories) suggest that
| humans have a very low impact on error rates. Reviewing
| more than ~200LOC every couple of hours makes the effect
| disappear.
|
| So you're not alone. You can even point to the plethora
| of "find the undefined behaviour," tests: humans are
| really bad at finding errors in code.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Good. I'd rather not have to work forever. The whole point of
| this job is that I'm lazy. I don't want to do any work so I
| make machines do it for me. Why are people so attached to
| having to work?
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| I'm not attached to having to work, I'm attached to paying my
| mortgage and buying groceries.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| I'm in my 20s, I'm a bit sad to think of the possibility that
| I've missed the boat of human ingenuity. It's not like if AI
| puts me out of work I'll be free to create works of art --
| GPT-12 will do that much better than me, too.
|
| Maybe this sounds naive to you, but if I'm not good for
| anything, what am I supposed to be doing? How should I see
| myself?
| lugu wrote:
| I feel you, in the same time we have been through so many
| changes. Some people still prefer Vim (at least i do) over full
| fledge IDE with refactoring helpers. Think of stack overflow,
| not a habit for everyone. Using macros/snippet to generate
| code, not that popular. Iterative development in a debugger
| (think Smalltalk), didn't make printf obsolete. The bottom line
| is: all software is legacy. Deleting code is the preferred way
| to debug. Finding the correct abstraction or most simple way to
| get what you need takes more than the ability to dump code into
| a computer. Free software didn't ruin the profession, quite the
| opposite.
| cidergal wrote:
| There is something to say about how we will not push UBI until
| automation comes for _our_ job.
| prewett wrote:
| I think you're doing that thing that makes software developers'
| estimates chronically low: we find a pathway to the solution
| and think, great, that's basically 80% done, and we don't think
| about everything else. Let's take a login screen for iPads,
| should be easy, right?
|
| ---- MagicAI, write me a login screen for iPads. The project
| should be configured to be iPad only. I want a logo in the
| center and under it the login and password entry textboxes. The
| password entry should not be in plaintext. Put a login button
| underneath the password entry.
|
| Actually, the logo + textboxes + login button should be
| centered as a group. The logo should be centered horizontally
| within the group as well. Make the login button right-aligned.
|
| The login button should be right aligned within the group, but
| the text of the button should be centered within the button.
|
| Put "Username" and "Password" labels to the left of the
| appriopriate text fields
|
| Make sure that the labels are the same width, so that the left
| edges of the text fields are aligned.
|
| Put a half em margin in-between the labels and text fields.
| Actually, make the vertical margin between elements in the
| group a half em, too.
|
| By "margin" previously, I meant "spacing", my mistake. Please
| fix.
|
| Does the German translation of "username" or "password" cause
| the text field to be too short, especially on an iPad Mini in
| portrait mode?
|
| Fix the alignment to work correctly in both portrait and
| landscape mode. The group should have a 10% left and right
| margin in both modes.
|
| The keypad enter button should say "Login" when entering text
| for the password field, but should remain "Done" for the
| username field.
|
| Great, now add a waiting indicator while waiting for
| verification from the server.
|
| Actually, put the indicator to the right of the login button,
| but do not make it part of the group for alignment purposes; it
| should be in the margin. And turn the indicator off if the
| server times out. Oh, add some error text for the error.
|
| I said error text, not error dialog. Never give me a disruptive
| dialog if there is a way to obviously display the error text.
| Make this a permanent setting on my account. Also, make this a
| permanent setting on all my colleagues' accounts, and
| especially the accounts of the low-cost outsourcing companies
| that make the apps I use.
|
| File bug report to MagicAI HQ that there is no way to make some
| directions permanent. Include in the report that there should
| be a way to look at the set of permanent instructions, and
| automatic reporting if new instructions contradict old
| instructions.
|
| Disable the login button if there is no text in the username or
| password field, or if the password is too short.
|
| Whoah, make sure that the text field scrolls so that it is
| visible above the keyboard, especially on an iPad mini in
| landscape mode. It should scroll back down to its original
| position when the keyboard disappears. ----
|
| I guess I'm not seeing how this is too much different from what
| I actually did in creating the login page in the first place.
| That's even without the dialogue where you try to figure out
| why the alignment isn't doing what you told it.
|
| You might also want to keep your instructions in a text file
| some place, in case you need to change them and regenerate the
| code. Maybe there should be a preprocessor of sorts, so that
| you can add comments to the file explaining your reasoning for
| certain instructions, or to not include some instructions on
| certain environments. You might also want some way to refer to
| a set of previous instructions, so you could say "do these
| things what we did over here". We could call this a "function"
| since "procedure" sounds too much like ancient Pascal, and math
| is cool.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at
| risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the
| writing is on the wall.
|
| My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging
| complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI.
|
| Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are
| still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we
| consider quality. Now maybe you're going to see a larger and
| larger gap between F500 companies and the rest (surely you do
| already), but playing out the consequences is a long and
| interesting story.
|
| > coding without AI will feel as antiquated and inefficient
| [...]. And resistance is futile because markets will punish
| those who refuse.
|
| Fortunately, the "punishment" by the market will just be
| reduced salaries. Move out of the Bay Area now. :)
|
| > And coding is just one of the many applications where AI an
| replace brains.
|
| And writing about those is interesting. With the development of
| DALL-E (etc), I would say coding isn't even the primary
| interesting application. (If "it's not AI", whatever... that's
| not the point.) Or not yet.
| tauntz wrote:
| > My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging
| complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI.
|
| That might be true for you and me but imagine somebody fresh
| out from university - the job market for junior devs will
| totally collapse in the near-near future. And then what?
| Where do the mid-level engineers come from if there are no*
| junior roles? Where will the future senior level engineers
| come from? We're certainly living in interesting times..
|
| *: There will be some artisanal companies who will pride
| themselves in having hand-written, AI-free code. These
| companies will be a minority and 90% of junior level software
| development jobs will disappear in no time.
| immawizard wrote:
| Mid level engineers will come from building something like
| GitHub, Netflix or Gmail over the weekend using powerful
| AI. The skills of current senior engineers will be much
| easier to gain since the feedback loop for software
| architecture and design will be down to hours instead of
| quarters. Being able to architect massive software systems
| well, will be expected from a new graduates.
|
| The role of junior software developers will not be needed,
| just as we don't need people doing multiplication by hand.
| intelVISA wrote:
| This seems the likely end result. We'll always need SWEs,
| of course, but gone will be the days of entire dev teams
| working toward a common product.
|
| I suspect SWE may trend toward other ailing fields like
| law with individual devs working on entire 'cases' and it
| being very competitive; rather than the recent "20min Js
| tutorial on YT to SF startup" industry.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Senior developer aren't senior because they can type code
| very fast. They are senior because they can take on
| responsibilities and make decisions. A junior that types
| code very fast is a junior that types code very fast.
| immawizard wrote:
| I think we're in agreement.
|
| The key here is what are you taking responsibilities and
| decisions for. Senior engineers take decisions which
| consequences will be apparent in a year or two. If
| productivity increases to the point where features that
| take months to deliver take days, the decisions made
| _currently_ by senior engineers can be taken by fresh
| graduates.
|
| There're still going to be senior roles, but their scope
| will be much bigger and expertise sought will be
| different than what senior engineers do currently. No one
| will hire a senior engineer just because they can
| architect and deliver a scalable SaaS product on a short
| timeline.
|
| Engineers who learn and adapt will be fine. Engineers who
| dropped learning the moment they graduated from
| college... not so much.
| visarga wrote:
| Mid level engineers will be surpassed two years later. And
| then seniors. But we'll still need humans in the loop,
| humans who understand.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Nah, I'll leave the bay once salaries drop. Not years before.
| sharemywin wrote:
| I wouldn't own housing there.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I don't!
| golergka wrote:
| > Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are
| still contracting out to get web sites
|
| They used to, 10 to 15 years ago. Now they just hire a SMM
| specialist to set up their Instagram account. Why would they
| bother with a website?
| waboremo wrote:
| Even those places that do have their own website (as
| opposed to just relying on Facebook Pages and Google's
| information sidebar), they just use Squarespace or Shopify.
| Shopify in particular has also been incorporating a lot of
| AI into their tooling as well, reducing the need to hire
| copywriters, translators, etc.
| goldfeld wrote:
| Almost a decade ago I jumped ship as a programmer for several
| reasons, and since '18 I am definitely not coding at all.
| Friends and family have wondered much at my path and letting go
| of what has become the one promised career for ever larger
| parts of the population, and making my inroads into the arts
| and literature, finally settling a bit with the profession of
| writing on many capacities. Now I look back more gadly than
| before, as I hadn't really imagined that coders would be on the
| very frontline of impacted jobs. I think the 10x will become a
| sad concrete thing, with salaries crunching and a team lead
| expected to take up the work of teams being fired, resorting to
| AI minions. It's a crazy tables have turned situation.
|
| So that really I'm writing with and about AI[0] to get the best
| of my technical and literary backgrounds, and to reach good
| audiences.
|
| Meanwhile writing is safer because contrary to code, a
| personality and a personal life will ever be valued in flesh
| and blood writers. And how could an AI, ever write love poems
| with a soul if it has not opportunities for falling desperately
| in love, suffering, changing wholesale because of an experience
| like that? It could emulate it. But readers want to read real
| sufferers, mortals who get old and lose their looks and so
| forth, not little gods of sillicon.
|
| [0]: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-
| revie...
| causi wrote:
| _I think the 10x will become a sad concrete things, with
| salaries crunching and a team lead expected to take up the
| work of teams being fired, resorting to AI minions. It 's a
| crazy tables have turned situation._
|
| I don't really see that it's sad. Imagine truly democratized
| programming. Not like how the refrigerator did the ice man,
| but in how Youtube and smartphone cameras did video
| production. A rising tide that lifts all boats and can give
| absolutely anyone a taste of what they could achieve with a
| little effort.
| naillo wrote:
| HNs version of ads
| [deleted]
| goldfeld wrote:
| Point taken, though I have long thought the ads were
| officially the hiring and also the Launch HNs that are now
| popping left and right from YC W23, and every single one
| naturally abou ML.
| substation13 wrote:
| I think replacing a SWE with AI means we have reached AGI
| levels.
|
| However, GPT 4, which is amazing but not able to do what a
| SWE does, is already making concept artists, voice actors and
| content marketers obsolete. The arts are far more susceptible
| to this technology.
|
| Anyone who thinks SWE is generating Python snippets doesn't
| really understand the role.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe you need to get yourself into an application domain with
| more bespoke protocols and tooling, and domain-specific
| expertise, that aren't public on the internet and that AI
| therefore doesn't have much of an idea of. At least at this
| point, AI is only of little help in my daily work,
| unfortunately, because I'd have to first explain it orders of
| magnitude more context than fits into its token buffer.
| kiviuq wrote:
| Porn?
|
| (scnr)
| [deleted]
| danwee wrote:
| I have the opposite feeling by watching their mini video demos.
| All I see is: engineers blindly commiting and pushing what
| copilots spits at them. Not only that, also the PRs
| descriptions/comments will all be one TAB+enter away. That
| means many things will go wrong and more engineering time will
| be spent reviewing nice-looking code good that only does what
| it's supposed to do in 80% of the cases. Meaning, it's gonna be
| hard to debug those 20% remaining cases.
|
| Besides, coding is probably the least of my problems. Dealing
| with people is harder. AI can help there as well, but
| ultimately people like to interact with people (see the whole
| trend about RTO)... we cannot stand each other faces via Zoom
| => we are not gonna stand talking to an AI.
| nivenkos wrote:
| UBI is a half-measure, we need democratic, communal control of
| industry.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| >we need democratic, communal control of industry
|
| That is called socialism. I don't mind socialism and state
| owned enterprises as long as the force of market competition
| is still at play. That is the reason state owned enterprises
| don't suck in China. They have multiple SOEs within the same
| fields like car manufacturing and telecommunication competing
| against each other.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| The state doesn't own SOE in pure socialism, society and
| the workers do. This is the idea behind socialism and I
| don't think anywhere on the planet practises true socialism
| and instead it's morphed or combined where it is said to be
| used.
| czbond wrote:
| Treasury just needs to "print those dollas" and make Musk
| even more so richest person in the world. I'm being serious.
|
| Retaining the profits and placing them back as UBI could
| work.... although if we do that, the politicians will just
| find a tax or another project that needs the money before
| giving it to people.
| what-no-tests wrote:
| Agreed - we don't control our destiny as a people by buying
| what they're selling with free money we get as a door prize
| for existing.
| skybrian wrote:
| We do have that for many government projects and they often
| don't go well, so I'm not sure what improvements you're
| expecting?
| visarga wrote:
| > We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance.
| Just like we need less manual labor in farms today.
|
| There will be more developing than ever, but humans will sit on
| a different place in the stack. We'll be more like team
| managers. Stable Diffusion can make pretty pictures by itself,
| but only when a human directs it then it can have value.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| The point is you'll need less humans to do the same work.
| Possible far less, maybe it'll be a smaller ratio to start
| with but eventually that ratio will grow.
|
| Most organizations are there to make profit for shareholders,
| if more profit can be obtained through less hires while still
| meeting money making goals the you can bet your bottom dollar
| they will hire less people where possible.
|
| People early in their careers should be ready for this as one
| day there may be far less times available to them in this
| field.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Literally every programming advancement from punch cards to
| now has made you need less people to do the same amount of
| work but we have more programmers working today than ever
| before.
|
| Your outlook sounds plausible in a vacuum but doesn't match
| reality.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Just like we need less manual labor in farms today._
|
| Back of the napkin suggests we have approximately the same
| amount of manual labor in farms today. The difference is that
| the same amount of labor today is able to feed a much larger
| population.
|
| This may simply mean much more software written, not fewer
| developers.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we
| created ourselves._
|
| Man, that is some food for thought. Beautifully put.
| ChancyChance wrote:
| Here's a simple way to tell if your expertise is at risk:
|
| - If you can get more done by working more hours, your job is
| at risk.
|
| When I was a programmer for most of past life, this was this
| case. Now I've got multiple decades under my belt and am a h/w
| and system architect. I can't get more done by grinding. My job
| depends on sharing information with other people, that have
| their own schedules, resource dependencies, supply chains, and
| pricing, and arriving at best fit solutions to move complex
| projects forward.
|
| I think if you want to protect yourself from being replaced by
| AI, you need to be part of a larger network where the
| challenges are more about synthesizing information than
| grinding.
|
| My $0.02.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| People said the same thing about Excel in the 80s and 90s.
| There are more accountants now than then.
|
| There might be more programmers out of this developments than
| before. It just will lower the barrier of entry, and increase
| productivity. Like most tools
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Companies are there to make money. If the same job currently
| dinner by 5 people can now be done by 3, and it means more
| profit for shareholders, what do you think shareholder will
| want?
|
| While profit is the main driver, it'll mean smaller teams
|
| Not today, not with current tech, maybe in the near future
| though
| istjohn wrote:
| But just like building more roads induces more demand by
| making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of
| custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps
| one day soon it will be affordable for every company of
| every size to have a fully custom ERP solution instead of
| shoehorning their business processes into Salesforce or the
| like. Perhaps every family will have a custom app managing
| their household's smart home appliances, childrens'
| allowances, autonomous vehicles, home maintenance, bill
| payment, child homework tracking, etc. in an integrated
| system.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Are you saying don't worry, don't have a fallback plan,
| everything will be honky dory?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Well productivity is up 240% since the 1950s. So due to a
| single person being more efficient than 2 in 1950 and the
| 43.5 million workforce we can extrapolate that no more than
| 20 million workers will be needed nowadays.
|
| Except in 2020 there were 152 million employed americans,
| with a productivity 2.4x higher than 1950s, or a
| cummulative workforce of 365 million 1950 americans
| working. And somehow they all had stuf to do and work on
| pleb_nz wrote:
| I dont think that's a fair and direct comparison tbh.
| There's a lot of new industries now that people have
| diverged into and population growth has exploded which I
| hope for the sake of the planet and human kind is going
| to slow , at least until we're in a better position to
| manage bigger populations without killing the planet and
| other life.
|
| I'll be happy if I'm wrong, but are you confident enough
| to bet that there won't be less need for general
| developers and engineers and not have a plan in case?
| Personally I would be looking at my options In case I
| needed to pivot and not waiting 5o find out.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > There's a lot of new industries now
|
| And if this tech is really revolutionary there won't be
| new industries? Have we peaked?
|
| > but are you confident enough to bet that there won't be
| less need for general developers and engineers and not
| have a plan in case?
|
| I am confident there will not be a lack of work. Whether
| the roles are similar is a different question. Actuaries
| and accountants look very different now to before excel
| was common place. Web developers were not a thing before
| the internet.
|
| If the revolution comes, and jobs are no longer needed,
| perhpas there is an industry for prompt engineers. Or
| model fine tunning experts. Dev ops roles to connect
| super computers to Modelling APIs. Who knows, but the
| skills of a decent Engineer are on problem solving, on
| learning new ideas, on applying problem solving laterally
| those are such broad skills that is hard for a job market
| to exist without needing them.
| devrob wrote:
| This would be the contrarian perspective, and it's an
| interesting thought to consider. If memory serves, I think
| Marc A points out in an old Youtube conference video how most
| new technologies follow the Promethean myth in their
| relationship to society.
|
| Funny enough your observation of
|
| > "There are more accountants now than then."
|
| could be extrapolated from in two ways
|
| The optimistic perspective might suppose technological
| development gives rise to new marketplace adaptations and
| creation of new and tangential jobs. For example, Facebook /
| Social Networks / Search creating new roles like:
| Influencers, Social Media Managers, Search Engine
| Optimization, et cetera.
|
| For the pessimist perspective, I think you could suppose the
| "end state" of all technological progress in human societies
| is, eventually, an oligopoly of two industries: bureaucracy
| (legal) and politics (marketing).
| brachika wrote:
| I remember reading Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is
| Near' (a book with bold predictions about human development and
| future) and thinking this guy is nuts, we are decades if not
| centuries away from these predictions. Well, now I don't feel
| so comfortable.
| substation13 wrote:
| The book was way over optimistic but many of his predictions
| are coming true, a few decades late.
|
| I might have to revisit it!
| bwanab wrote:
| Historically, this response doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes,
| farm labor became redundant, but it became redundant because of
| machines that had to be built, maintained and repaired. People
| who would have been on the farm their whole lives moved to the
| city and got jobs that paid well and lived possibly better
| lives as a result.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise
| is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but
| the writing is on the wall.
|
| I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen
| any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or
| even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it
| to create something that isn't like anything in its training
| set?
|
| My experience is that GPT just makes shit up that looks
| plausible at a glance when it doesn't have an answer instead of
| just admitting that it doesn't know; this is obviously very
| dangerous when it's supposed to be writing computer programs.
| That OpenAI hasn't made any progress towards fixing this makes
| me wonder if it's even possible for the GPT to understand that
| sometimes it doesn't understand. At the very least it must be a
| non-trivial problem.
| ctoth wrote:
| Counterpoint: how often do you as a developer create
| something totally novel that has never been built before?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| I have to make new things pretty often. If you step outside
| of the high-level cloud/webdev stuff that most people seem
| to be obsessed with these days, there are a lot of non-
| trivial problems being solved in lower-level software such
| as device drivers, kernels, and compilers.
|
| EDIT: i misinterpreted what you were saying, initially i
| thought you were asking _how_ i make new things, not _how
| often_ i make new things. my original reply is below.
|
| weelll, i think about it real hard and do research? Not
| sure what your point is, but I definitely don't solve these
| problems by trying to find somebody else's solution to
| copy, or just dumping a bunch of C code that doesn't do
| anything and calling it a day like GPT would.
| [deleted]
| naillo wrote:
| Reminder that they read your code as part of this which then
| feeds their models. Basically you're paying to replace yourself
| long term.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Wow, Microsoft was so ahead of the curve when they bought Github.
| They saw this coming and knew they had to acquire them to make it
| into this kind of thing. Just absolutely impressive execution
| here. Especially since Github would not have been able to do this
| on its own. Just an absolute perfect acquisition here. They don't
| often go right, but when they do so much new value is created for
| everyone.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I am praying for some alternative platform to take the throne
| off Github. This is way too much power in the wrong hands. The
| competing product needs to add a fundamental new idea or
| feature. Gitlab as it is doesn't cut it.
