[HN Gopher] Open Sourcing Cody - Sourcegraph's AI-enabled editor...
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       Open Sourcing Cody - Sourcegraph's AI-enabled editor assistant
        
       Author : michlim
       Score  : 73 points
       Date   : 2023-03-28 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (about.sourcegraph.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (about.sourcegraph.com)
        
       | qwick23 wrote:
       | Is it an answer to GitHub Co-Pilot?
        
         | beyang wrote:
         | We don't have autocomplete yet, which is what Copilot is mainly
         | used for. But we're working on it, with the same context-aware
         | mechanisms that provide a quality lift on the Q&A side.
        
         | wsxiaoys wrote:
         | Cody is more like a wrapper on top of GPT API (gpt-3.5-turbo)
         | endpoint, with related code snippets embed in prompt. It's not
         | competing the low latency scenario that Github Copilot seats
         | in.
         | 
         | There're recent works show a potential of beating Copilot's
         | performance (e.g https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12570) with much
         | smaller models (500M vs 10B+).
         | 
         | Inspired by these work, I'm building Tabby
         | (https://github.com/TabbyML/tabby), a OSS GitHub Copilot
         | alternative. Hopefully it could make low cost AI coding
         | accessible to everyone.
        
           | wackget wrote:
           | FYI, Tabby is the name of an existing open-source product:
           | https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | michlim wrote:
       | This is probably one of the most sincere and personal product
       | announcements from a corporation I've read.
        
       | michlim wrote:
       | > There's actually a growing body of evidence that shows the
       | emergent ability of LLMs to reason (the so-called "chain of
       | thought" ability) arises only when LLMs are trained on huge
       | amounts of code, not just natural language. Natural language
       | training data provides the ability to sound human, but it is the
       | programming language training data that provides LLMs with the
       | ability to be logical.
       | 
       | Good on Sourcegraph to contribute back to the open source
       | community. LLMs rely more on open source code than meets the eye.
        
       | skybrian wrote:
       | I wonder if there is anything like this for a notebook-style UI?
       | I'm a fan of how Observable does it.
        
         | beyang wrote:
         | You're a mind-reader!
         | 
         | We currently have a notebooks UI (e.g.,
         | https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks/Tm90ZWJvb2s6MTg1NA==), but
         | the plan is to roll Cody into this and make it a super rich UI
         | for learning/understanding anything and everything about code
        
           | skybrian wrote:
           | Sounds promising, but that looks to me like a different kind
           | of notebook? It seems to be a way to write documentation with
           | some fancy features.
           | 
           | An Observable notebook is a standalone program, sort of a
           | cross between a makefile and a spreadsheet. You write code
           | snippets in JavaScript to calculate things and it
           | automatically recalculates them when dependencies change.
           | It's pretty powerful since you can import JavaScript
           | libraries (to draw graphs, for example) and call API's.
           | 
           | Examples:
           | https://observablehq.com/collection/@skybrian/digital-
           | signal...
        
       | mlboss wrote:
       | How does it compare to github copilot ?
        
       | jarpineh wrote:
       | I am confused of what is being open sourced here. What I've
       | managed to read from announcements and README I find myself being
       | funnelled to Discord and Sourcegraph cloud services. I'm trying
       | to understand what is what here.
       | 
       | I think there's three components that are needed to have the best
       | (admittedly enticing) experience: Cody itself, Sourcegraph at the
       | background (optionally) and an LLM called Claude from Anthropic.
       | Claude is very much proprietary. Sourcegraph is open core, but to
       | use it as a Cody's "helper" do I need those proprietary features?
       | Without Claude and Sourcegraph Enterprise/Cloud what can Cody do,
       | say with LLama based LLM, should this integration happen?
       | 
       | Again, what I've read, taken at face value, seems really
       | promising. I've used Sourcegraph a few times in the past and
       | sometimes wondered how it would benefit in my commercial work.
       | Having an LLM could make this a next level tool, possibly
       | something that regular chat-type LLM based services don't
       | currently do.
        