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| eawlot3000 wrote:
| the future is here. lets gooo
| cpb wrote:
| Better PR descriptions explain why.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Jetbrains and NeoVim logos also in there:
| https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x !
|
| Above "Can't wait for the future? "
| azemetre wrote:
| It doesn't say it in the blog post, but sign up to the preview
| does require a paid subscription to copilot.
|
| Unsure if this applies to those who are given copilot for free
| (doesn't apply to me as I pay).
| cristiioan wrote:
| I was able to apply with my student account(it has copilot and
| pro for free).
| ertucetin wrote:
| It seems as though all the companies deliberately agreed to wait
| until 2023 to release their AI products
| ivxvm wrote:
| So it still can't write new code according to project's patterns
| / conventions and "core" library?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I'm not impressed with this announcement.
|
| What I miss with Copilot is not reflected there:
|
| 1. Separate hotkeys to accept either single token from the
| suggestion or single line. Often Copilot tries to autocomplete 50
| lines method which I'm not happy with.
|
| 2. Ability to edit existing text. It only inserts new text. I'd
| like something like multiple cursors or macroses working
| automagically by recognising similar text patterns below current
| position and applying similar edits.
|
| 3. AI linting. If some code looks obviously wrong, I'd like to
| know about it.
| pjot wrote:
| To your first point, `cmd + <right>` will accept the suggestion
| word by word.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Thanks!
| hislaziness wrote:
| Copilot with GPT-4 model, chat and voice, pull requests, command
| line, and docs to answer questions.
| nico wrote:
| Are you doing that? Any specific tools/services you use for it?
| unity1001 wrote:
| I dont get it - has the copyright problem with AI generated code
| trained on other people's repositories been solved yet?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I currently use copilot in my terminal by using copilot.vim and
| then using C-x C-e in my command line to bring it into my editor
| but I have to exit and re-enter to get traditional autocomplete
| which I find annoying. Paths come easy since neovim will complete
| this for me with Deoplete but the rest is not straightforward.
| jacooper wrote:
| Looks like anyone who left Github because of Copilot won nothing,
| as GPT4, the new model used for new Copilot includes everything,
| not only Github code. So even if you uploaded it to GitLab,
| codeberg or Sourcehut it still trained on your code...
|
| That supreme court case is becoming more important by the day.
| visarga wrote:
| > A ChatGPT-like experience in your editor with GitHub Copilot
| Chat: We are bringing a chat interface to the editor that's
| focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS
| Code and Visual Studio. This does far more than suggest code.
| GitHub Copilot Chat is not just a chat window. It recognizes what
| code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown, and
| it's deeply embedded into the IDE. A developer can get in-depth
| analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do,
| generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs.
|
| This is what I am excited about - seeing its errors and other
| things it needs in order to accomplish tasks. Can't wait to see
| it in action.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Microsoft lost some trains trains with mobile and servers. But
| they won with AI, developer tools, cloud and gaming.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| There has been this bug with Copilot in VSCode for just about
| forever where it only suggests one line at a time. People have
| been asking for this to be fixed for months and months:
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522
|
| Do the people here in the comments section, who seem to be
| getting good results with Copilot, somehow not have this issue?
| If so, what is the workaround?
| aldarisbm wrote:
| At which point do we not need to understand what is in front of
| us?
|
| eg: The Code.
|
| I was using chatgpt, with a groovy project (havent used groovy in
| years), I prompted chatgpt for an answer, and it gave me a
| solution. The solution (to me) was a bit obfuscated, but it
| worked. Since I'm only using groovy to figure out this one task,
| it would've been extremely easy for me to not check what the
| solution did, and just keep going with my day. Luckily, I'm
| curious and wanted to know how things worked.
|
| What if we increasingly stop to care, because of the confidence
| instilled by the media.
|
| "It can make errors" but also "This show SIGNIFICANT improvements
| over last generation (which tbh was pretty okay)"
|
| A lot of dis/misinformation.
|
| I like using copilot/chatgpt, but it's incredibly hard to believe
| that we wont just become 100% reliant on this tool, and coding
| will be something akin to assembly code to engineers.
| jnovek wrote:
| One hypothesis I have is that the future of programming is
| natural language and the "compiler" is a LLM. This would be no
| different from the days when C took over for asm.
| layer8 wrote:
| The difference is that natural language doesn't have a well-
| defined semantics and is open to interpretation. Programming
| languages being compiled, on the other hand, have precise,
| well-defined semantics (excluding UB I guess) that you can
| formally reason about.
|
| Using an LLM for programming is not like compiling, it's like
| employing a developer you either have to trust how they may
| happen to interpret your instructions, or to manually double-
| check their work.
| NeuNeurosis wrote:
| This was my take on the tech. Ultimately it will need to be
| prompted. Now the form that prompt takes is open to a bunch
| of speculation but even if it gets superhuman at producing
| code or any output it is directionless by itself, for now. We
| are what direct its ability, which I think is really cool. I
| think getting good at extracting exact outputs from the LLM
| will be the new engineer.
| elevenoh wrote:
| [dead]
| kumarvvr wrote:
| A curious question. Would it be possible to build LLMs off of
| bytecode / compiled code, and then translate it back to different
| programming language codes?
|
| Is that a viable way to get more fine-tuned outputs from these
| models?
| mad0 wrote:
| I don't think so, bytecode / machine code must be really
| precise, while LLMs are producing nondeterministic outputs (at
| least GPT). Add "hallucinating" of the output to the pile and
| right now I think it's infeasible.
| bilsbie wrote:
| So how do I get started with this. Explain like I'm a vim cgi-bin
| programmer.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Just to save others from wasting their time (and free trial): The
| Copilot extension in full Visual Studio (i.e. NOT VS Code) is
| super terrible, broken, and buggy. It is so bad it is worse than
| nothing (literally, it can make Visual Studio lag out). But don't
| take my word for it, read the reviews:
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c...
|
| This is the polar opposite of VS Code where it works super well
| and reviews great accordingly. In my opinion if you're a Visual
| Studio developer who wants AI assist, you'll need to figure out
| how to open your solution in VS Code instead to use Copilot or
| just pay the $20/month for ChatGPT Plus then copy/paste.
|
| PS - This isn't a version specific thing, it has been broken
| since launch. They've been replying to reviews with "Try Copilot
| version [vNext] with Visual Studio [latest]" since last December
| to last week, yet the one-star reviews keep coming in unabated.
| Funny enough they recently replied to a complaint with "The VS
| Code version does this!"
| squeegmeister wrote:
| I haven't noticed any issues with it, other than it
| occasionally just not chiming in. I'm using vs2022 on windows
| fwiw.
|
| That said, it wouldn't surprise me if vscode is getting
| preferential treatment
| symlinkk wrote:
| Visual Studio is a legacy product. You should be switching to
| VSCode.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Tell that to Microsoft. .Net's VS Code support is a joke
| relative to Visual Studio (as opposed to TS which is better
| on VS Code by far). People aren't using Visual Studio (and
| spending $3K+/year) because they WANT to.
| veec_cas_tant wrote:
| Visual Studio has free versions for Windows and Mac [1]
|
| [1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I have no illusions that what I've been building was ever going
| to be commercial or even particularly useful (it just offers code
| improvements, bug fixes, etc. as errors are piped into the system
| - it's very rudimentary but neat), but it's striking right now
| how incredibly deep Microsoft's moat in this arena is right now.
|
| I realized it would be best as a VS Code extension in its current
| form and started writing that this morning. I was thinking Github
| would do this _eventually_ , it was obvious -- copilot already
| existed and was primed for this -- but evidently they'd already
| built it a while ago. I was also thinking eventually it could be
| a bot which generates pull requests based on error correction,
| but... They did that too.
|
| If I wanted to go all in one this project, say as a hypothetical
| competitor to Copilot, I don't see how it would be possible to
| succeed. Any clever UI improvements would rapidly find their way
| into Copilot, offering far better solutions due to their absurd
| access to pertinent data.
|
| They can even train Copilot to resolve errors based on how
| they've been resolved in the past; it could probably patch all
| kinds of common errors reliably soon.
|
| I think this is cool in the sense that it'll be genuinely useful
| to people, but frightening to realize how dominant MS is here, in
| this moment. Maybe I'm not creative enough and I can't see a way
| to build something novel with this which they haven't already.
| That's arguably likely. At the same time... I'm a little shaken
| at how narrow of an opportunity anyone had to try to get into
| this space. I don't think it's a good thing.
| chrisan wrote:
| Is there a way to talk to copilot after something has been made?
| For example: I just asked it to search for something on a public
| api in a comment and let it auto complete the function.
|
| The resulting code was pretty decent except it included a hard
| coded access_token in the url. This was a blank project, I don't
| even have an access token for this api - guessing someone posted
| theirs in a public repo at some point.
|
| Is there a way to talk to copilot at this point to refine the
| code?
| muny wrote:
| What I normally do in cases like this is set up the necessary
| scaffolding for the solution. In your case, that could be
| introducing a variable named something like `access_token` for
| it to substitute into the URL.
|
| Then, when you trigger a suggestion it's very likely that
| CoPilot will use your `access_token` variable.
| drBonkers wrote:
| I think this is what Copilot Chat will do.
| chrisan wrote:
| ah yes, you are correct. Visual Studio (code) only at the
| moment
| lovasoa wrote:
| GitHub Copilot X is currently a representation of GitHub's vision
| for the future rather than an available product offering of
| GitHub Copilot. As we continue to design, test, and build
| features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also
| taking the time to determine the best way to provide them to our
| customers.
| sqs wrote:
| From https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x (FAQ: When
| will GitHub Copilot X be available and how much does it cost?)
| [deleted]
| w-m wrote:
| I tried getting myself on the CLI waitlist
| (https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli/). That they use
| ffmpeg as the example hits a huge pain point for me. But:
|
| "Next Waitlist by GitHub Next would like permission to: Act on
| your behalf
|
| Not owned or operated by GitHub"
|
| Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give permissions
| to an app to act in my account? An app that isn't even officially
| from GitHub?
|
| This sets a bad example for permission requests, getting people
| to just click through the dialog, which requests too much access,
| and from the wrong domain.
| localhost wrote:
| While I don't remember to use it (too much AI in too many
| tools!) Warp has this feature as well "Warp AI". This is what
| it told me for the demo scenario: ffmpeg -i
| input.mp4 -i watermark.png -filter_complex "overlay=10:10"
| output.mp4
|
| Bunch of descriptive words too.
| macNchz wrote:
| It's interesting because the Copilot for PRs preview uses an
| app that does say "Owned and Operated by GitHub". Probably just
| an oversight, but I'm pretty sensitive about what access GitHub
| apps have, especially given the list of major attacks that have
| happened in recent years that were initiated by someone
| sneaking malicious payloads in somewhere along the development
| pipeline.
|
| Curious why they'd use a totally different domain in the first
| place-how much access do you think you could get to private
| repos just by cloning that page onto githubfuture.com
| (available) and spearphishing interesting targets?
| w-m wrote:
| Signing up for the technical preview of Copilot Chat also
| worked as expected, it was just a checkmark and a button on
| github.com, not even an oauth dialog.
| darepublic wrote:
| +1 for copilot is good for ffmpeg. Recently did a project
| involving complicated ffmpeg filters, it could handle them on
| it's own quite well.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Interesting, how does this know what executables are available
| on your PATH?
| nicky0 wrote:
| I guess since it runs does a shell executable, it can simply
| examine the path.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give
| permissions to an app to act in my account? An app that isn't
| even officially from GitHub?
|
| Because it uses GitHub's oauth flow, all applications who use
| this flow show the same stuff.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| OAuth allows the use of different scopes for different levels
| of access. So just because it uses OAuth doesn't mean it has
| to require major account access.
|
| I assume the problem is that GitHub doesn't have sufficiently
| granular permissions (OAuth scopes), or that the requesting
| app doesn't use the correct scopes.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing. It seems like it is labeled
| weirdly since it is part of GitHub, but definitely was triple
| checking what was going on with that.
| ilaksh wrote:
| There are several CLI programs like this. I built mine before
| ChatGPT came out so it uses text-davinci-003. It
| https://github.com/runvnc/askleo If you google for ChatGPT CLI
| I assume some will come up and those are probably better
| because they are cheaper and faster.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| It's officially from GitHub. There is some weird language (that
| I'll absolutely pass feedback on to the team), I think because
| GitHub Next is a different organization from GitHub proper, but
| I can assure you, this is an official GitHub app.
|
| But I totally agree that this isn't a great/clear message about
| where this is from.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I raised this concern before about how unclear this is and
| the concern was pretty much dismissed
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539150
|
| "Techies" often lament about how silly users are about
| falling for phishing tricks, but then they also routinely
| make it so difficult to determine what's legit from what's
| fake.
| basch wrote:
| >routinely make it so difficult to determine what's legit
| from what's fake.
|
| Like the amount of times on my phone where I get prompted
| for a username and password different from the app im in
| (to make some kind of connection) but then suppress the url
| from visibility. An astoundingly poor design choice that
| has proliferated into every single variant of that
| interface design flow.
| cyrusatjam wrote:
| Not to mention, the app you're in can inject JS into the
| page it renders. Best practice is to open in your default
| browser and then allow the deeplink in the callback_uri
| to return you back to the original app
| BubbleRings wrote:
| This becoming the top thread here might get their
| attention. You have a very good point.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Totally agree. I did the same double-take with some stuff
| at Universe and I work here. As Idan said back then, there
| are _lots_ of reasons that we want Next to be separate from
| GitHub proper. But you're absolutely correct that we should
| make it more clear that anything from Next is not a rogue
| org and also part of GitHub.
|
| Thanks for the feedback.
| Borgz wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think this is another indication of a lack
| of understanding by GitHub of how their OAuth/GitHub App
| systems are expected to function by end users.
|
| I'm reminded of this incident [1] from a few months ago.
| Allegedly, a malicious actor abused GitHub's poorly designed
| OAuth permissions to obtain up to 500 stars from developers
| without their consent, all thanks to a "sign in with GitHub"
| button and a flawed consent screen that did not communicate
| what the victims were consenting to. Even worse, GitHub
| allegedly decided to suspend at least one victim's account.
|
| We're left with a number of questions:
|
| 1. Why does GitHub give third-party apps permission to star
| repos when it is apparently against the terms of service to
| automate such an action?
|
| 2. Why does GitHub lump this permission in with public_repo,
| a scope that grants read _and write_ access to all public
| repositories? [2]
|
| 3. Why does the consent UI for this scope display simply as
| Repositories Public repositories
|
| and not even mention that this grants _write_ access unless
| the user clicks on it? [3] (it also doesn 't mention that it
| gives permission to star repos)
|
| 4. Why does GitHub punish victims with account suspension for
| being tricked into giving consent to malicious apps?
|
| It is good that GitHub is taking some steps to improve
| account security, such as fine-grained personal access tokens
| and mandatory 2FA. But these improvements do not seem to be
| extending to the OAuth system. The GitHub App system, while
| better in that it has granular permissions, is also flawed
| with its mysterious "act on your behalf" consent UI. [4] [5]
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33917962
|
| [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/developers/apps/building-
| oauth-ap...
|
| [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919481
|
| [4]: https://github.com/community/community/discussions/37117
|
| [5]: https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-ci-docs/issues/751
| someguyformdn wrote:
| [dead]
| idan wrote:
| Correct! We know this is a terribly confusing thing.
| Hopefully by the next big launch we can work out a way to
| have GitHub Next things not bear the "not owned or operated"
| thing.
| RulerOf wrote:
| The domain name on that authorization prompt was more than
| enough to get me to decline.
|
| I wouldn't have hesitated at all if it were at
| next.github.com.
| dheera wrote:
| Time to register a rogue Github Pages site at
| next.github.com?
| tcbyrd wrote:
| Pages sites no longer work on github.com
|
| https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-29-github-pages-
| will-s...
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Next.GitHub.com redirects to GitHubnext.com fwiw.
| eitland wrote:
| The amount of companies, including serious banks, that
| doesn't understand this is mind blowing.
|
| Just the other day I had to verify with a Norwegian bank
| that the KYC form (which IMNSHO was utter nonsense as
| usual) that they linked to was actually them and not
| someone who had gained access to sneak in a link. Because
| the domain was something completely different.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Totally get it.
|
| I've passed feedback on to the team so (hopefully) the CLI
| app will be be clearly from GitHub soon (we need to
| transfer it to the regular GitHub org and then there
| hopefully won't be any confusion). GitHub Next exists in a
| different org from GitHub proper for lots of reasons, but
| we should definitely make it more clear that those
| experiments are still from GitHub.
| RulerOf wrote:
| FYI, after digging down a few links from there and
| winding up at the GitHub Next org page[1], seeing the
| verified email next@github.com and the official site link
| to https://githubnext.com was enough validation for me.
|
| Can't wait for Voice Copilot :)
|
| 1: https://github.com/githubnext
| rjzzleep wrote:
| To me the auth flow looks wrong. The CLI oauth would get
| act on your behalf, but the website to apply for access
| should not under any circumstance do that.
|
| Maybe it's just copy and pasted from somewhere, but it
| looks wrong to me regardless.
| Kye wrote:
| It seems like one organization being able to specify a
| relationship with another, possibly with the ability to
| set a list of approved permissions, would solve this.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Doing it under a liberated domain under GitHub.com sounds
| like it would work (still a separate org but it's a
| signal that this is from main GitHub)
| envy2 wrote:
| I think this is just a standard API access prompt. The GitHub
| Next page clearly indicates it is (C) GitHub Inc and the blog
| post makes GitHub's control clear.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Well. That's what the AI wants you to believe.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > The GitHub Next page clearly indicates it is (C) GitHub Inc
| and the blog post makes GitHub's control clear.
|
| This is not clear at all. Phishing websites always say (C)
| Bank of America. That doesn't make it legit.
| mmaia wrote:
| Huge impact for commercial open source projects. I'm thinking
| that it could even change incentives for companies to open source
| more projects.
| trashface wrote:
| Funny how if AI puts programmers out of a job, they won't be able
| to afford all these AI coding tool subscriptions. I'm unemployed
| (and probably, now, unemployable) and I can rationalize/afford
| the $10/month for regular copilot, but not more.
| the_other wrote:
| It should be free, or at least significantly cheaper. It was
| trained on millions of person-days of work people shared for
| free. This is _our_ work being sold back to us.
|
| (ok, not really mine, I don't contribute to OSS very much; I
| should probably pay for it.. but you get my point).
| cal85 wrote:
| As an OSS contributor I'd love it if GitHub decided to share
| their profits with me, but I did knowingly contribute my work
| under free software licences so I don't see myself as having
| any moral or legal right to that. (If they've trained it on
| private repos that's another matter, I am assuming they
| haven't.) Either way, I don't think it's a strong argument to
| say it's our work being sold back to us. Whatever it is that
| makes people pay for Copilot, it can't just be the OSS code
| that it was trained on, as that is all still freely available
| online. People must be paying for the part that GitHub has
| trained/built, the part that reads your codebase and makes good
| suggestions.
| yodon wrote:
| After finally switching to a Mac full time last year for the
| better developer experience (bash command line without the WSL
| disk access slowness), I now feel like I need to install
| Parallels to get the better developer experience (Copilot and
| Copilot X under Windows)
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Oh nice, so now copilot can not only hallucinate what completions
| to use in the code, it can hallucinate what PRs even do and even
| hallucinate the documentation.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I can't believe how quickly things are moving. In five years
| we're either going to look back on this as a hysterical hype
| bubble, or one of biggest innovations in the 21st century.
|
| I have been skeptical of Copilot from the beginning, but it's
| becoming clear that I'lll be left in the dust if I don't try at
| least try it.
| mikkelam wrote:
| I have absolutely loved copilot so far. I especially love how
| fast it handles indexing complex n-dimensional arrays, which I'm
| really bad at. I also feel like often pushes me to more formal
| solutions instead of hacking. I'd estimate a 10% velocity
| increase for me with it.
|
| Super excited for GPT-4 behind it.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I was going to say "blergh. that doesn't sound too complex."
|
| But... we all are better at some things than others and I
| really like that you've highlighted a specific issue where you
| find it valuable.
| knodi123 wrote:
| My team was freaking out about copilot because we're conducting
| tech interviews right now, with a take home exam and some
| pairing sessions, and they're worried we'll hire a bonehead
| because he can make copilot spit out reasonable stuff in our
| contrived and simple interview scenarios.
|
| But we finally had a guy whose take home test had tons of
| handling in the controller for cases we weren't even using, and
| test coverage of things that couldn't possibly fail, or were
| actually part of the core language and not our own code. It was
| really obvious! And when I wanted him to fix an SQL Injection
| problem in our pairing, copilot carefully preserved the bug
| while he was moving code around. Made me chuckle.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Something interesting is that there is no mention of fine-tuning.
| Is GPT-4 so good at general tasks out of the box that fine-tuning
| is obsolete? Can one model really be equally good at Python and
| poetry?
| og_kalu wrote:
| Finetuning has been more or less obsolete for LLMs since the
| introduction of GPT-3. This was a major discovery of the
| original paper. Codex-Davinci only existed because the original
| gpt wasn't trained on much code not because a version trained
| on sufficient code would need special code optimizations/fine-
| tuning.
|
| and yes, LLMs are general intelligences. there is nothing
| narrow about them at all
| flangola7 wrote:
| >Is GPT-4 so good at general tasks out of the box that fine-
| tuning is obsolete? Can one model really be equally good at
| Python and poetry?
|
| This is correct. It is able to generalize across domains
| intelligently. Given the results of fine tuning in earlier
| models, fine tuning GPT-4 for a specific purpose will probably
| produce super-human ability.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| This will be a hard moat for GitLab to cross. There is so much
| value to having open source models though that I wonder if we
| could come up with a project on the scale of Linux that is for
| open source machine learning models. So many companies could
| benefit from it.
| prosim wrote:
| BigCode is such a project: https://www.bigcode-
| project.org/docs/about/mission/
| [deleted]
| criloz2 wrote:
| Why people will upload their code to GitHub (if they are working
| in some state-of-the-art tech) is beyond me, you will be easily
| replaced by microsoft and they will say that was a product
| generated by gpt, see what happened in Amazon store with the
| popular products
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I asked ChatGpt in plain english to cook some bash scripts for me
| and the examples are good. It replies in plain english and then
| generates working code that does what you ask it to do and then
| you can ask it to refactor or to change and re generate. Very
| impressive. Who remembers that ${my_string%%myword} shaves-off
| the word at the end of the string anyway?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Voice support? Can I get this thing to call into a teams meeting?
| (Asking for a friend.)
| cess11 wrote:
| Why participate in the hype?
|
| It's highly likely this is the result of legal having mulled over
| the Copilot litigation and deciding that it can go either way or
| worse, so the top layer in MICROS~1 has decided to rush whatever
| product development they can use the general public for and try
| to hook as many people as they can to their stochastic parrots.
| Which they wish to insert into not just every other government
| machine, but also every Linux machine, preferably pumping out
| every line of code written with those.
|
| It's better to support open source rights holders against this
| exploitation than getting one's nose brown.
| joeyh wrote:
| To the extent of claiming that "GitHub Copilot is already
| writing 46% of code". It smacks of desperation to lie so baldly
| with statistics.
| cess11 wrote:
| Yeah, it reeks, makes me think of the "it's afraid scene" in
| a well known movie.
|
| As for the productivity increase some claim it can bring, I'm
| not so sure. The software doesn't know your style guidelines
| until you give them away. Maybe it can help in some marginal
| cases, cough up some XML there is no longer official tooling
| for generating or whatever. If you don't have snippets and
| IDE support for boilerplate you're doing development wrong
| and should start looking into techniques for code generation
| in your stack.
|
| For any non-trivial application design you really want to
| know what your inspiration is and what it's used for, so you
| can judge the context of the code you take inspiration from
| and can cull the parts you don't need and adapt to your
| particular situation.
|
| And typically code output is more about learning the problem
| domain deeply and doing code reviews. If one spends more time
| writing stuff that doesn't need thinking than doing reviews
| and study there's an obvious need for automation and code
| generation, and one probably ought to think more about how to
| make one's contributions more efficiently.
| retinaros wrote:
| do you see this as a tool to increase productivity in a way that
| shareholders ask for leaner team or in a way that it creates more
| demand for products and devs?
| swader999 wrote:
| One should expect both.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Increased productivity usually leads to cutting team size
| instead of expanding scope. A lot easier to justify doing the
| same work you have been doing with less, as opposed to doing
| new work with the same number of people.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| But since the question was asked about shareholders
| specifically, the guaranteed bottom line improvement is going
| to come from cutting labor and running leaner teams. That's
| where large corporations will go first.
| geraneum wrote:
| That's the main idea behind developing such systems. It's
| telling execs: Hey, look, you are paying a lot of money to
| those pesky workers (i.e. developers) and we like that
| number. Give us a cut and we save you a lot of money. This
| is nothing new actually. Has happened over and over in
| other industries and is not really surprising. What happens
| is that a lot of added value that the developers were
| generating will be consolidated into the pockets of a few
| and the rest will be automated. They businesses cannot be
| upset about this because the ultimate goal of a business is
| not be your friend but to generate more money and one way
| is to reduce costs.
| m_ke wrote:
| People should keep in mind that these human in the loop AI
| systems are built to learn from the human until they're good
| enough to replace them.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Until they're good enough to _liquidate them for fuel_.
|
| FTFY.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I am building my system https://aidev.codes and adding virtual
| servers to allow back-end code with the explicit goal of
| selling this service to end-users as an alternative to hiring
| software engineers. In the niche I have previously been working
| in, there is a huge demand to build fairly complex integrations
| (such as with my other service) without an adequate budget to
| hire a person.
|
| I already know at least one designer who previously would have
| considered hiring me for something but now has explained that
| they are achieving tasks with ChatGPT.
|
| Especially when you start to understand the reasoning ability
| of GPT-4, what the 32k context window and ability to understand
| images means, any software engineer who thinks their job will
| remain safe is in complete denial.
|
| In fact, with this release you will start to see quite a lot of
| non-programmers start using Github. Within X months or a few
| years, its quite feasible that Microsoft will have a software
| engineer built into Windows.
| jnovek wrote:
| Do you have evidence to back these claims? Specifically that AI
| will be replacing software engineers any time soon and that
| Copilot exists explicitly to gather data towards that purpose.
| m_ke wrote:
| I've been working on ML systems like that for the last 10
| years, usually as tools to automate boring data entry tasks
| like tagging photos, automating food logging, giving dietary
| advice.
|
| At first these tools offer suggestions, but as more data
| comes in they start to do parts of the work autonomously,
| until they can handle all cases.
|
| Stable diffusion will replace a ton of paid design work, self
| driving cars will at some point replace most drivers.
| make3 wrote:
| Well it's hard to argue against the idea that the final aim
| of Copilot is to automate as much of software engineering as
| possible.
|
| I don't think that their aim is explicitly to replace humans,
| but to be as helpful as possible to developers, but doing
| that does exactly the other thing
| qwertox wrote:
| > ChatGPT-like experience in your editor with GitHub Copilot Chat
|
| The best thing about VS Code is how you can click on the tab of
| the current editor and drag it out into a new self-contained
| window, so that you can move it to another monitor. This is such
| an optimal use of screen real estate.
|
| I will drag out Copilot from the main VS Code window to my right
| monitor, have the main editor in the center monitor, and Google /
| GitHub / API docs on the left monitor.
|
| Yes, I'm being sarcastic.
| awestroke wrote:
| What's your point?
| magospietato wrote:
| VS Code constrains a single IDE instance to a single window.
| Extra flyouts like Copilot chat can only exist in this
| window, impacting on available real-estate for the code we
| actually care about.
|
| It's Code's biggest weakness IMO.
| qwertox wrote:
| Why not offer parts of it as a website? The part where I chat
| with it, where I ask my questions and get my answers. (Maybe
| it could bridge into VS Code via a local server to exchange
| code.)
| awestroke wrote:
| There is already a website. It's on chat.openai.com
| [deleted]
| retrocryptid wrote:
| But for the fact that it would likely get me permabanned, I would
| suggest making HackerNews Copilot X, the system that responds to
| HN posts and comments on your behalf and in a manner guaranteed
| to get more upvotes from other AIbots hanging out in internet
| comments forums.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I see that the AI bot has already down-voted this comment.
| yanis_t wrote:
| On the negative side, no mentions of the Vim plugin update so
| far.
| simonvc wrote:
| vim mode in vscode is good enough honestly. i've not booted vim
| for anything other than quick hacks in ages.
|
| 99% of the time i `code` now instead of `vi`
| w-m wrote:
| What I'd love to see in the future is a proper refactoring UX.
| This new chat interface is probably a good start, as it seems
| able to replace code blocks in your original source file. But
| most code changes in the real world require changes in multiple
| locations. And I don't usually have questions for the AI, I have
| small tasks for it to do.
|
| I hope we can get to a point where I can give quick commands to a
| Copilot-like system to do more complex changes. Changes which
| traditional refactoring tools balk at. Stuff you would discuss
| with other humans. Like "this value needs to be calculated once,
| move the code to the constructor", which then requires code being
| removed in one method, a member variable being created, and
| possibly a constructor, and some code being moved there, and
| perhaps a few changes in method parameter lists.
|
| The jump from single-point edits to multi-point edits is
| obviously a huge one, not only for the AI part, but also for the
| UI (being able to understand, accept or modify the changes, for
| the human). That for me would be truly next level (up from the
| amazing place where we are already with Copilot), and I can't
| wait for it to get there.
| salt4034 wrote:
| I agree. Before finalizing the changes, the AI could show you
| the diff and ask "is this what you had in mind or would you
| like me to change anything else?"
| w-m wrote:
| Are diffs really the best we can do though? Can't we come up
| with a better model of interaction?
|
| I find that looking at code and looking at diffs are
| different mental modes, for lack of a better word. For me,
| parsing diffs seems to engage a different part in the brain,
| and is much more exhausting than reading code.
|
| In comparison, reading code while someone makes changes to it
| seems to stay in the same code-mode. And I don't want to
| switch back and forth from code-mode to diff-mode all the
| time.
|
| How about after being prompted, Copilot acts like a remote
| user in my code base, with its own cursor, changing the code
| at the speed that ChatGPT currently writes out answers?
| Perhaps even commenting on what it does next to it. You could
| still have accept/modify/reject buttons at the code change
| locations, but they would change the new version, not a diff.
|
| Getting this slightly wrong will of course make you curse the
| whole thing to hell and back.
| ilaksh wrote:
| There are multiple startups for this.
|
| You can test the concept on my site https://aidev.codes
| although I don't have github integration yet.
| w-m wrote:
| Looks neat! But I would need it for pushing numbers around
| with Python, not building websites.
| ilaksh wrote:
| You can do that, it will output whatever. I just can't like
| execute or show any output. When I have the virtual servers
| I will be able to run the code.
| elil17 wrote:
| Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is
| a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would
| consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables).
| Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional
| mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely
| astounding.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| They automatically switched Copilot to GPT 4 without you
| enrolling in the limited access list?
| gunshai wrote:
| I used sympy the other day for the first time. I was blown away
| by that library I wish I had known about this years ago.
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes, I feel like it is much better than HN has given it credit
| for in earlier discussions. But that may be influenced by the
| fact that I only started using it relatively recently; I've
| probably mostly seen it at its best.
|
| Also, I have no illusions about how language models work. I
| notice that the sloppier the code I'm editing, the worse
| suggestions (and dumber comments) it suggests. If I start
| writing a comment and copilot immediately suggests "TODO:
| delete this", that's a better indicator of poor code health
| than any metric I know about. It's not a magic wand, but it can
| be extremely useful if you use it sensibly.
|
| Then again, you can just decide to forget how it works and ask
| it questions directly in comments: // Hey
| GPT3, write me a poem // ANSWER:
|
| It's not sensible, but it's great fun.
| Kiro wrote:
| You're being too kind on the HN crowd. We're usually
| extremely pessimistic for no good reason and useless at
| predicting things. It seems like we just love to hate on
| stuff.
| qgin wrote:
| It's definitely not considered high status here to be
| positive about anything
| vintermann wrote:
| If you think that you should see what Slashdot is like
| these days, lol.
| acdha wrote:
| People here love hot takes, especially if it stakes out a
| contrarian position as the smart one. Criticizing the big
| players is just too easy to do that with since it doesn't
| require you to build an alternative and is often right in
| some aspect so you can get validation.
| kreas wrote:
| I would say this about most developers not just HN. It took
| years for me to break that mindset.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I don't think people understand the hockey stick we're on.
| Don't focus too hard on the failings, look at the scaffolding
| being rapidly deployed that makes the iterative improvement
| process exceptionally tight.
| brookst wrote:
| It's the same with every paradigm shift.
|
| "GUIs are pretty but slow. Ok, they're faster but just glued
| on to CLI programs. Ok, they're native but less information
| dense. Ok, that's a good thing, but..."
|
| "The internet is nice but you still have to go to the
| store/bank. Ok, you can shop/bank online but you still have
| to call airlines. Ok you can buy airline tickets but you
| still have to go to the library to research. Ok, you can
| research but you still have to drive in to work. Ok..."
|
| Maybe it's a half empty / half full thing, but there is some
| portion of the populace that can't acknowledge the promise of
| anything until it is perfect and comprehensive.
|
| And, yes, there's another portion that can't acknowledge gaps
| or flaws of the promise is sufficiently huge. But it's the
| former that grinds my gears.
| scandox wrote:
| Your overall point is reasonable, but to take your point
| about GUIs...we actually lost an awful lot moving from text
| based interfaces going to GUI. We got universal adoption
| and more or less zero training required...but we got very
| slow and inflexible interfaces.
| chaxor wrote:
| Command line didn't vanish ... You can still use it.
| Approximately 90% of my work is done via TUI, so it's
| certainly not gone.
| scandox wrote:
| I'm talking about people behind counters, people in stock
| rooms, people in all kinds of data entry and so on. The
| terminal did vanish from many places. We're not the
| market.
| headcanon wrote:
| I would assert that the "here are the current flaws" side
| is still necessary in the overall conversation, since they
| provide the necessary feedback that allows technology to
| improve. Similar to political debates influencing the
| Overton window of a population, I see the "future promise"
| vs "current flaws" as a human algorithm realizing itself.
| The debate never ends, but the "mean" value keeps moving as
| technology progresses. As a "future promise" person myself
| I used to be annoyed by the "current flaws" side as well
| until I started seeing things through this lens.
| darkwater wrote:
| I'm speaking more generally but
|
| > Maybe it's a half empty / half full thing, but there is
| some portion of the populace that can't acknowledge the
| promise of anything until it is perfect and comprehensive.
|
| Probably because paradigm shifts or new ways of doing
| things come with a lot of trade-offs that can be seen only
| after the change has been absorbed more. Early adopters are
| usually blind to these issues (or decide to be blind at
| them), conservatives don't look at the improvements but
| think that there might be something not that good in the
| future by projecting past experiences.
| agent281 wrote:
| I'm mostly curious how far the hockey stick will go up.
| Eventually most things level off.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Considering this hockey stick is in the field that is in
| the business of making hockey sticks it could go pretty
| far. A hockey stick maximizer if you will.
| substation13 wrote:
| This is the big question isn't it. With self driving cars
| we have been on the final 20% for what seems like forever.
| elil17 wrote:
| Big difference here is that it becomes more useful as it
| gets better. Self driving cars aren't useful until they
| reach a certain threshold.
| wfeefwfwe wrote:
| [flagged]
| danenania wrote:
| To me the key issue are these 'hallucinations'--mistakes
| that seem plausible but are completely made up, like API
| endpoints that would be super useful except for the small
| problem that they don't exist. GPT4 is better than GPT3 on
| these but it still produces a lot of them.
|
| The question is whether these are somehow inherent to the
| LLM approach or whether scaling up and continued
| improvements can eventually get rid of them.
|
| They are the main barrier at this point between a _very_
| useful tool, but one that still needs to have all its
| output carefully checked by humans when it comes to
| anything important, and a true autonomous agent that can be
| given full tasks to do on its own.
| elil17 wrote:
| It seems pretty clear to me that you could do some more
| RL to enforce truth-telling/admitting when it does not
| know - it would just be much more labor intensive
| compared to the RLHF they have already done because fact
| checking is difficult.
| danenania wrote:
| I'd imagine they've already been doing lots of RL in this
| direction, which explains the improvements in GPT4, but
| it's still an issue. Maybe they can eventually eliminate
| hallucinations completely, but I could also imagine that
| it will end up being difficult to do that without
| lessening its creativity across the board. Perhaps making
| things up is fundamental to how LLMs work and trying to
| stop it from doing that will kill the magic. I'm not an
| AI researcher so I really have no idea--just speculating.
|
| I'm not at all trying to downplay the power or
| significance of LLMs, btw, in case that's why I'm getting
| downvoted... I'm using copilot/GPT4 every day and they
| are massive productivity boosters. But currently I see
| them as tools for producing rough drafts that need to be
| revised and checked over. If they can't solve
| hallucinations, LLMs will stay in this lane, which is
| still incredible, amazing, and useful, but won't
| necessarily get us to the AI endgame that the hype is
| predicting.
| barrenko wrote:
| They were probably apprehensive beforehand, and now just
| unleashed it on everything.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| So it's on par with a junior software engineer?
| elil17 wrote:
| No, I don't think it's comparable to a junior engineer. It
| works best for pretty short snippets of code. It also can't
| decide when to run the program and how to interpret/make
| changes based on the results.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| So... a junior developer?
|
| I (mostly) kid but some seniors I know struggle at those
| things.
| elil17 wrote:
| I mean I get what you're saying. But it doesn't just
| struggle with those things - they aren't even the sort of
| things it can do.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Yes. Of all the comments I've made on HN, that one most
| deserves to be down-voted. Jr. Devs I know are motivated
| and reasonably intelligent.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > It also can't decide when to run the program and how to
| interpret/make changes based on the results.
|
| Not quite, but a bit of plumbing can get you closer. Not
| human using a computer close, but interestingly closer
| nonetheless.
|
| I've been trying to accomplish something akin to this by
| having a program monitor and alter another program within a
| virtual machine, using GPT-generated solutions to error
| traces to correct bugs in the sand boxed program.
|
| It watches the program to see when an error occurs, feeds
| the error to GPT with pertinent code, then tries to splice
| in the solution.
|
| It kind of works. I don't think we're going to see human-
| levels of success from this in the immediate future, but I
| was able to write a simple event-based system which alters
| a program to resolve simple bugs. It even does it on a
| different git branch, and there is some stubbed out code
| and prompts for generating tests. In my manual testing,
| this actually worked too. If the tests passed I was going
| to have it push the change set and create a PR explaining
| the changes, tests, etc.
|
| I doubt I'll continue now that Copilot is doing this
| already. My point though is that with the right
| configuration, the right data and prompts, and a system
| orchestrating the start/stop/test patterns based on the
| state of the sandboxed program, you can begin to achieve
| something akin to an inexperienced person solving bugs.
|
| Sometimes it does a terrible job and other times it kind of
| falls over itself. But we're already leaps and bounds ahead
| of previous systems, and I just cobbled this together with
| what's possible via OpenAI's API.
|
| The crazy part is that there are so many possible layers.
| Like say we get our initial solution and we verify that it
| works. Well, now we can have a system which optimizes the
| implementation. Like a PR buddy that observes the
| implementation and determines: should this test be appended
| to an existing suite of tests? Can the test case simply be
| added to an existing table-driven test? How can we
| streamline this patch to avoid an endless stream of
| additional files and tests to maintain? I think that's
| actually tractable already. While the success rate won't be
| 100% today, it'll clearly only improve.
| vintermann wrote:
| Sure. One that never gets tired, never gets frustrated,
| always does his best, and has a pause button.
| geraneum wrote:
| This applies to managers and many founders too. I imagine
| it's gonna affect the startup scene more than people expect
| and the number of current model of startups where you build
| a custom software solution for a problem may also fall. It
| applies to all white collar workers. This is the goal of a
| corporation like Microsoft to develop such a system (to
| consolidate those added values), and it will happen one day
| as it happened with physical labor. Although we are not
| quite there yet. It might be far or not. Who knows?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I admit that I'm anxious about the possibility that AI will drive
| down demand for developer jobs. My base case is that it won't
| have a meaningful negative impact, but it's possible that it
| will, so it's unpleasant to have this uncertainty about the
| future and to see the technology develop very rapidly with big
| news coming almost every day - which I would be normally extatic
| about.
|
| I've been on a path to financial independence (= saving and
| investing) but still need ~9 years to be able to safely retire. I
| slightly envy people with US-based FAANG jobs, where achieving
| financial independence seems like a breeze.
|
| This also adds fuel to my desire to start a side project.
|
| What are your thought on this? Are you preparing in any way
| financially?
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I'm thinking over the medium to long term, we'll lose jobs but
| we won't see them, they just won't have been created.
| wfeefwfwe wrote:
| this is a very, very important nuance, i think.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Here. We. Go.
|
| I made the analogy a few days ago about how all modern
| manufacturing and machining processes were essentially
| bootstrapped from two fairly flat stones. Its going to be
| interesting to see how the acceleration in improvement of the
| tools for "making things" changes in the LLM age.
| hobs wrote:
| I love the "Origins of Precision"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 that goes into this
| very topic.
| dw_arthur wrote:
| There's something really satisfying about using a tool that
| makes you more productive, even more so if you built the tool.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Stochastic Markov Monte Carlo cut and paste is clearly more
| powerful than deterministic cut and paste.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I think the gnu emacs code base is proof of this statement.
| I'm fairly certain they fed the source into disassociated
| press and kept doing it until it compiled.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| Well, technically, three flat stones. Two flat-appearing stones
| can match (like two stacked Pringles chips) and still not be
| flat and thus not match a third true flat reference. Thus:
|
| "When two plates are not flat but still match, one will not
| match the third. By continually lapping or scraping the high
| points of their contact until all three show perfect bearing
| when intercompared, three flat planes are created" [1]
|
| [1] Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy by Wayne R. Moore c.
| 1970
|
| (An absolutely fantastic read)
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Agreed, I think we're entering the 4th era of the internet (as
| I see it).
|
| The first era was pre-consumer (arpanet etc).
|
| The second era had internet installed in several homes across
| the country, but it still wasn't clear what the internet was
| going to become, and it was still considered an oddity. This
| was roughly 1990-the mid aughts.
|
| The third era saw the internet become socially viable -
| myspace, facebook, twitter, instagram all took over peoples
| lives. This roughly coincided with the release of smart phones,
| as well as the increased computing power of browsers, spurred
| mostly by V8.
|
| For the last few years there's been this implicit expectation
| that we're entering into a new era, but it wasn't clear what
| that era would be. For a minute, people thought it was
| crypto/metaverse, but that was always kind of a silly idea.
|
| It's now clear that AI is going to be the catalyst, and I think
| it's ushering in something equivalent to the industrial
| revolution, but starting from where we are now. It's just
| impossible to fathom where we're going to go from here.
| eterps wrote:
| I am guessing that at some point a class of programming languages
| will be designed that is both optimal to generate by LLMs and
| easy to read/understand for humans. Right now most PLs are
| optimized for writing code by humans.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| That is what makes them also optimal for LLMs as is. It would
| be more efficient to have something that is direct machine
| code, but LLMs are Large <Language> Models right?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > easy to read/understand for humans
|
| I think many languages are actually already optimized for this.
| Where "reading" means reasoning about what the program does and
| not just reading text.
| brookst wrote:
| Do we even need such a language, beyond just English / other
| human languages?
|
| IMO we'll see LLM interpreters / compilers where the spec is
| the code, and whatever the LLM does in the background is opaque
| to the "programmer".
| kypro wrote:
| Slightly unrelated I suppose, but I'm not sure how I feel about a
| world where people frequently communicate with each other via AI
| generated prompts.
|
| I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something quite
| creepy about this future we're currently being sold. A world
| where inauthenticity is the norm, and where everything you read
| is no longer written by your family, friends and colleagues, but
| by their AI assistant.
|
| I suppose people have expressed similar feelings about phones and
| video conferencing, and AI prompts are just the next step of
| optimising human interaction by removing all the constraints and
| annoyances that come with interacting with other humans.
|
| Any way I would be interested in hearing how others feel about
| this. Or if it's more convenient, how you feel as interpreted by
| your AI assistant. It's all the same after all.
| maicro wrote:
| All joking below aside, I'm not sure how I feel about this
| either, though I also haven't been following things too closely
| yet. The below is the first "real" use I've made of an AI to
| write a response for me.
|
| I guess there are a couple different layers there. On the one
| hand, the technology/medium being used has always caused us to
| adjust our communication style - we communicate differently if
| it's a letter that will take weeks to deliver and weeks more to
| receive a response, vs. a hasty limited text message, vs. an
| email, vs. a face to face conversation with no time
| constraints, etc. So I guess that as long as the person sending
| the message agrees that it conveys what they want, having an AI
| draft it isn't terrible...
|
| --- Me: Write a response agreeing to this message: [contents of
| your post, without correcting the original typo thus explaining
| paragraph 4] Bard draft 3: I agree that there is something
| quite creepy about a world where people frequently communicate
| with each other via AI generated prompts. It seems like a world
| where authenticity is lost and where everything is just a
| simulation.
|
| I can see how people might be attracted to AI prompts because
| they are convenient and efficient. But I think there is also a
| risk that people will become too reliant on AI and that they
| will lose the ability to connect with each other on a deeper
| level.
|
| I think it is important to maintain a balance between using AI
| and interacting with other humans. AI can be a tool that helps
| us to communicate more effectively, but it should not be a
| replacement for human connection.
|
| I have not been interrupted by my AI assistant, but I can
| imagine that it would be annoying if it was constantly trying
| to interject or offer unsolicited advice. I think it is
| important for AI assistants to be respectful of human privacy
| and to only provide information when it is asked for.
|
| Overall, I think that AI has the potential to be a powerful
| tool for communication, but it is important to use it
| responsibly and to be aware of its limitations.
| UK-AL wrote:
| I think they've done it backwards in regards to it writing tests.
| Tests are the check to make sure the A.I is in check. If A.I is
| writing tests, you have to double check the tests.
|
| You should write tests, then the A.I writes the code. It almost
| doesn't matter what the code is, as long the AI can regenerate
| the code from tests.
| layer8 wrote:
| Tests don't (can't) prove tthat code is correct. They are
| merely a rough plausibility check that the code isn't
| completely wrong and didn't regress. You generally can't derive
| the right code just from tests.
| UK-AL wrote:
| You can write tests about properties you care about which may
| not be everything. Generally in some of the more financial
| applications i've written I would be ok with people rewriting
| the app as long as it passes the tests.
|
| I've even written tests that say this set of input goes to
| this output, for various different subsets of input. Anything
| outside of the of the defined input sets fail validation.
|
| Than it randomly picks a couple of thousand inputs from the
| input sets I've defined and runs them. More confidence you
| need, the more exhaustive setting you put it on.
|
| It's a bit like QuickCheck.
| layer8 wrote:
| You can approximate it, but to represent really _all_
| properties, in the end it becomes a mirror picture of the
| actual code you are testing, which then begs the question.
|
| A random sample of inputs that is hidden from the AI also
| won't allow it to derive a corresponding implementation.
| And if the set of sample inputs is not hidden, then the AI
| is still free to produce an implementations that only works
| for those sample inputs.
| UK-AL wrote:
| You'd probably separate example tests and validation
| tests. Also test descriptions should fed into the prompt
| to help guide it, like BDD style tests.
|
| On test failure, the data is fed back into the prompt
| about what failed for another iteration.
|
| This will help avoid over-fitting, and generate another
| generation on test failure. I mean you can't guarantee
| correctness, but you could probably get it pretty close.
| Humans also have the same problem.
| electrondood wrote:
| > GitHub Copilot Chat builds upon the work that OpenAI and
| Microsoft have done with ChatGPT and the new Bing.
|
| Cool, so it can sass me and threaten to stop responding when it
| doesn't like my tone?
|
| Whatever PM decided that tools need to have a personality should
| be fired and blacklisted.
| drdrek wrote:
| I would love to hear from other people here but I tried it for a
| while and dropped my subscription. For short things it was nice,
| but the larger the suggestion the worst it got. I found myself
| constantly mentally debugging the output it suggested, I do not
| know if it was faster but I was mentally exhausted by it, unable
| to go for long periods of time. Dumb code completion is
| predictable, I know I'll need to press down three times before
| its even shown to me, enabling me to think forward. With "smart"
| code completion I need to constantly stop my train of thought to
| process what ever it throws at me. I even tried to just trust the
| system, playing it fast and loose, not double checking
| everything, but then it just produced bugs.
|
| I'm developer with 16 years of experience, currently working
| mainly with python for API work.
|
| I'd love to hear accounts of other people, please add your
| background if you feel comfortable. I want to see if there is
| some correlation to experience, programming languages or use
| cases.
| yanis_t wrote:
| I mostly code in JS/TS and ruby, and find it pretty handy.
| Especially when I need to write some unit tests, I usually only
| write it("should work like this and like that"), and 90% of the
| time it generates a useful unit test[0].
|
| Also, I find it very useful when I code in an unfamiliar
| environment, for example python. While usually I know what I
| want to do, I'm not exactly familiar with details of syntax's,
| or how a specific library api looks like. This is where it
| shines, in my experience. Huge time-saver.
|
| [0] https://www.strictmode.io/articles/using-github-copilot-
| for-...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| That's been my (limited) experience, you have to debug its
| output and if you don't you have problems later. Pasting
| CoPilot's code into ChatGPT was sort of interesting but not
| really a time-saver, although pretty useful for understanding
| new concepts. Ultimately I'd still have to go read the
| documentation to actually understand how to use something new
| correctly however. Not really sure if it's worth $ for.
|
| Where it is pretty useful I think is in examining large chunks
| of poorly commented code bases, where you're using CoPilot to
| generate comments describing what the code is supposed to be
| doing, i.e. '#here we ..'.
| raincole wrote:
| At this point, Copilot is as natural as autocomplete and syntax
| highlighting to me. Of course I can still write code without
| them, but it would feels really off and counter-productive.
| aloer wrote:
| My trial ran out yesterday and I cancelled the subscription. It
| feels limiting on its own. There are three use cases off the
| top of my head
|
| - auto complete. This one is amazing but I'm not willing to
| spend 10/month for only that
|
| - generate code inline. The main purpose of copilot. It works
| okay but too often I feel like I'm faster if I google things
| myself. Perhaps I'm just a very fast googler and reader.
| Wouldn't surprise me
|
| - use a solution and adapt it to my own code. I don't know how
| this could work without copilot having access to my browser and
| knowing what I just read somewhere. I'm very excited about this
| but right now copilot does not seem the right tool
|
| But above all I cancelled for two reasons: it's too slow and I
| can't trust my privacy and code IP to be respected
|
| Edit: I also feel there is a lot of secondary information lost.
| If I google I have multiple tabs and windows and (temporal)
| structure. I also learn about neighboring concepts via
| stackoverflow comments, or I learn about how to navigate the
| docs for whatever I'm doing right now.
|
| With copilot I am not exposed to all of this. Not yet
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I currently use copilot and 80% of the benefit I get from it is
| boilerplate and refactoring, the rest is just using it as smart
| autocomplete where I can zip through adding a bunch of
| properties or arguments. I use it for a lot of greenfield stuff
| though which is really where it shines since a lot of that work
| is just standing up all the essential bits and pieces before
| you have to do anything complex. It's helped me massively with
| going from an idea to a working implementation both by getting
| rid of a lot of the boring typing and by keeping me going when
| I started to get a bit run down or uninspired.
|
| I can understand why you might not like it if you were using it
| for critical things that needed to be well planned and debugged
| before running. I don't find it very good at intricate work but
| that's ok with me since I want to really slow down at those
| points and think about what I'm doing.
|
| As a side note, using ChatGPT with GPT-4 or even just GPT turbo
| is an amazing unblocker for projects where you need to use
| unfamiliar packages, APIs or languages. You can just talk to it
| about what you're trying to do and it'll provide you with great
| examples and explanations. It won't be right 100% of the time
| but it's right enough to get you unstuck and a lot faster than
| searching through docs or stackoverflow for a good answer. It
| helps to be very precise with your problem statement as well,
| like specifying the version of the package you want to use or a
| time frame. Those little prompt tricks remind me a lot of the
| Google-fu we had to learn to search effectively. I'm excited
| that Copilot is going to be moving to GPT-4 with chat built in,
| it'll unify the whole process.
| babl-yc wrote:
| (Software dev for 15+ years)
|
| I'm using it for Typescript + NodeJS development. I find
| Copilot most valuable when it's something I'd need to Google
| anyway, like how to format a date string or how to do X in
| selenium. 8 out of 10 times the answer is right, and the other
| times it is at least interesting (gives me an idea of what to
| look for).
|
| This quick feedback is _way_ faster than googling and keeps me
| in the IDE, and also just makes it more enjoyable to code when
| there is this "pair programming" partner that I can interact
| with via code/comments and it will generate ideas for me, even
| if they aren't all perfect.
| ddren wrote:
| I used it for a while but I found that too many suggestions are
| worthless and having to consider them makes me waste more time
| than just writing the code myself. For the things that it is
| useful like snippets, I found that ChatGPT is better anyway.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Copilot for generating TS prop types on react components is
| fantastic, or guessing the write type for a library object's
| type.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| I don't know about the new developments but with last year's
| copilot, it's great as long as you don't have it on all the
| time. Just turn it on when you want it to complete something.
| Unfortunately VSCode didn't/doesn't make that easy -- you have
| to hack something together yourself:
|
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7553#discussio...
| Epskampie wrote:
| Totally agree, I cancelled my subscription because the way
| the extension works (worked?) is just way too distracting,
| shoving (often wrong) suggestions in my face all the time.
|
| It should have an mode where it only ever suggests a single
| best guess when I press a certain shortcuts.
| nprateem wrote:
| It mostly just gets in my way by being frequently wrong, and
| disabling my IDE's autocomplete. If I didn't get it free I
| wouldn't pay for it.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I haven't used copilot but your experience sounds exactly like
| what I would expect. Since AI is based on prediction, it makes
| sense that broader predictions would be less accurate. I think
| stringing together output from a lot of smaller predictions
| would yield better results. Which, at the end of the day, means
| that a human + AI will always be more productive than AI on its
| own. At least for the foreseeable future.
| BratishkaErik wrote:
| Another reason to switch from GitHub, I don't want to strengthen
| this ecosystem. AI-generated description for PR? gg. IMHO it will
| drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on
| this platform (but still increasing whatever fake metric
| [accepted pull requests? stars?] people love to check)
| blibble wrote:
| personally I cleared out all my highly starred projects and
| filled them all with randomly generated crap that happens to
| compile
|
| and will never contribute to public open source again
|
| (I guess MS have finally managed to kill open source)
| mrcwinn wrote:
| The non-fake metric is the accepted pull request itself, ie,
| work done in service of the objective.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those
| who will remain on this platform
|
| Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot
| has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports
| differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Not everyone - me and quite a few others I know tried it and
| turned it off.
|
| It might be better now they've improved it, but for the sort
| of work I do (maintain a mature Kotlin codebase) the prior
| version wasn't a productivity upgrade, it was a downgrade
| because the type system and IDE generated more accurate
| suggestions that I don't have to double check for errors.
| Copilot and ChatGPT both seem to have error rates too high
| for this sort of work.
|
| I can see though, that once I switch to some other sort of
| work it might be more valuable.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I have used it for 2 months and disabled it. So there is your
| exception.
|
| The code it suggests is always highly suspect and writing raw
| code never was the problem in the first place (for me). I was
| "discussing" with it for far longer than it was making me
| "productive". I give it -5%.
|
| I do however love occasionally using GPT directly for
| converting some weird list of values to JSON or coming up
| with plausible test data. Sometimes some text or ideas for
| emails (especially English, which is not my mother tongue).
| Sort of a secretary of sorts.
| hellcow wrote:
| Copilot definitely makes me much less productive, since it
| breaks my flow on every line. I give it a -50%. It is both
| very dumb and very loud. It feels like I'm pair programming
| with a 1st year CS student who pipes up on _every single
| line_ trying to predict what I will type next and getting
| 95% of it wrong.
|
| I found ChatGPT however outputs good code when I want it do
| simple things. Writing unit tests is tedious, and ChatGPT
| is pretty good at that. Optimizing a SQL query, etc. Things
| that used to take some time are now either instantaneous or
| get me 90% of the way there, and I can do the final edits.
| BratishkaErik wrote:
| sorry if i was unclear, by "real productivity" i meant
| something that requires more creativity than copypasting
| stackoverflow/copilot to your code, not measured in "lines of
| code" but rather in how much it is unique. Highly subjective,
| yes...
| jwhiles wrote:
| What's the reason to think that it reduces the amount of
| creative code that's written. Doesn't it just let you get
| through the copypastable stuff faster - all things being
| equal I'd assume it means you spend more time on the
| creative parts.
| dagw wrote:
| Copilot lets me get the 'boring' scaffolding work out of
| the way quicker so I can spend more time on the parts of my
| project that actually are hard and 'unique'.
| elil17 wrote:
| Right, but the idea is that copilot frees up more of your
| time for the creative part. That is what I have found in
| practice.
| yunohn wrote:
| > rather in how much it is unique
|
| IRL a lot of what people do is rehashing or gluing together
| things as others may have done before. We all stand on the
| shoulder of giants - code is a tool to enable an outcome.
|
| I don't agree with your definition of "code uniqueness is
| productivity".
| _bohm wrote:
| Could you explain your reasoning? You expect that these tools
| will create more work to get from point A to point B rather
| than less?
| BratishkaErik wrote:
| In short: because there will be "current junk pull requests"
| (see microchanges for readme) but increased x100, if you want
| to use AI at least write description by yourself, orelse
| there os no point in your pr as authors might make it
| themselves
| _bohm wrote:
| I see. My impression based on this press release is that
| GitHub is planning on marketing this more to teams using
| their paid plan though. It seems like this would be a non-
| issue for organizations using private repositories?
| BratishkaErik wrote:
| > As we continue to design, test, and build features that
| fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also taking
| the time to determine the best way to provide them to our
| customers, which may include changes to Copilot for
| Business and Copilot for Individuals.
|
| so we'll see :)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect just that. Overall,
| producing code quicker is probably not something we need.
| It's plenty quick to type code. What's slow is finding good
| designs. I think more often than not, we jump to the coding
| part too early and build things too soon. This creates
| problems that are hard to fix after the fact.
|
| The easier it is to produce code, the more code will be
| produced. The more code is produced, the more complex and
| short-sighted the architecture will be as a result.
|
| This is much older than AI. You can take a one-person task
| that takes two weeks to perform, assign it to a five person
| team, and they'll solve it by producing 25 times the code.
|
| We create abstractions to cope with the noise of a large code
| base, but in doing so, we also create a noisier and more
| complex code base that needs more abstractions.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| Managing complexity was once the job description
| _bohm wrote:
| Yeah I think there's a lot of sense in that. I think it's
| likely that the ability to use these tools in a disciplined
| fashion will grow to be a significant differentiator
| between more effective and less effective programmers. The
| former taking a considered approach to design and then
| using the tools where they're a real force multiplier e.g.,
| writing unit tests, and the latter prompting them to spit
| out large swaths of code they would have previously written
| by hand: "write an endpoint that does X".
| gzer0 wrote:
| There are 5 different sign-up waiting lists. Each one needs to be
| signed-up for separately.
|
| [1] Copilot X: https://github.com/github-
| copilot/chat_waitlist_signup/
|
| [2] Copilot Voice: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-voice/
|
| [3] Copilot Docs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-for-
| docs/
|
| [4] Copilot for PRs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-for-
| pull-requests/
|
| [5] Copilot CLI: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli/
| renewiltord wrote:
| Thank you. Better comment than the release docs.
|
| This is going to be fantastic!
| fortylove wrote:
| This screams to me that each internal team just wants a piece
| of the glory and the accompanying praise and "way to get this
| across the finish line team!" emails.
| usrnm wrote:
| You're forgetting promotions
| fortylove wrote:
| True!
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Soon - Introducing Copilot Copilot - to help you navigate the
| Copilot offerings.
| amelius wrote:
| Coco-pilot, with a mascot that looks like Bonzi buddy in an
| airplane.
| vanillax wrote:
| Underrated comment here
| cloudking wrote:
| Thanks saved a lot of time!
| [deleted]
| sqs wrote:
| "GitHub Copilot X is currently a representation of GitHub's
| vision for the future rather than an available product offering
| of GitHub Copilot. As we continue to design, test, and build
| features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are
| also taking the time to determine the best way to provide them
| to our customers."
|
| From the FAQ at https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x
| (When will GitHub Copilot X be available and how much does it
| cost?).
| pastor_bob wrote:
| $50+ in monthly subscription fees?
|
| BRB buying some MSFT
| paxys wrote:
| We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation of
| developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN
| subscription just as the base cost for doing business. This
| is what Microsoft does.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| While building off of free open source. Perfect.
| xxpor wrote:
| the MSDN subscription was amazing for me to piggyback off
| of my dad as a kid though. access to essentially
| _everything_ in MS 's current and back catalog that was
| even remotely related to dev work, including OSes :)
| spookthesunset wrote:
| The best was when you knew somebody who worked at
| microsoft and could get the company discount!
| LASR wrote:
| If you knew someone working at MSFT, you would just ask
| them for some free keys.
| nwatson wrote:
| My old MSDN keys for Windows from ten years ago will
| still unlock Windows 10/11 installs when I need a Windows
| VM.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Did individual developers actually pay that? I've done
| quite a bit of development in the MS ecosystem and can't
| recall anyone personally paying for MSDN. It was always
| through their employer that they got access.
| paxys wrote:
| We will pretty soon get to a point where companies start
| to volume license Copilot for their entire engineering
| team, so really the same thing.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| Consultants and freelancers for sure did - though again
| that's technically a business expense.
| ghaff wrote:
| I definitely had some sort of personal MSDN subscription
| at one point. Plus compilers and the tike were far from
| free. I had shelves of books. And computers themselves
| cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars.
| zerkten wrote:
| Individual developers paying was always an insignificant
| volume. It was still within reach so devs could get it
| and be productive. As an example, the cost was fairly
| insignificant to the many .NET devs who jumped to
| SharePoint in the 2000s to keep their top rates. People
| give SP a hard time quite rightly, but as a revenue
| generator for devs in many markets with limited options,
| it was a very good choice.
|
| It was priced and designed for companies to be buying as
| a bundle with other licensing. individual devs would
| frequently use some of the loopholes through licensing
| partners to commit to what was basically a three year
| subscription that spread the cost. For companies, it
| could mitigate some of the costs associated with the
| proliferation of environments that needed to be licensed
| from top-to-bottom. Later, these may stop being eligible
| for MSDN use and generate more revenue. License auditing
| was real and gave visibility into this usage.
|
| VMware still have a program like this going for their
| admin user base. It gets recommended by the r/homelab
| folks who haven't adopted Proxmox.
| arwhatever wrote:
| I believe that they tended to hand it out for free or
| very inexpensive to students, substantial trial offerings
| to new/small businesses, etc.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation
| of developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN
| subscription just as the base cost for doing business._
|
| Or $800 for a COBOL|FORTRAN|C|AP/L compiler, plus $600 for
| a debugger.
|
| At least when you upgraded the next year, you got $20 off!
| axlee wrote:
| Or $299 a year for the Apple Developer Program just for the
| great honor to be able to develop for that platform...
| booi wrote:
| that's not entirely fair... you also need a iDevice and
| some form of new-ish mac as well.
| ericlewis wrote:
| $299 a year? It is $99.
| drusepth wrote:
| The Developer Program plan is $99/year and enables
| distribution via the App Store.
|
| The Developer Enterprise Program plan is $299/year and
| enables corporate/internal distribution to employees.
|
| Most people only need the first, but the second is also
| an option. And if you need both, it's technically
| $398/year for the great honor.
| jjeaff wrote:
| $99 plus 15-30% of everything you create.
| Terretta wrote:
| Try selling through Amazon.com and see what % you keep.
|
| Then try selling through a grocery or drugstore chain.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The difference being I can always walk to a different
| grocery store without having to pay ~$1k.
| brookst wrote:
| As a brand, do you get more value from being on Amazon or
| in a local grocery store?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Have you tried selling apps trough Amazon or grocery
| stores?
| wysewun wrote:
| Great point. Time to do research on how much GitHub
| contributes to msft earnings. Really does seem like they're
| on the verge of a huge jump
| moonchrome wrote:
| They are bragging about 1m developers on copilot, let's say
| 20$/m to be generous - that's 20m$/month - they probably
| have larger single client revenues than that and I doubt
| copilot is high margin (I bet I spend more than 10$/month
| in compute by the queries I generate).
|
| Unless this goes to hundreds of dollars/month (which I
| would pay if it was a good experience) I don't see this
| making a dent.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Probably it will be using license for enterprises with
| decent margins, and it will be much higher cost then.
| Soon it's no-brainer for all enterprises to buy. I truly
| think that a little bit more time and engineering costs
| would be down 80% - 90%, because of all this tooling.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Maybe they think of waiting until everyone uses Copilot
| and then jack up the price.
|
| But that wouldn't quite work.
| tarruda wrote:
| It is basically free if you consider companies will be
| automating a lot of the dev grunt work for now on. Learning
| to code using tools like Copilot will be a requirement, but
| instead of 10 developers you hire 1.
| bg24 wrote:
| Where is the pricing? I looked around and not obvious if I
| missed it. Some of these used to be in copilot labs. I used
| and then disabled it. Was part of monthly copilot
| subscription.
| rvz wrote:
| > BRB buying some MSFT
|
| No.
|
| Tell me you buy the hype and on high impact macro-economic
| news like FOMC and lose more money due to volatility without
| telling me.
|
| Almost everyone here knew GPT-4 will release soon, months ago
| in advance and you now decide to 'buy' MSFT as soon as it
| goes up to $277?
|
| The market really does get retail FOMO'ing in stocks with the
| hype and it just never ceases to surprise me that it happens
| here too.
| bavila wrote:
| This "tell me X without telling me" meme is, frankly, quite
| snarky and unnecessary.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| It's such a bummer that it started as a joke confessional
| TikTok meme and became a bitter forum reply meme.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| I think you have a valid point or two, but I think you're
| not grasping how much enterprises will be throwing money at
| MSFT.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Based on my own productivity, and how strong the tools seem
| to be, then I presume current increase in the value is
| still too very low. These tools would eventually reduce
| workforce costs by 90% at the very least in my view. To me
| it seems like most people don't truly understand how things
| are going to change now.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Maybe when they become much much more sophisticated.
| Right now they reduce time spent write boilerplate and
| looking at docs. How much of you overall time is spent on
| those tasks now? For most devs its not much. Significant
| time is spent reading code to understand program
| architecture, investigating bugs caused by obscure edge
| cases, refactoring or extending functionality without
| breaking everything. Copilot doesn't even scratch the
| surface of those yet.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It can find bugs, suggest fixes, write tests and do PRs.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| I feel like this is one of those eras where I will, yet
| again, not invest early and will, yet again, not make stupid
| money on the other end.
|
| Cheers to those who know where to put their dollars to ride
| this AI bubble to early retirement!
| csantini wrote:
| If you want it cheaper: https://how2terminal.com
|
| This is when I build a product and then Microsoft releases it
| three weeks later -_-
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If you want it cheaper:https://how2terminal.com_
|
| Very cool. Too bad I don't do subscriptions. If you ever
| figure out how to do a version on localhost, I'd pay $40 or
| so for it.
| MattSayar wrote:
| What a great landing page. Clear, to the point, with a
| self-explanatory demo. I know exactly what to do and how to
| use it in under 30 seconds
| dotancohen wrote:
| Your pricing is terrific. The free plan provides just
| enough daily queries to try it, and the monthly plan might
| be a good fit for a business.
|
| I'm going to sign up for the free plan, not because I need
| such a tool, but rather so that my boss might see me using
| it and decide that it's worth $10 a month to her.
| dotancohen wrote:
| What is `!-*f(6s6U8Q9b` here: const
| questionCriteria = { filter: '!-*f(6s6U8Q9b' //
| body_markdown and link }
|
| I thought maybe it is a hard-coded CSS element name in
| StackOverflow answers, judging by the context, but it's not
| that. Could you shed some light on this?
|
| Found in the How2 source file `how2/lib/how2.js`. Thanks.*
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| [dead]
| donmcronald wrote:
| That's super cool. I hate the pricing. I typically know
| everything I need to for day-to-day usage of the shell and
| only do things that require discovery every few months. 100
| queries wouldn't be enough in those months, so I'd have
| some months where I'm paying for nothing and the odd month
| where I don't get enough usage.
|
| $9 per month also makes it costly enough that I wouldn't
| buy it as a "just to have" kind of tool. I don't think I'd
| get $100 of value vs searching online, _especially_ since I
| attribute some negative value to tools that can be taken
| away from me. I don 't want to pay forever _and_ be
| dependent on something that could disappear tomorrow.
|
| I don't get why something like that needs to be an online
| service. I don't know much about AI, so maybe it's a lack
| of understanding on my part, but why can't I simply have a
| copy of the trained model on my local machine where there's
| no ongoing cost (to you) whenever I run a command? Isn't an
| online API a complex solution to a problem that could be
| solved with a local app + data?
|
| Maybe I just lack understanding and the models are too big
| or the compute required to make a query is huge. If you
| could give some insight I'd genuinely appreciate it.
|
| Even though I'd never buy it as a subscription, it's the
| kind of thing I'd pay for as a perpetual app. I'd wouldn't
| hesitate to pay $50 if I could install it on my machines
| and forget about it until it would be useful. I'd also
| expect to pay for updated versions of the models whenever I
| need them.
|
| Regardless, I think it's amazing as a discovery tool. I
| don't mind reading 'man' pages to figure out details, but I
| always feel like it's a hassle to discover what command I
| need for certain tasks.
|
| Also, I'm probably an outlier since I make a lot of effort
| to avoid tools that rely on an internet connection to
| function. IE: I won't rely on GitHub. I'll use it, but only
| as a push mirror.
| cess11 wrote:
| In case you'd like to know, there are a couple of typos on
| the landing page: focussed and Custome service.
| smcleod wrote:
| I really like copilot, I've used it every day since it was in a
| closed alpha. Copilot voice however - is hilariously terrible
| in comparison.
| tough wrote:
| talonvoice.com was developed by a develoepr that needed
| himself to use the AI voice to code tech
| drusepth wrote:
| > [4] Copilot for PRs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-
| for-pull-requests/
|
| One minor nit for the Githubbers inevitably lurking in the
| comments:
|
| The confirmation message for [4] says that they'll contact you
| at [first email address listed on your account], not [primary
| email address listed on your account]. I hope that's just a
| display bug since I don't have access to the email I first
| created my account with (but want to keep it added for commit
| attribution). It's not listed as the primary email though,
| which is where I'd expect this kind of communication to route
| through!
| simonw wrote:
| I had that problem too.
| brightball wrote:
| I think I prefer the WhatTheDiff approach to this one.
| Jack5500 wrote:
| So wait, is the switch to GPT4 done now or will it be done with
| Copilot X? The wording seems unclear to me
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Is anyone actually seeing things IRL like 46 % of code written by
| Copilot? I'm using it in RubyMine in a few years old Rails
| codebase with some complex bits, and while I find it much more
| useful than RubyMine's already nice autocomplete, I can rarely
| get it to write more than a one-liner before it misunderstands my
| intentions and touches something it shouldn't.
|
| One thing that I think contributes to this is that the codebase
| is really messy in places, so often there isn't much good code to
| parrot, and things that are named like should only do thing A
| often do thing B on the side.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Probably more than 30% for me, and there's a lot of low hanging
| fruit I bet it could get up to 60% at least. This is a full
| stack app. It knows from context what you're going to next in
| many cases.
| vslira wrote:
| A bit sad that they'll go the price discrimination route instead
| of improving Copilot
|
| Gotta pay for those H100 I guess
| ThereIsNoWorry wrote:
| This does not replace anyone, it just gets rid of people that
| don't adapt. I bet any company and developer that won't be using
| AI augmentation to increase productivity (not just coding) will
| horribly underperform in less than 10 years.
| drusepth wrote:
| It's kind of mind-blowing to see how well Microsoft has navigated
| the Next Big Thing (AI) waters compared to Google, whose bread
| and butter is (was?) AI/ML.
|
| Microsoft seems to have positioned themselves extremely well not
| only to be a leader in the space moving forward, but also to
| completely change the space. That's the mark of a great leader
| and it's exciting to see someone taking the reins whose not
| afraid to shift a paradigm or two.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Bard is very underwhelming if you've used GPT-4.
|
| Between search being trash and now even Maps being awful, I
| think it's time to stick a fork into Google. They need new
| leadership and they need it asap.
| itamarcode wrote:
| While in GitHub Copilot X you need to join a waiting list, you
| can already today generate meaningful test suites right inside
| your IDE. Check out: https://www.codium.ai
|
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/21206-codiumai--meaning...
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codium.c...
| amelius wrote:
| Stackoverflow should be afraid.
| erdaniels wrote:
| If you think about it, it's likely that much of the code
| Copilot is trained on comes from stackoverflow Q/A that made
| its way into open source GtiHub projects
| johlits wrote:
| Next step: Don't even show me the code. Just the results.
| zzzzzhzzzzz wrote:
| "At GitHub, our mission has always been to innovate ahead of the
| curve and give developers everything they need to be happier and
| more productive in a world powered by software."
|
| Maybe start with repo folders?
| thisismahdyar wrote:
| Make an organization?
| zerop wrote:
| So we will have to train our developers to produce code using gpt
| prompts.
|
| I see many jobs are at risk.
| la64710 wrote:
| This is clearly a case when an idea is oversold and everybody
| starts to blabber the same thing. Lose all the arguments to git
| cli because of an AI chat interface?
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I have some interesting stories from writing a report about a
| couple teams using AI pair programming for development at my
| firm.
|
| I'm seeing experienced senior developers use the AI to context
| switch like lightning. They know when the AI is bullshitting
| them, but they can use that seed to "jumpstart" their memories.
|
| Junior developers doing very domain specific tasks are taking
| longer to develop using the AI. However boilerplate work is speed
| up significantly.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| The first video in this post is a _perfect_ example of the
| problems I see in this space.
|
| First the programmer asks the AI to nebulously "fix the bug".
| Then the AI spits out an answer faster than anyone can read and
| prompts you to integrate it.
|
| Sure I can pause the video... but this is terrible marketing and
| dangerous practice.
|
| The PR autocomplete is just braindead development at it's
| conclusion.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| _GitHub Copilot for CLI_ however, seems exciting.
|
| Ask a question for how to execute a command, get an answer with
| description of the options needed. Explicit and easy, cool.
|
| Still doesn't build the muscle/mind memory of finding it
| yourself, but could serve as a reasonable substitute for
| `tldr`.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Everything I have worked for is worthless. The programming
| knowledge I sacrificed my prime years to learn is obsolete.
| Everything I earned I used to buy a house which is declining in
| value day by day. I wonder if I would be happier and more
| successful if I didn't take the responsible path in life.
| itsaquicknote wrote:
| Ouch, this nukes a few startups I was watching working on
| "basically this". What's the plan control.dev and cursor.so?
| pleb_nz wrote:
| This is cool no doubt and I use it every day and it still has
| shortcoming and isn't perfect.
|
| However, I definitely see job cuts coming. Not now, in some
| years. I'm lucky, I'm closer to the tail of my career than the
| start.
|
| But I feel for the hords of young people who have got into this
| career but may soon find only a smaller percentage of them are
| needed.
|
| You can't fight it, it's going to happen. It's up to the
| individuals to identify this risk and take steps to ensure their
| bases are covered if it and when it does.
| winstonprivacy wrote:
| No support for jetbrains? Having a chat plugin directly in the
| IDE would save me a crazy amount of time.
| veec_cas_tant wrote:
| The video[1] shows JetBrains at 31 seconds: "All in your
| favorite editor"
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/4RfD5JiXt3A?t=31
| endisneigh wrote:
| it's interesting to try and reconcile the anti-big-tech zeitgeist
| with the pro big-tech AI offerings such as this. fun times
| pornel wrote:
| The Copilot Voice dictation experience looks way better than the
| current state of the art of "type keyword import space quote foo
| quote semicolon newline".
| jchw wrote:
| Not very impressed with either Copilot or ChatGPT for programming
| purposes. I'm sure it will be interesting for some people, but
| whenever I really feel like I could benefit from an intelligent
| AI, it usually falls flat. Most commonly, it will just generate
| calls that don't exist, and if you try to get it to implement
| them, it will write bullshit. Now the thing is, maybe it really
| does improve developer productivity by virtue of letting the
| developer autocomplete boring things. To be fair, I did see some
| opportunity here. But on the other hand, it also seemed to harm
| productivity, as I had to carefully review everything it did, and
| eventually had to disable Copilot so that it would stop annoying
| me with nonsense completions every time I stopped typing. I'm not
| really sure if language models are actually getting closer to
| what we really want, or if they're getting closer to some other
| maxima that just looks similar. Clearly they're doing something
| that is novel and probably even useful, but with increasing
| parameter counts it seems that the underlying problems are not
| changing. Something certainly seems like it must be fundamentally
| wrong...
| woeirua wrote:
| ChatGPT << GPT4 when it comes to coding.
| thebackup wrote:
| I second this. My impressions so far are pretty much the same.
| Have been trying to get ChatGPT to generate code for some
| algorithms that are pretty close to well known implementations
| but with some twists and it absolutely fails no matter how much
| I tried to provide hints to change the suggestions it gave me.
| In the end I just went back to hand coding them since it
| actually saves me the frustration of trying to get ChatGPT to
| bend in the direction I need.
| Donald wrote:
| Have you tried GPT-4?
| thebackup wrote:
| Will give it a go. But probably it'll take another
| generation or two before it's good enough.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I use them all the time with success. For copilot it's very
| useful for writing tests and autocompleting repetitive code.
| Like writing a Typescript interface that matches a JSON object,
| or listing properties of an object into an array. ChatGPT is at
| worst a good rubber duck, and at best a superpowered
| documentation tool. If I ever get confused by docker or some
| popular JavaScript library it's able to give me a custom
| tailored answer that usually solves my problem on the first or
| second try.
|
| Neither of them are any good at just writing a ton of code
| (unless the code is mostly boilerplate). But they're amazing
| keystroke savers and a next generation stack overflow.
| danenania wrote:
| What would be amazing for Copilot + Typescript is if it could
| somehow integrate with the TS compiler (or perhaps just get
| sufficient fine-tuning on the TS type system) so that it only
| generates valid/type-safe suggestions.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem
| with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI.
| They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their
| models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies
| can overcome that
|
| have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-
| developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from
| their ecosystem. Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow
| managing to turn around public opinion about them, it's an all
| timer
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I hope that Copilot X will be brought to other IDEs as well,
| not just Visual Studio [Code].
| rvz wrote:
| Here we go again with the editor lock in as precisely
| predicted. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685104
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I like how you probably spent more time looking up your
| multiple-year-old comment that could have instead been used
| to make sure that you're not sounding like a fool that
| doesn't know what he's talking about.
|
| They have already committed to releasing it to all editors
| Copilot supports. So, you know, the exact opposite of
| editor lock in.
| rvz wrote:
| > I like how you probably spent more time looking up your
| multiple-year-old comment that could have instead been
| used to make sure that you're not sounding like a fool
| that doesn't know what he's talking about.
|
| It took seconds and it is still true and evergreen to
| this day. Thanks for your so called 'concern'.
|
| > They have already committed to releasing it to all
| editors Copilot supports. So, you know, the exact
| opposite of editor lock in.
|
| They are more 'Committed' to supporting VS Code than
| giving total feature parity to other editors. Do you
| really believe _everything_ that Microsoft / OpenAI
| feeds you?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Considering they have several third party editor logos in
| full display on their main landing page, I'm going to
| believe Microsoft and OpenAI over some random naysayer on
| the internet who didn't even bother to check.
|
| https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x
|
| What benefit would they even gain from locking it to
| their free editor? If anything, VS Code is a way for
| Microsoft to push other services _like_ Copilot. The
| strategy has been and continues to be to bring these
| services to where the developer is.
| rvz wrote:
| So there is 100% feature parity then for all other
| editors other than VS Code then? YES or NO?
|
| As I said before, _" They are more 'Committed' to
| supporting VS Code than giving total feature parity to
| other editors."_
|
| Sticking a bunch of logos with no guarantee of 100%
| feature parity as seen in VS Code is _exactly_ what lock-
| in is.
|
| > If anything, VS Code is a way for Microsoft to push
| other services like Copilot. The strategy has been and
| continues to be to bring these services to where the
| developer is.
|
| Re-centralizing _everything_ and owning the entire
| developer ecosystem to MS / GitHub. What could possibly
| go wrong? /s
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > So there is 100% feature parity then for all other
| editors other than VS Code then? YES or NO?
|
| Yes. If you had taken the time it took to look up your
| comment to actually do something productive like looking
| this up, you'd have probably found it yourself. Yet, here
| we are.
|
| Copilot fully supports JetBrains and NeoVim alongside
| Code and VS:
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/getting-started-with-
| gith...
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/getting-started-with-
| gith...
|
| In fact JetBrains is listed before VS proper in the
| getting started guides:
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/copilot
|
| Sounds _totally_ like a place that "is more committed to
| supporting VS Code than giving total feature parity to
| other editors".
|
| > Re-centralizing everything and owning the entire
| developer ecosystem to MS / GitHub. What could possibly
| go wrong? /s
|
| How, exactly, is providing Jetbrains and Neovim support
| "re-centralizing everything"?
|
| Next time, do the most bare minimum of research before
| you double then triple down on an absurd argument not
| based in reality.
| klibertp wrote:
| > How, exactly, is providing Jetbrains and Neovim support
| "re-centralizing everything"?
|
| Bait and switch. If it's good enough that Neovim users
| can't live without it, pulling the plug from Neovim
| support will result in some subset of users converting to
| VS Code. Probably won't play out this way with Jetbrains,
| but editors with smaller following and nobody backing
| them will most likely suffer this fate. It's happening
| all the time, most notably with Google products. Google
| Talk that used XMPP was neat and I switched to it because
| I could use Pidgin to contact most of my contacts. Not
| only Google Talk stopped supporting the standard, it even
| died and was reborn as something else I think 3 or 4
| times by now. Of course, my contacts stayed with Google,
| so I had to leave Pidgin behind. It's going to be similar
| here, though to what extent I'm not sure, maybe it won't
| be very noticeable, or maybe it will. We'll see.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| That's all fair, but that's not even remotely what their
| argument was.
|
| Their entire point is that Microsoft is re-centralizing
| everything by forcing people onto VS Code. Which is
| something they're... just not doing.
|
| This is also an optional, paid tool to help when coding.
| The comparison to Google Talk is IMO not relevant. It's
| never going to be "good enough that someone won't be able
| to live without it" because it's at its core a completely
| optional tool.
|
| If Copilot for NeoVim goes away in 5 years, you can
| just... stop using it. It's not like we haven't developed
| things without Copilot for decades now.
| efields wrote:
| The sublime plugin for Copilot works well enough already. I'm
| sure Copilot X will be something you can fold into any
| editor. I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate
| the UX lag in VSCode
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Try disabling all extensions.
|
| I know there are startup metrics, and I would expect there
| are keystroke metrics to understand what's running
| epolanski wrote:
| Maybe they have a better machine than you so they don't
| notice it.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| My dev machine is sufficiently beefy (32G of RAM). I
| recently tried https://lapce.dev/ and was very surprised
| that it was noticeably more snappy than VSC. (I am not
| super sensitive to that kind of thing after years spent
| in Eclipse/IDEA.).
|
| Made me realize how I can just become accustomed to a
| certain amount of lagging....
| pzo wrote:
| I recently tried lapce on my Mac and just empty editor
| with just one new tab was eating 70% of my CPU. I'd
| better IDE eat 1-2GB of ram than eat my CPU cycles. Also
| on their github lapce has more than 50% of open issues
| labeled as C-Bug - that's not very reassuring
| joshmanders wrote:
| > I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the
| UX lag in VSCode
|
| A lot of us don't experience any issues. To me, VSCode is
| just as performant as Sublime is.
| eitland wrote:
| I guess what you experience is how I experience 1 px
| misalignment and similar things that some people always
| complain about in KDE:
|
| I don't notice it at all.
|
| Modern software that doesn't react _immediately_ even
| when running on even more modern hardware however, that
| grinds my gears.
| acedTrex wrote:
| VSCode never has any lag for me personally
| norman784 wrote:
| Seems that you didn't bother checked their site before
| commenting. Check it out here[0], but TLDR: they have VS, VS
| code, Jetbrains and NeoVim logos in there.
|
| [0] https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x
| Version467 wrote:
| The page you linked only shows those logos in a block that
| specifically talks about Copilot, not Copilot X, so I don't
| see how this implies that Copilot X will come to those
| platforms as well.
|
| (I expect implementations for those platforms to show up
| eventually, I just don't think the logos on that page are
| evidence for that.)
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The blog post we're talking about says specifically:
|
| "We are bringing a chat interface to the editor that's
| focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with
| VS Code and Visual Studio."
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I don't know about jetbrains, but the neovim plug-in is not
| full featured like the vscode one. For example, it doesn't
| have the "explain this code" feature. The repo also does
| not allow issues or PR's so you can't even ask for it to
| have feature parity. I am a paying GitHub copilot user with
| the neovim plugin (in Emacs), but I find this second-class
| treatment frustrating. I expect copilot X to be more of the
| same, since it is even more deeply integrated into vscode.
| highwaylights wrote:
| They've already committed to bringing it to other platforms
| where Copilot is currently (JetBrains IDE's for example).
| mwilsonthomas wrote:
| Hey Mike: see this post for info about Copilot chat in Visual
| Studio 2022!
|
| https://aka.ms/GHCopilotchatVS
|
| Hope that helps
|
| Cheers Mark Wilson-Thomas Program Manager, Copilot chat for
| Visual Studio
| _the_inflator wrote:
| MS was smart enough to use the existing brands to somewhat
| whitewash their previously not so well perceived reputation in
| the developer community.
|
| I guess some folks at Google will regret not buying Github. On
| the other hand, Google is in my opinion not the best choice in
| regards to product development and integration. Their business
| model centers around ads, while Microsoft has the better stance
| here with a subscription model.
| ilovetux wrote:
| > have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-
| developer Microsoft used to be
|
| Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-
| developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in
| my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their
| developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-
| class.
|
| I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly
| hostile to open source, but I don't think it's fair to say they
| have been anti-developer.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Is there anyone doing more for open source today? I hear you,
| but it's clear they've changed that tune dramatically.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| By monetising OSS and sidestepping copyleft licenses to
| suggest you the same code repackaged as part of proprietary
| autocomplete for which you pay MS and not original authors?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| What do you mean by that?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Yeah, that's totally what they did when they open sourced
| ts, .net, vscode, wsl, powershell, playwright, fluent UI,
| windows terminal, blazor, dapr...
|
| It's also clear you don't understand LLM or how anything
| is working under the hood when it comes to AI. I'd use a
| throwaway account too if I was talking such nonsense.
| erikstarck wrote:
| "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
|
| He wasn't kidding.
| oefrha wrote:
| Brings back the fond memories of Ballmer and his sweaty
| shirt.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against
| scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with
| wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much
| as possible for admins and devs.
|
| Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of
| this, just more dev-friendly.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Being a developer isn't the same as being a command line
| user.
|
| Most Windows users prefer GUI over the command line.
|
| That being said, Microsoft released PowerShell, Windows
| Terminal and lots of command line tools. A large part of
| the Windows administration can be done trough command line
| if one so desires.
| klibertp wrote:
| Yeah, but then they made PowerShell, which was at the time
| seriously the most advanced shell and shell scripting
| language out there. PS got pretty mixed reactions because
| it was different than BASH, but the idea of typed pipes of
| objects instead of one-size-fits-all streams of lines of
| text was (and still is) powerful. (The syntax could be a
| little less verbose though)
| bradford wrote:
| > Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and
| against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable,
| with wizards and s*,
|
| I'd categorize this as incompetence, not malice towards
| developers.
|
| Specifically: Microsoft thought that code-creation wizards
| and UI would offer a better story than command line and
| text. Those attempts were misguided, and MS adjusted. The
| command line culture at MS has been pervasive for a long
| time, despite the quirkiness of DOS, so I must object to
| your categorization of MS being anti command-line and anti-
| scripting.
|
| [disclaimer, MS employee, my opinion only.]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the economic contracts offered to developers by Microsoft
| were very different than in other development ecosystems.
| Microsoft always represented a different economic culture
| than many others, developers chose their allies based on
| multiple criteria.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| At this point, it seems MS has almost as many years of being
| neutral-supportive of FOSS as they have of being against it.
| lancesells wrote:
| Many people paid to host their code at Github to only then
| have it sold back to them and others in the form of Copilot.
|
| IMO that's very anti-developer.
| vincentkriek wrote:
| That is not anti-developer, but definitely anti-opensource.
| As a developer I dont really care my code is used to make
| copilot better and sold in that way.
| bhj wrote:
| You should care if your code's license is being violated
| by being reproduced without attribution. Undermining
| OSS's licenses can ultimately weaken it, and the cynic in
| me suspects MS is fully aware of this.
| cornholio wrote:
| There is some nuance here. Microsoft executed "commoditize
| your complement" to perfection - the complements to their OS
| being PC hardware and applications.
|
| This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast
| array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally
| good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low
| in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for
| these commoditized and neutered competitors - "ISVs".
| Basically, Microsoft owned the OS and the major applications
| like office & enterprise software, media, browser etc. and
| everything else was supplied by an ISV, for example your
| accounting software for country XYZ, a market where MS had no
| interest in entering.
|
| As long as you kept within the ISV playground, MS was
| developer friendly, but it would turn very hostile to any
| perceived competitor to their core assets. Undocumented APIs,
| monopoly abuse, dark patterns, the entire circus. This
| strategy made the PC market impenetrable for nearly two
| decades, and it was only through sheer luck and complacency
| that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the
| mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot.
|
| Windows Phone wasn't bad and I wish we could have more
| competition in mobile space.
| cornholio wrote:
| I wish we could have open platforms that competitive
| players can extend and develop without owning outright
| and excluding other competitors.
|
| It's the great next step in regulating monopolies,
| contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the
| marketplace but must always interoperate with existing
| infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech
| competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some
| first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto
| standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its
| dominance and undeserved rent extraction.
|
| The situation is complicated by the nature of
| international trade vs local regulations, it might not be
| good for your national consumers to be fleeced by a
| platform monopoly, but you more than make up for it if
| your national tech champions achieve world-dominance.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > I wish we could have open platforms that competitive
| players can extend and develop without owning outright
| and excluding other competitors.
|
| Who will pay for the development of those platforms? Who
| will ensure the compatibility with hardware?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > The last decades of tech competition were a repetition
| of this basic tune, some first mover more or less
| stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like
| hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent
| extraction.
|
| Isn't that true for every industry?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Microsoft is far more open than it used to be. It's not simply
| marketing.
| kmlx wrote:
| this just tells me it's only a matter of time before they will
| be forced to split.
|
| windows, office, xbox, devices, github, azure, zenimax,
| activision blizzard and so many others i'm forgetting.
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| Does anyone have a prediction for how this translates into
| Microsoft's bottom line? I'd imagine it is mostly increased
| Azure sales with a few Visual Studio licenses.
| epolanski wrote:
| Bingo, exactly what I'm thinking.
|
| Sure, they get more developers to use their software, but to
| how much money does that translate considering the tens of
| billions they have spent?
|
| Not sure how does that helps Azure by the way. It helps GH
| more than anything.
| toyg wrote:
| Azure/subscription sales is what they care about anyway.
| Everything else is a commodity.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| I could see them selling an absurdly expensive enterprise on-
| prem copilot that is tuned for a company's codebase and able
| to be customized to some extent. If they can show how much it
| improves productivity it would be an easy sell. Plus tightly
| integrate everything with Azure like you said
|
| Bill Gates was also talking about company AI's that "attend
| every meeting" and are involved even in non-technical areas
| via Office. Microsoft seems all in on this
| Vespasian wrote:
| They have some great products in there (probably) but most
| likely they expect some of their attempts to fail (it's to
| be expected).
|
| It's a "bet the retirement fund but not the farm" situation
| where they invest a lot of money to see what stick.
|
| They are in a great position to do that and burning a few
| millions in the process might be worth it.
| piokoch wrote:
| Who will verify that those data are correct? What if majority
| of the code sucks, what if majority code uses "best practices"
| that are no longer valid - think of many GoF Java "patterns"
| that are now considered to be code smell?
|
| AI will not invent anything, it will effectively reproduce
| mistakes made by others.
|
| The process of code writing is such a small part of the whole
| IT project, that shortening of time spent on writing code does
| not matter in practice.
| nixarn wrote:
| Have you tried co-pilot? I don't want to code without it.
| Saves so much time and produces good results, instead of
| searching for answers online, which isn't easy as you get
| into ad filled sites, find shitty Stack Overflow answers and
| webpages with outdated docs and examples.
|
| Two examples from this week. Formatting dates in javascript,
| I had a datetime string and I wanted to show it as YY-MM-DD
| HH:MM for our internal tool. I don't know by heart exactly
| what to in this case although it's far from rocket science,
| so now I could write a comment what I wanted done and copilot
| coded it for me.
|
| Same when I wanted a request to become a file download for
| the user, not something I've done many times before, and I
| could kinda reason that it probably needs the header to be
| set to something. And googling for this didn't give good
| results, yo need the right language, framework etc. With
| copilot I just wrote the comment // return file as download,
| and co-pilot wrote the code to set the header and send the
| bytes. Amazing!
| taormina wrote:
| So it set some headers. Did it pick the right headers? Did
| it know what headers the recipient was expecting?
| chatmasta wrote:
| > Have you tried co-pilot?
|
| I wanted to try co-pilot, but noped out when I saw it
| required a subscription. I thought it was in some kind of
| beta and would still be free. Is there a way to try it
| without signing up for a subscription?
|
| My general worry is about becoming personally dependent on
| a paid tool just to do basic programming work.
| pantulis wrote:
| Your worry is going to become obsolete pronto, just like
| you are not worried about depending on a paid CPU to
| perform basic computations. The meaning of "basic
| programming work" will be redefined by these tools.
|
| The entry barrier of the subscription is a shame, that's
| for sure. But before open models are avilable, the field
| is proprietary today: we are going to witness a battle of
| AIs that will be as bloody as the Unix Wars of lore.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I suspect you're right, and I'm generally optimistic
| about this future efficiency. But it doesn't make me any
| less of a cheapskate :)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I still want to know if MS lets, say, Windows or MS
| Office developers use it. If not, they must consider it
| too risky from a copyright standpoint, which means so do
| I.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > . Is there a way to try it without signing up for a
| subscription?
|
| Yes, you can sign on the wait list and get 2 months free
| trial.
| tootie wrote:
| I'm a fanboy of heavy IDEs with big fat debuggers like
| JetBrains tools. It's ironic that Microsoft who used to
| dominate that niche, is now dominating with a glorified text
| editor.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There are still lots of people using Visual Studio.
| btbuildem wrote:
| > Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow managing to turn
| around public opinion about them, it's an all timer
|
| To be fair, it's been almost two decades. I feel like since
| Ballmer's departure, MS began to turn things around.
| soiler wrote:
| > have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-
| developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from
| their ecosystem
|
| I mean, any company can become hostile to a large portion of
| its userbase. Most are. Microsoft already is with Windows OS
| being spyware. Are you saying that you think all of this is a
| trap to bring developers in to VSCode etc. and then transform
| it into a terrible experience? People will leave then. SWEs are
| not generally an audience that is unwilling to replace bad
| tools.
| boppo1 wrote:
| If I'm using VS Code, am I opting in to sharing my code as
| training data?
| brundolf wrote:
| Public companies aren't people. It doesn't make sense to trust
| them, but it also doesn't make sense to hold a grudge against
| them. They act in a way that fits the moment. Right now,
| Microsoft seems to be in a "build good tools" moment. If they
| get too dominant they could re-enter an "abuse power" moment.
| But that would be because it's what they think is in their best
| interest, not because "Microsoft is [uniquely] untrustworthy"
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep. But also this kind of essentialist thinking doesn't work
| for people, either, so :-) Nobody is just one thing or
| another. And neither are companies. They act on various
| levers, in response to various interests, and it's about
| looking at the tendencies and patterns. Holding grudges
| against people makes little sense, either.
| brundolf wrote:
| Fair, although even on a sliding-scale I think trust
| mechanisms are less-inaccurate when it comes to a single
| person (who can change, but usually in gradual/limited
| ways) vs a company (which is a revolving door of thousands
| of people who come and go over the decades)
| chatmasta wrote:
| That may be true, but for many of Microsoft's flagship open
| source projects, it is very much about the people. For
| example, TypeScript has been created and maintained by a
| relatively stable team of highly proficient developers who
| have become the face of the project and in many ways the
| driving force behind its success.
|
| It's important that Microsoft backed them, because it
| provides a stable environment for the developers to keep
| working on the project and gives confidence to the community
| that it's a stable language to adopt. But fundamentally it's
| the people who are important.
|
| In recent years, Microsoft has shown there can be real upside
| to corporate-driven open source, especially when it has
| proper buy-in from management and usage throughout the
| organization (e.g. VSCode is developed in relative lockstep
| with TypeScript, and both projects benefit from that
| relationship).
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer
| ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with
| OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to
| optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI
| focused companies can overcome that
|
| Other companies can focus on other areas where AI can be used.
| There's room for everybody.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-
| developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from
| their ecosystem.
|
| At a certain point you may find that you've got your hand so
| far in the Microsoft cookie jar that it would make more sense
| to just accept that you are a MS shop and go for the rest of
| the cookies as shamelessly as possible.
|
| We've embraced our fate. Almost everything is Microsoft branded
| in our workplace now.
|
| It's really easy to hate on Microsoft through the lens of
| programming tooling and other nerd abstractions. It's super
| hard to hate on them from the perspective of IT administrators
| and business owners wanting to enjoy their weekends. [Azure]
| Active Directory and the modern Windows/Office suite are a
| competitive advantage for enjoying your free time. I have never
| seen a better overall experience for managing a small startup.
| fossuser wrote:
| Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon
| Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don't have a
| horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they're a scary
| force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they
| are again.
|
| There's a massive paradigm shift we're just at the beginning of
| and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last
| couple of years. Nadella has really turned things around for
| them.
|
| Google and meta are scrambling.
|
| Things should get interesting.
| bredren wrote:
| If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a
| wee bit caught out as well.
|
| I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other
| advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will
| propel it to forefront.
| endtime wrote:
| I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa
| or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different,
| since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with
| those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard
| part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as
| extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect
| their ability to use their users' data to train models.
|
| It'll be interesting to see, anyway.
| listless wrote:
| I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this
| point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into
| the net.
|
| Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI.
| Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a
| language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate
| some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins
| because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous
| compute happens - which is likely in Azure.
| fossuser wrote:
| Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some
| extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated).
|
| Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They
| were first to market with Siri and it's still trash
| 13yrs(?!) later. It's always been what they're weakest at,
| I'm not sure LLMs will be different for them.
|
| The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform
| advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them.
|
| They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for
| "ai"
| fossuser wrote:
| Siri still sucks?
| withinboredom wrote:
| "Siri, set an alarm for 5pm eastern standard time" ...
| you get an alarm for 5pm local time, with the memo
| 'eastern standard time' (assuming aren't located in
| eastern standard time, this is not the expected
| behavior).
| shagie wrote:
| Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface
| to a few standardized interfaces that applications can
| hook into.
|
| The system provided intents (
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are
| rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the
| architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that
| easily extensible by anyone (Apple included).
|
| However, for those intents - it does quite well and most
| processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and
| that fundamentally changes the economics and capability.
| It is _much_ less expensive than Alexa to run (where
| nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also
| something that can 't do as much.
|
| Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what
| time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are
| indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples
| such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan),
| it shows that much of the work is done on the phone.
|
| This also means that its capabilities are limited to what
| you can run on the phone.
| fossuser wrote:
| That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current
| status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't
| supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to
| what they wanted.
|
| We'll see if that changes.
| shagie wrote:
| The "what they hoped" is a question of "what _who_ hoped?
| "
|
| When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and
| Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't
| designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but
| rather the intents show that it is designed for specific
| functionality of specific types of applications.
|
| Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was
| always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha
| was the choice for a while).
|
| Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice
| interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't
| trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't
| do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't
| be a surprise to Apple.
|
| Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different
| architectures with different goals and support costs.
|
| If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get
| the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a
| general "do everything and chat about it" assistant.
| What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas
| Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
| fossuser wrote:
| Just watch the introduction of the Siri product:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ
|
| "Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things
| done just by asking"
|
| I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what
| LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy
| barely functioning timer setting app it currently is.
|
| Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's
| not worth trying to use.
| shagie wrote:
| The tooling that it was designed for was things like
| https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709
|
| Those were the intents that were set up.
|
| Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that
| isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start.
| Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and
| parsed for functions to call into apps that register that
| they are able to handle that function call.
|
| If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to
| Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While
| Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot.
|
| Siri wasn't supposed to be _smart_. Siri was intended for
| an interface to the existing apps of phone, music,
| messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and
| weather.
|
| When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your
| phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and
| you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer
| setting app.
|
| What functionality in there that you see in this segment
| that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps?
| What time cue do you see them promising something smarter
| than what was designed?
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| eitland wrote:
| > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them.
| They were first to market with Siri and it's still trash
| 13yrs(?!) later.
|
| Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years
| ago:
|
| Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its
| unsolicited suggestions.
|
| Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense,
| like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a
| friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning.
|
| One single time I can remember Google actually getting a
| suggestion correct.
|
| This probably works better today than four years ago and
| maybe it always worked better if you were in a US
| timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri
| setting timers at least works and a few times a year it
| comes up with smart suggestions.
|
| (Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)
| bredren wrote:
| AI in support of user interface has been downright awful.
| IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of
| any other product at Apple.
|
| However, the company has deployed machine learning in
| support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of
| penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready
| to do gen AI at the edge.
|
| The company has focused largely on STT and image
| processing but has worked to support use of the chip for
| general ML, via transformer. [1]
|
| I'd say Apple's only failed in the way everyone did---
| failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative
| AI.
|
| Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its
| ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like
| behavior to Xcode. When will this occur?
|
| [1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-
| engine-tra...
| pantulis wrote:
| > I'd say Apple's only failed in the way everyone did---
| failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative
| AI.
|
| This is so true that now the only differentiating
| capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is
| excelling here in an unexpected way.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will
| regret that MSFT did so.
| ugh123 wrote:
| OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started
| working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So
| the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to
| scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra
| bredren wrote:
| I think apple made a choice a while back to yield
| software engineering workflows outside Swift to
| Microsoft.
|
| I had expected Apple to produce its own version of
| GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy.
|
| The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of
| press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad
| answers or questions about legality of what the models
| produce.
|
| None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its
| strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require
| expertise the company doesn't have.
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| for now, Apple is in a different league
|
| if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply
| pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will
| only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at
| the same time" and _everyone_ will comply
| DeathArrow wrote:
| And that's why I don't use their products.
| pxoe wrote:
| a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's
| kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working
| out great for them, isn't it.
|
| so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not
| even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do
| something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually".
| well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope
| for much.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > meta has a headset, and that's working out great for
| them, isn't it.
|
| A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails,
| too, we' ll see another in 20 years.
| hbn wrote:
| I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're
| gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of
| free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big
| breadwinner software is still abysmal to use.
|
| I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank
| document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds.
| Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad
| serving platform that happens to run the applications you
| need, and they still constantly break basic system functions.
| For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo
| preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and
| eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic
| functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was
| literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed
| the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear,
| jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until
| you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default,
| built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is
| so clunky and prone to breaking.
| Cipater wrote:
| It takes three seconds to cold start Word for me on an old
| (2015), underpowered (core i5, 8GB RAM, low end SSD) HP
| laptop.
| fossuser wrote:
| They're strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of
| their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good
| reason (vscode, GitHub).
|
| O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they
| crushed slack despite slack's headstart. Slack sold out to
| languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own
| that space.
|
| Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at
| iTunes on windows, it's not really representative. Even
| Windows itself isn't that important (that was one of the
| big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took
| over). You're right about edge though (which is why
| Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit).
|
| Microsoft also ships (something Google can't do very well).
| I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued
| because people have not properly updated from outdated
| historical sentiment.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > lot of their products > GitHub
|
| Yeah that one doesn't count, they've made exactly zero
| changes since acquisition and Actions still has downtime
| every few weeks.
| matwood wrote:
| > integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack
| despite slack's headstart
|
| Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is
| included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better
| at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS
| lock in most people still need office to deal with
| interop.
|
| Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with
| a free feature from a product suite most companies are
| forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they
| struggle at handling acquisitions.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is
| still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather
| join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100%
| of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will
| cook up this time to ruin your call.
|
| O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document
| creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any
| normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water
| in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted
| documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office
| (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has
| gone downhill at alarming speed.
|
| VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but
| ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in
| most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a
| convincing offer either.
|
| Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average.
| And don't even get me started on Windows itself.
| mynameisash wrote:
| A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no
| indication that offline Office is being discontinued.
|
| And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other
| online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which
| has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365.
|
| Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me.
|
| [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...
| fossuser wrote:
| It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their
| opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say
| Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's
| just not something that matters in this kind of strategic
| product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just
| a signal it's not worth engaging imo).
|
| There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs
| isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to
| compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending
| to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to
| pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're
| going to mock competition you better hope you're apple
| and not netscape [0][1].
|
| I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not
| enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive
| offering and they failed to do that.
|
| [0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/
|
| [1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-
| letter_n...
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Desktop Office apps are still available, fully supported,
| and fully functional. Office 2021 is the latest buy-once
| release, but Microsoft 365 subscribers get all the
| desktop apps with their subscription (and they get
| continuous updates). The web apps are separate and have
| their limitations. Microsoft 365 subscribers get to
| choose between the two. Non-subscribers get only the web
| version with some features removed.
| adzm wrote:
| Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have
| stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they
| turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.
| toastal wrote:
| > at least we have Discord
|
| Poe's Law?
| nicce wrote:
| Discord is yet another walled garden to be fair. It might
| be good replacement for some little, private communities.
|
| But also large communities are moving into Discord
| instead of using some public, index-able and findable
| platforms. They used to be public in the past and people
| very able to read information about them without going
| process for creating account, acceptance or even finding
| whole community.
|
| Discord is terrible for storing long term information in
| text form. People try to keep some pinned posts but no..
| information disappears, when in comparison for forums it
| was there.
|
| And let's not start with privacy.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > information disappears
|
| Wait really? I've never seen that happen on Discord, I
| can still see messages from over half a decade ago. Why
| would they delete data they mine?
|
| Slack on the other hand deletes everything immediately if
| you're not on the paid plan of course.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think it's more about salesforce, I have a pretty
| negative opinion about them and everything they acquire
| seems to limp along or die (and the good employees leave
| immediately) - just seems like a boring place to be (nice
| sky scraper though).
|
| Microsoft has a better track record with acquisitions.
| eloisius wrote:
| Salesforce wastes all their effort on new acquisitions
| making business-driven decisions like "add Einstein to
| it!" or "integrate it with the Lightning Experience
| (TM)!" instead of doing anything remotely useful to pre-
| acquisition customers. Once it's adequately diced up,
| they can add it as another line-item to renewals who
| already pay so much money to salesforce that they don't
| care.
| jackosdev wrote:
| vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than
| all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of
| features they pump out month to month is outstanding,
| just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why
| they put so much effort into a free product that I run
| from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot
| subscription so it all makes sense now.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| better than PyCharm for python?
| OOPMan wrote:
| Nope, but VsCode addicts are usually too cheap to try a
| paid-for tool like PyCharm
| snotrockets wrote:
| There's a free, open source, community edition, which
| provides most of the functionality
| bombela wrote:
| It's free and electron because they can run it in a web
| browser, running everything on MS Azure. With code on
| GitHub and CI on GitHub etc etc. The whole dev experience
| offered to companies as a service via a series of web
| applications. Companies will love this.
|
| Just get any web browser, preferably Microsoft Edge on a
| Microsoft Window Pro on a Microsoft Surface laptop. Open
| Microsoft GitHub workspace. To dev for your Microsoft
| Azure hosted Linux VM. Run the CI on GitHub. Use
| Microsoft O365 for your design doc. And Microsoft Team
| for communication.
|
| Poor little Linux in the middle.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You honestly had me do a double take. Copilot costs
| money? Maybe I get it through some other thing, but its
| been free for me as long as I can remember. It's wrong so
| often that I generally keep it on because it's
| entertaining. I wouldn't pay for it.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| You might be thinking of IntelliCode, which was released
| in 2019.
| https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/
| withinboredom wrote:
| No, I use in PHPStorm as a plug-in.
| infinityio wrote:
| I think copilot is free in the education pack - you might
| have got it from there?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Looks like I get it through my organization.
| bitwize wrote:
| You're complaining about 15 seconds? I can remember the
| Windows 3.x days when it took _minutes_ to warm Word up.
| computerex wrote:
| No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If
| it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete
| monopoly on AI.
| passion__desire wrote:
| As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy
| Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the
| same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was
| scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal
| competitive moments
| letsdothisagain wrote:
| Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't
| ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all
| companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc.
| airstrike wrote:
| Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't
| live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse
| daydream wrote:
| > When Microsoft executes well, they're a scary force. They
| were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are
| again.
|
| I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how
| much they left on the table during this very same time.
| Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing
| read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well
| as how much they got right.
|
| MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership
| and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves
| right now. Google in particular should be very afraid.
|
| [1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth
| reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be
| afraid?
|
| There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS
| is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like
| MS can.
|
| If anything, this is where they should both be afraid
| because an upstart with a browser extension could replace
| them.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right
| now_
|
| Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition.
| They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS
| and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft,
| including their XBox division.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > That said, except for OS and Browsers
|
| Windows is not negligible.
| siva7 wrote:
| Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price
| tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs
| potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts
| best acquisition in the last two decades.
| neom wrote:
| Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke
| when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full
| circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is
| back on top.
| dathinab wrote:
| - lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store,
| probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a
| lock down on macOS
|
| - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop
| Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could
| just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not
| anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers
|
| - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games
| and only through the Windows app store
|
| - maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well
|
| - probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the
| sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants
| (like gmail)"
|
| - probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not
| work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it
| hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux
| system
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux
| taking over the desktop?
| dathinab wrote:
| It never was about emotional things like being scared.
|
| It's about eliminating competition and especially
| preventing potential future competition, it's about
| maximizing control and power to the most you can without
| losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost
| consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and
| future prospect.
|
| Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of
| "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With
| a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which
| is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for
| Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely
| calculative perspective.
|
| And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in
| context of how currently most Linux desktops are but
| prospect anyway.
|
| I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges:
|
| - like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of
| components and users, often with a lot of more emotional
| then technical opinions
|
| - much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies
| which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not
| focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat,
| Valve))
|
| - a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all
| decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing
| things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not
| be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental"
| improvements and maintenance.)
|
| but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite
| usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then
| Windows. The main problem is normally not missing
| functionality or hardware support but fragmentation.
| Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a
| software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack
| and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources,
| fragmentation making system management/hardware support
| harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too
| much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop
| Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is
| small).
|
| But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop
| Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions
| _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly
| successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible,
| hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Microsoft already owns the desktop and I don't think they
| consider Linux a threat.
|
| macOS would be a a better contender but I don't think
| they consider that a threat, also.
|
| In fact, Windows is starting to weigh less and less in
| overall Microsoft strategy. Windows mattered when all we
| had were desktops but now they have lots of cows they are
| milking.
|
| I won't be surprised if in the future Microsoft will find
| that it isn't worth to pay for the development of Windows
| and will release it's own Linux distribution. It would be
| quite a disappointment for me, but certainly possible.
|
| > but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is
| quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then
| Windows.
|
| I've tried since 23 years ago to use Linux as a desktop
| but it failed repeatedly. I even have it installed on a
| separate disk on my home PC but I seldom boot it.
| boringuser1 wrote:
| [dead]
| dathinab wrote:
| > There's a massive paradigm shift we're just at the
| beginning of and Microsoft
|
| yes, but I hope people don't thing embrace, extend,
| extinguish is dead, it isn't
| mattferderer wrote:
| Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued
| that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than
| Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also
| very active with the company during those years as well.
|
| Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting
| to crush it & make it dissolve.
|
| Nadella inherited an underdog.
|
| I think this should be considered when thinking about the
| legacy of the CEO.
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer.
|
| - Massive miss on mobile
|
| - Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows
|
| - Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with
| windows for same reason
|
| https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
|
| > "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services,
| Not Devices that argued that Ballmer's strategic priorities
| were exactly backwards: Microsoft's services should be
| businesses in their own right, not Windows'
| differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his
| memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft's dysfunction
| that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that
| allegedly played a large role in his ouster."
|
| I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad
| strategy and things only started getting better when he was
| finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the
| previous decade's decisions caused them to become one.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in
| windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux
| distribution that runs legacy windows software within
| containers :D
| withinboredom wrote:
| If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that
| shenanigans[1] aren't required.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year
| remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep,
| command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will
| eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird
| workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a
| github case 2-3 years old
| wankle wrote:
| I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux,
| and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10
| in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user
| tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with
| Microsoft.
| dathinab wrote:
| or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying
| out linux distributions in the past
|
| like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs
| which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many
| try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them
| can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for
| Linux servers etc.
|
| Basically they have accepted that windows server have
| failed and their server license business model isn't that
| good anymore too due to how the cloud changed things. So
| instead of pushing for a Windows everywhere ecosystem they
| now embrace Linux on servers (preferable on Azure ;) ) and
| Windows on the desktop using WSL to bridge the dev
| experience and also bridge to university student use case.
|
| But you can be sure that if they see a way to make it
| harder to install Linux on systems and get away with it
| both legal wise and PR wise (probably using some excuses
| about "security") you can be sure they will do so.
| Especially if they can push the blame onto others (like the
| hardware vendors not implementing some option in the BIOS
| which is needed to allow other OSes to be installed).
| Through at least for now I expect them to act careful to
| not damage their new image.
|
| Also one way the failed the "Windows desktop" thing is by
| producing a pretty bad out of the box desktop experience
| for many people (like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if
| there is even a single AD in there, or bloat ware). This
| create reasons for people to switch to Linux which had been
| much less common during windows 7 days.
| fossuser wrote:
| I use macOS in large part because its a *nix OS under the
| hood.
|
| WSL gives a lot of that power to Windows.
| dathinab wrote:
| macOS is tempting but it's a pretty bad nix IMHO.
|
| The amount of times I had to change ad-hoc scripts to
| work around macOS limitations is absurd.
| fesc wrote:
| Except it isn't, so e.g. running containers still need a
| VM.
|
| I wish macOS had something like WSL built-in.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers
| etc.
|
| I develop for Linux but I use WSL only indirectly through
| Docker Desktop.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if there is even
| a single AD in there
|
| I can't remember last time I paid for Windows. Microsoft
| usually offers free upgrades.
|
| I haven't seen any ad on Windows. I frankly find hard to
| believe there are ads in Windows.
| ashes-of-sol wrote:
| [dead]
| ipaddr wrote:
| Sounds like you are on an older version of windows or
| maybe you disabled them in a drunk rage.
| dathinab wrote:
| > I can't remember last time I paid for Windows.
|
| Every time you buy a new Laptop or pre-build computer
| with Windows installed you (very likely) implicitly
| bought a license.
|
| But I agree that due to Windows handing out a lot of
| "free upgrades" even outside of their official supported
| upgrade path they missed out on a lot of License cost,
| but made more users upgrade so probably worth it.
|
| Most important Microsoft mainly cares about Businesses
| buying Pro versions of licenses, potential in huge
| batches.
|
| > ... disabled ads ... [from other adjacent comment]
|
| Or uses a pi-hole or a software which disables them for
| you but which you might have installed to e.g. set
| privacy settings or replaced components with 3rd party
| ones or that LTT Linus ability to subconscious filter out
| ads. What matters is that there are a lot of people which
| have had the AD experience.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together
| recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't
| use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as
| a business.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Reminds me of the IE days
| knodi123 wrote:
| half our team is really entrenched with jetbrains. but aside
| from a couple of curmudgeons who are formally married to vim, I
| think VSCode and JetBrains has pretty much sewed up the market.
| mempko wrote:
| Listen, if I divorce vim, it will take half my stuff.
| airstrike wrote:
| How about using vim mode in VS Code or is that like being
| in an open relationship?
| notpachet wrote:
| It's more like marrying a sex doll.
| eterps wrote:
| It sure looks like they're setting themselves up to (again) be
| in a position where no one can get around them.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| The irony of this comment is absolutely wonderful.
| rvz wrote:
| Some people and developers here just never learn from history
| rhyming with itself. [0] [1]
|
| Another bunch of startups destroyed by this announcement.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28324999
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685104
| pongo1231 wrote:
| Aren't lock-ins into their own respective ecosystem what
| every tech giant is striving for? Don't see how that behavior
| is Microsoft-exclusive necessarily.
| bredren wrote:
| The waiting list signup does not allow you to pick Pycharm,
| which previously has had a GitHub copilot plug-in.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Funniest thing for me is how Ms has been left out of the FAANG
| acronym for all these years, as if they somehow haven't been
| relevant in the developer ecosystem for the past 10 or so
| years.
| tarruda wrote:
| When you use copilot integrated in the editor, does microsoft
| collect all source code data on your project or only context
| used to perform the completions?
| jghn wrote:
| Concern over this is the #1 reason I have not yet tried to
| use Copilot. For my hobby projects I don't care enough to pay
| for it. And if it's phoning home proprietary code, I can't
| allow that to happen.
| programmarchy wrote:
| It's worth it even for hobby projects, imo. It reduces the
| time spent on mundane tasks and allows you to think at a
| higher level and just move faster. Maybe you achieve a
| level of zen from implementing utility level code, similar
| to how some people might still write assembly code, but
| otherwise it's a valuable tool/skill to learn.
|
| Tangentially, I think there's some fear associated with
| adopting AI tools, perhaps because developers feel like
| their skill sets are being displaced. And they are but
| there's headroom e.g. assembly programmers learned C. There
| seems to be some post-hoc rationalizations being put forth
| to avoid that fear, but my sense is that developers who
| don't cultivate this new skill set will fall behind.
| discreteevent wrote:
| > my sense is that developers who don't cultivate this
| new skill set will fall behind
|
| That might be true but it's an easy skillset to pick up
| compared to programming. The bigger danger is that new
| developers will lean on AI so much that they do not pick
| up the fundamentals of programming in which case they
| will definitely be left behind.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| Many, probably. However, the curious types will likely be
| further enhanced by AI. I've never been one to take code
| at face value, and I have been enjoying sessions with
| ChatGPT asking all sorts of questions about some of the
| stuff it produces. The answer is usually sufficient, and
| in cases where it's not, I've been given enough
| background context to know where to find the answer
| online or in books.
|
| Honestly, I've seen myself master many more additional
| things since I've started including it in my daily
| routine.
| blibble wrote:
| the result of this will be similar to hiring infosys
|
| hundreds of thousands of lines of buggy incomprehensible
| boilerplate that doesn't work on anything but the easy
| cases
|
| then you have to rip the entire thing apart and start
| again with people that know what they're doing
| Vespasian wrote:
| I'm being reminded of a close friend of mine who is a car
| mechanic. In recent years the fraction of BEV and PHEV
| among new cars has risen to ~20% which absolutely will
| influence his job and will require new skills of a
| different kind.
|
| Yet, despite the obvious evidence, he is unwillingly to
| even acknowledge the possibility that this is happening
| and refuses to research what it could mean to him (which
| may be very little).
|
| I never quite understood why. Certainly just keeping in
| touch with the world wouldn't hurt right?
|
| With the rise of AI, I think I get it. There's a part of
| me that is scared to shit about the prospect of being
| made redundant in the near future with all my acquired
| skill being worthless in this new world. The temptation
| to put my head into the sand and hope it "blows" over is
| strong.
|
| I've resigned myself to never become like my friend and
| consequently have recently shelled out for a year of
| Copilot. My thinking is that at worst it's 100EUR wasted
| and at best I'm not blindsided by what is coming anyway.
|
| The reality will probably fall somewhere on a middle
| ground where there are still jobs to be found.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Can you describe how you use it? I struggle to imagine
| how it would even be done. Ie do you write prompts? Just
| code as normal but frequently hit a "copilot" button? etc
|
| Though i do wonder if it'll improve my ability to read
| code. PRs are a pain because i find it easier to write
| than read. I'd pay for Copilot in a heartbeat if it was
| good at spotting PR errors/etc.
| nicky0 wrote:
| Just type your code in the editor. And it offers auto
| complete suggestions. Sometimes it will complete the
| entire function based on the function name or a comment.
| Sometimes it'll just guess the function you want to
| write, without you typing anything at all. (Turns out a
| lot of code is rather predictable).
|
| By experience though it's best to go line by line rather
| than accepting whole function autcompletes.
|
| For me, I found incredibly useful for generating test
| cases. It will type out test functions for various
| conditions, stuff that is normal really tedious to code.
|
| Sometimes is eerie, how how well it knows exactly what
| next line should be. Countless times it filled in an
| important detail that I hadn't thought of.
|
| It's not perfect at all, sometimes it goes off on
| tangents or writes incorrect code.
|
| I don't think you even have to pay for copilot. At least
| it's free for me.
| Vespasian wrote:
| They have a limited trial or company memberships afaik.
|
| It costs 10$/month 100$/year for individual users.
| nicky0 wrote:
| ~~That's weird because I don't pay anything.~~
|
| EDIT: GitHub Copilot is free to use for verified
| students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open
| source projects
| toastal wrote:
| The Adobe model of letting students and schools train on
| it and then demand employers buy the subscription when
| the graduate.
| madisp wrote:
| I use GitHub so not really a concern for me, they have my
| code already.
| mplanchard wrote:
| IIRC they didn't train on private repos though, so using
| copilot in a private (github) repo will potentially open
| up your proprietary code to being used in that way.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| No, the model doesn't train on your private code (which
| is good but also somewhat limiting as in my experience it
| doesn't provide useful answers that are very specific to
| your codebase); it's good for generic code though and
| saves time looking stuff up.
| vintermann wrote:
| Eh, as long as my employers don't care (they don't), I
| don't care. I have no illusions that my code/our code will
| give Microsoft any valuable training data it couldn't
| trivially get elsewhere.
| jghn wrote:
| Mine does, and therein lies my issue.
| 2gremlin181 wrote:
| IMO Copilot for Business has a very reasonable data
| collection policy. They discard any code snippets once
| the suggestion is returned.
|
| https://github.com/features/copilot
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| If that's the case, would co-pilot be useful anyway? Or
| are you off the range where suggestions wont help?
| jghn wrote:
| In theory there are no rules about importing code, beyond
| the usual licensing issues. But people use SO and such
| all of the time, right? If one *really* wanted to do a
| global audit of improperly imported code, we'd all have
| bigger problems. So from that perspective it's status
| quo.
|
| But I don't want to be the person caught uploading
| proprietary code to another company's servers.
|
| It's not a major issue, and I doubt it'd ever be a
| practical problem. But fear of punishment keeps me away.
| mlboss wrote:
| You can always use https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen
| . But it does require managing the model hosting. You can
| use fauxpilot to mimic copilot functionality
| https://github.com/fauxpilot/fauxpilot
| meesles wrote:
| According to my subscribing and testing it out with the
| Sublime extension, you get to decide whether your code gets
| piped up into their model.
|
| Not that I've verified it by monitoring network calls.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| Same is true if you use `git push` in which case all the code
| is transferred through the wire and is collected by GitHub
| which may or may not be desirable.
| airstrike wrote:
| git != GitHub
| folkrav wrote:
| I think OP's point was that GitHub=Microsoft, so you're
| effectively sending your code to Microsoft in one way or
| another. Although the licensing/privacy policies are
| probably different for private repositories.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| When you sign up for CoPilot, there's a settings section on
| Github for it. One option you can toggle is "Allow GitHub to
| use my code snippets for product improvements *".
|
| Context still needs to be processed, so surrounding line,
| block, and a couple open tabs gets piped into the prompt.
|
| And here's a quote from the privacy page.
|
| > Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub
| Copilot may also collect and retain the following,
| collectively referred to as "code snippets": source code that
| you are editing, related files and other files open in the
| same IDE or editor, URLs of repositories and files path.
| belorn wrote:
| What is the default?
| skripp wrote:
| To share. But it's a very obvious check-box.
| ThorsBane wrote:
| [dead]
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| I can't help but think that these new Copilot offerings, when
| fully implemented in 2-3 years or so, make project managers /
| program managers / release managers obsolete.
| erdaniels wrote:
| How have people been thinking about licensing and attribution
| when it comes to using AI code assistance tools like this? In my
| personal work, I'm avoiding it since being trained on "publicly
| available code from GitHub" feels too risky for me if I were to
| say accidentally pull in GPL code to a private project.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole for this reason.
| netr0ute wrote:
| That's exactly why my projects are GPL, so I don't have to
| worry about that.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Not all public code on GitHub is licensed in a GPL compatible
| way.
| _bohm wrote:
| I have been using it on a fairly large project, and in practice
| I find it rarely, if ever, spits out anything other than
| something that resembles what I would have written next
| anyways, taking context clues from the file I'm editing.
| packetlost wrote:
| Yeah, this is my experience too. You _can_ prod it into
| generating code that exactly matches something from the
| training data, but it seems like you have to really try.
| dijit wrote:
| Someone asked me to pay for a team subscription for Copilot.
|
| As I'm CTO (and thus legally responsible for those agreements
| that you normally just click through); I read the terms of
| service, and they _do not_ actually grant license to the code.
| They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING
| SUGGESTIONS.
|
| So, as I don't want to encourage people to think that they can
| simply copy over copilot solutions I decided against buying
| access to it, even though I am quite certain it would have
| boosted developer productivity. (and goodwill, people like
| shiny!).
|
| I was also a little concerned because it is additionally the
| case that a AI is confidently incorrect sometimes, so there are
| suggestions that have subtle and hard to see bugs. I really
| don't really want to hear that a bug is caused by AI, since
| from my perspective the whole point of you being paid a
| handsome salary comparable to a doctor is because you take
| responsibility for the code you write; which is actually
| somewhat in-line with the Copilot license agreement[0]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-
| spe...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's also another risk, which is that copilot generated
| code may not be copyrightable[1]. I'm not sure how that would
| play out as part of a large codebase, but something to watch
| closely.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-
| says-so...
|
| > The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection
| depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that
| the most popular AI systems likely do not create
| copyrightable work.
| brookst wrote:
| Isn't software copyrighted as a whole, not line-by-line?
| belorn wrote:
| As the linked article describe it:
|
| _" the office said copyright protection depends on
| whether AI's contributions are "the result of mechanical
| reproduction," such as in response to text prompts, or if
| they reflect the author's "own mental conception.""_
|
| So if we take that into software development, the text
| input that the developer gave copilot may be protected
| under copyright but the output of copilot may not.
|
| If the developer arrange or modify the output, then those
| arrangements and modifications can also be protected
| under copyright.
|
| To me that means that during copyright cases there will
| be a much bigger burden on the plaintiff to prove that
| they own copyright in any specific situation, and that
| the infringement is done on those parts that is covered
| by copyright and not just the output of the copilot
| algorithm. Simply claiming authorship to all the code
| will no longer be enough.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think there's any precedent for copyright to be
| applied partially, with some of a work covered and some
| not. Are you proposing that copyright will change to be
| line-by-lien, with each one covered (or not) depending on
| how it was generated?
| belorn wrote:
| What the copyright office describe was AI generated
| images, and a book where such images was included. Those
| images can't be copyrighted, but the prompt that produced
| the images may, and the arrangement inside the book may
| also be copyrighted. People can however take out those
| images from the book and reproduce them, since those
| images themselves are not covered under copyright.
|
| So if we apply that to software development, some
| portions of the code could be copyrightable while other
| portions will not, and the arrangement of the whole thing
| can be covered under copyright.
|
| So let say you write a piece of software and I copy a
| portion of that code into my software. Is that portion
| that I copied covered under copyright? Maybe, maybe not.
| It will depend, and depending on how the legal precedence
| fall it may be up to the author to prove that they really
| are the author.
|
| If I apply this in an fictional game developer, we could
| image them ask an AI to generate the image assets for a
| wooden table. Then they ask the AI to create the 3d mesh
| of a wooden table. Then they ask the AI to write a
| function that places the table with image assets onto a
| 3d plane. Each step here would produce content that
| historically would be copyrightable independently, but
| which is not copyrightable if done through an AI. The big
| unanswered question is at what time the work becomes
| copyrightable, and what happens if someone takes assets
| and portions of that work and uses that in something
| else.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| > They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR
| TAKING SUGGESTIONS.
|
| I really hope they get reamed in court over this. When
| Microsoft's servers running Microsoft's AI transmit somebody
| else's code covered under GPL (or any other FOSS license with
| attribution, like BSD) to a third party without replicating
| the license statement or even providing proper attribution,
| Microsoft has absolutely violated the GPL. They can't get
| around that by waving a paper that the third party signed.
|
| This reminds me of those dump trucks you see with stickers
| saying that the owner will not pay for damage caused by
| falling debris. Absolutely laughable attempt at dodging legal
| responsibility for an act that they are absolutely
| responsible for.
|
| I'm glad execs like you are taking this seriously instead of
| going along with M$' flagrant disregard for FOSS licenses. I
| hope there's a lot more corporate pushback for trying to sell
| a tool that can poison their customers' codebase with code
| stolen from copyleft projects.
|
| As an aside, I find it very telling that they trained this on
| other peoples' code instead of their flagship products like
| Windows, Office, VS, etc. I also remember seeing a few years
| ago an article on HN about M$ not allowing its employees to
| use github internally because they were worried about
| accidental IP leaks; I wonder if this is because they were
| already planning copilot?
| coldtea wrote:
| >* I read the terms of service, and they do not actually
| grant license to the code. They say in very clear terms: YOU
| ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS.*
|
| That doesn't exactly mean they don't grant licensing in the
| sense that they retain the license to use the code they
| produce.
|
| That means there's no licensing, and any issue others have
| with your code infringing on third party licenses is on you.
| tubs wrote:
| Do you also disallow your employees from reading github,
| stack overflow, or other sources of code?
| dijit wrote:
| I disallow copying of copyrighted code into our product
| repositories unless the license is clear, I have even
| reached out to people to directly license copyrighted
| software, or for them to relicense their public AGPL/GPL
| license (for a fee).
|
| To answer your statement directly:
|
| 1) StackOverflow submissions are CC-BY-SA, so if a person
| copies' code from there, _even if it 's copyrighted_ you
| can consider it good faith and remove the offending code
| from your product. This is actually a licensing nightmare
| but the current situation is the same as when the music
| industry accidentally uses an unlicensed sample and there's
| no current reason to consider it otherwise.
|
| 2) Github has a neat repository licensing feature (LICENSE)
| so you can easily tell what repo has what, not having a
| license file means the repository is fully copyrighted by
| default by the way; if we bundle GPL code then we would
| have to open source our game, which is not going to happen,
| so _no_ you 're not allowed to just copy code, but you can
| take inspiration; which is what Copilot is saying you
| should do in their terms *NOT COPY CODE VERBATIM*.
|
| Ultimately: Software licensing is a joke to you because it
| doesn't really concern you, however it concerns me as it is
| quite literally part of my job to protect the company from
| being sued over doing something wrong here.
| tubs wrote:
| Right. So it's up to you to educate your developers to
| not copy code from sources that have licenses
| incompatible with your project. Much the same as
| educating the same developers that "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE
| FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS" from copilot. I do not see any
| difference here.
|
| It's an extremely personal attack to claim software
| licencing is a joke to me. You have zero context on the
| work I do professionally and as open source. I'd
| appreciate it if you could limit your arguments to not
| include personal insults.
| xdennis wrote:
| Reading Stack Overflow doesn't send my code to Stack
| Overflow.
| corobo wrote:
| I don't use it for dayjob stuff because I don't want to deal
| with the hassle of explaining and selling someone on it to get
| the use approved, and admittedly there are (however small)
| risks of sending confidential stuff over the wire. Copilot
| isn't enabled for those projects.
|
| Personal stuff? I don't really think about it at all outside of
| these threads, no. I'm not exactly citing every source for
| where I learned each concept, and people smarter than me say
| that's how Copilot learned it too. That'll do for me and my
| side projects, I'll keep up with the law as it keeps up with
| AI.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I honestly don't think it's going to be a risk for developers.
| I don't believe you can accurately run attribution on any of
| the source code generated for you, right? If so, that should
| give you plausible deniability, while putting all the liability
| on Github's shoulders. It's their responsibility to make sure
| they don't violate licenses in their own model.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate
| licenses in their own model.
|
| Maybe morally that's true. But who do you think is easier to
| sue? Small startup using copilot or Microsoft?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Yeah true, you're right. Still, intuitively it seems like
| the better legal case would be against MS, even if it's not
| the more practical one.
| fwlr wrote:
| "developers can verbally give natural language prompts."
|
| One more reason to demand remote work. I really do not want to be
| sitting next to the guy who spends 8 hours talking to his
| computer.
| nlh wrote:
| I think you may be missing the intended audience for this --
| it's aimed at folks who are visually or otherwise impaired and
| cannot type using a traditional keyboard/input device.
| adzm wrote:
| The accessibility potential of AI is vastly understated. I
| expect this to fill that niche perfectly. The difference
| would be life changing for millions of people.
| polyterative wrote:
| I suffer from chronic pain in my hands because I have been
| programming non stop for the past five years. this really
| gives me hope to recover without losing my job
| fwlr wrote:
| Speaking to your computer is just as valid as typing into it!
| I have auditory processing issues, mentally processing speech
| takes up a significant fraction of my cognitive resources and
| I don't really have the ability to just tune it out.
| Constantly hearing one half of a conversation would impair my
| ability to work almost as much as being forced to use a
| keyboard would impair the person who's talking. I would be
| asking to work remote or private so that my needs aren't in
| conflict with their needs. (Not that you could have guessed
| this was the case just from my comment, but that's why I said
| " _I_ really don't want..." and not " _People_ really
| shouldn't be...".)
| digdugdirk wrote:
| With increases in productivity from systems like this, and a
| guaranteed bottom line improvement from cutting labor and running
| leaner teams, has anyone here heard of any large corporations
| using LLM's as an excuse for headcount reduction yet?
|
| In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if this has already
| played a large behind the scenes role in the layoffs at
| Google/Microsoft.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Everyone I know is understaffed. I think the outcome is
| roadmaps deliver more reliably not reduce headcount.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Seems strange with all the layoffs
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| That's companies preparing for the artificial recession the
| fed is launching us into to ensure Twinkie's don't cost
| $0.05 more.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Sometimes thinking that you are understaffed is actually
| caused by being overstaffed. The reason is that having a
| lot of people introduces tons of overheads and coordination
| costs, that reduce your time for your main work.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Lol the cope here is unbelievable. Let me guess, the
| people that are "just overhead" and "reduces time for
| main work" are everyone else, not you, right?
| shmatt wrote:
| I work at a big tech company and there is a complete ban on
| coding using LLMs. The fear is sending our code for the model
| to learn in the future. This is also why then hype around
| GTP4-powered Office is overhyped. Very rarely will a
| corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their
| internal documents and excel sheets
|
| Until an on-prem solution is offered, many of these companies
| won't get anything out of the technology
|
| The layoffs at big tech are caused by un-even profit
| generating, Where 5% or 20% of the company generate 99.9% of
| income. The rest are essentially startups being funded by rich
| VCs. Eventually if you don't find PMF the VC cuts the funding
| walthamstow wrote:
| > Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running
| inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets
|
| Aren't they already doing this, if your documents are in
| Sharepoint or Google Drive? I have assumed so, but with no
| basis
| dougmwne wrote:
| How do you reconcile what you just said with the massive
| popularity of cloud services? The source code is already
| sitting in the same data center the LLM GPUs are sitting in.
|
| Of course there are some businesses too paranoid to use the
| cloud, but even intelligence agencies are on board these
| days.
| xdennis wrote:
| Probably because people view the cloud as their data in
| someone else's hands, but AI companies view data as fair
| game for ingestion, since "they just learn like humans, and
| you allow humans to view your data, right?".
| frenchy wrote:
| With cloud services, there's some expectation that your
| stuff is private. Copilot is like doing all your cloud
| development with an anonymous FTP server.
| maeil wrote:
| For big companies, that on-prem solution is coming sooner
| rather than later. For small companies, plenty of them
| (likely the large majority) will be very willing to take the
| "risk" for the save in labour costs.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| > Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running
| inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets.
|
| Which is why Microsoft will be able to charge outrageous fees
| for enterprise plans that keep employees' queries to GPT
| private and out of future training sets. I do not think on
| prem will be successful, though, the hardware requirements
| are fairly substantial and specialized.
| manicennui wrote:
| If your job is nothing but writing the kind of boilerplate code
| that Copilot gets somewhat right, you probably should lose your
| job.
| jstx1 wrote:
| In general demand for programmers has been growing over the
| long term. So if the baseline is an upward trend, these tools
| can have a demand-reducing effect and the overall demand can
| still be going up just at a lesser rate.
|
| Or it could be flat or go down - my point is that one thing
| reducing demand doesn't necessarily mean that demand is going
| down.
| debugdog wrote:
| Well, loving "tldr"[1] and smashing the tab key for my
| autocompletes that Copilot CLI thing kind of sounds like another
| level of laziness and less Googling.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
| devit wrote:
| It's a bit annoying that you have to pay for Copilot just to sign
| up for the waitlist, rather than being able to either pay for
| acceptance or start paying when you are accepted.
| messel wrote:
| I've got LLM fatigue
| retrocryptid wrote:
| So if MSFT's message here is "software engineers don't have to
| know how to code," what's the value of knowing how to code? Seems
| at odds with their core customers' self interests.
| make3 wrote:
| it's totally not the message, weird that you would say this;
| this is a tool just to make the developers' lives easier
| retrocryptid wrote:
| That doesn't seem (to me) to be how it's being advertised to
| corporate clients.
| yanis_t wrote:
| God, only yesterday there was a comment by someone, that Copilot
| will eventually move to gpt4. So eventually = just 1 day. Things
| move so fast these days.
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