         | beyang wrote:
         | Cody is being open sourced under Apache 2. The source code is
         | here: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegrap
         | h/-.... The analog would be if GitHub open-sourced Copilot but
         | didn't open source GitHub (Sourcegraph is open core, similar to
         | GitLab, with all the code publicly available and the
         | enterprise-licensed code under "enterprise" directories).
         | 
         | The network dependencies are Cody --> Sourcegraph -->
         | Anthropic. Cody does need to talk to a chat-based LLM to
         | generate responses. (It hits other APIs specific to Sourcegraph
         | that are optional.)
         | 
         | We are working on making the chat-based LLM swappable.
         | Anthropic has been a great partner so far and they are stellar
         | to work with. But our customers have asked for the ability to
         | use GPT-4 as well as the ability to self-host, which means we
         | are exploring open source models. Actively working on that at
         | the moment.
         | 
         | Sorry for any lack of clarity here. We would like to have Cody
         | (the 100% open source editor plugin) talk to a whole bunch of
         | dev tools (OSS and proprietary). We think it's totally fine to
         | have proprietary tools in your stack, but would prefer to live
         | in a world where the thing that integrates all that info in
         | your editor using the magic of AI and LLMs to be open source.
         | This fits into our broader principle of selling to
         | companies/teams, and making tools free and open for individual
         | devs.
        
           | beyang wrote:
           | I'll add if folks want to submit a PR to turn on other LLMs
           | (or have Cody talk to the base LLM provider directly, sans
           | Sourcegraph), we're happy to accept those. Literally the only
           | thing preventing us from doing that right now is
           | prioritization (our team is 4 people and we're scrambling to
           | improve context fetching and implement autocomplete rn
           | :sweat-laugh-emoji:)
        
           | jarpineh wrote:
           | Thank you for your response. I think I get it now. When I
           | first read the announcement I jumped at the thought that the
           | entirety was being open sourced. Perhaps I got a bit clouded
           | through that. I understand your needs as a company with a
           | business plan and expect nothing is free. When the option to
           | ask here in this discussion arose I took it, since I couldn't
           | figure this out elsewhere.
           | 
           | Ability to use other LLMs, especially open ones, is
           | promising. I guess it's mostly a matter of how APIs are
           | standardised across these products. I mostly use Copilot and
           | truly hope things can get better than that. Especially the
           | lack of control is infuriating, and tendency to go off on
           | repeats for no discernible reason. On paper Cody looks to do
           | better here.
        
             | beyang wrote:
             | Hopefully it's not just on paper :) There are a lot of
             | rough edges still, but we hope to iron them out as quickly
             | as we can.
             | 
             | One of our core design principles for Cody is to make it
             | "unmagic". Like, the AI is magic enough, but the rest of
             | what we're doing in terms of orchestrating the LLMs in
             | combination with various other data sources and backends
             | should be clear and transparent to the user. This allows
             | for greater understandability and steerability (e.g., if
             | Cody infers the wrong context, maybe you can just tell it
             | the file it _should_ be reading and then regenerate the
             | answer).
             | 
             | Copilot is a great tool, and Oege de Moor, Alex Graveley,
             | and the whole GitHub Next team deserve huge credit for
             | shipping it. That being said, I really want the standard AI
             | coding assistant to be open, and there's been a ton of
             | innovation in LLMs since Copilot's initial launch that
             | doesn't seem to have been rolled in yet. I think this is a
             | case where being open means we can accelerate the pace of
             | innovation.
        
       | dmoy wrote:
       | Okay I wanna know if Steve Yegge named this after Cody, one of
       | the best people on the the Google-internal grok/kythe team that
       | Yegge also started.
        
       | jcuenod wrote:
       | Any plans for a neovim plugin?
        
         | jdorfman wrote:
         | On the roadmap, no ETA.
        
         | beyang wrote:
         | The best way to accelerate this is to bug
         | https://twitter.com/teej_dv on Twitter. Tell him Beyang sent
         | you and that he thinks he can have an Emacs plugin out faster
         | :P
        
       | jdlyga wrote:
       | Wrestling has more than one AI Assistant.
        
       | dabei wrote:
       | The decision to open source is surprising at first glance. But it
       | makes a lot of sense. With the greatly enhanced coding
       | productivity, the ROI for tweaking open source tools is quite
       | high. This puts closed source tools at a significant disadvantage
       | in terms of customization. They are a little late to the AI
       | coding assistant market, this move enables them to capture market
       | share rapidly and slow down the competitors in building up data
       | moat.
        
       | dgellow wrote:
       | How much would it cost to use Cody with Sourcegraph? I don't see
       | a price in the article
        
         | jdorfman wrote:
         | Edit: It's free
        
           | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
           | This is not a clear answer to a question about the cost.
           | 
           | Don't be a car salesman.
        
             | jdorfman wrote:
             | Sorry wasn't my intention. It's free.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | beyang wrote:
         | Cody is free to use and doesn't strictly require Sourcegraph.
         | It can make use of Sourcegraph APIs (e.g., code search, soon
         | find refs) to improve its context fetching. We hope to
         | integrate other dev tool APIs (e.g., monitoring, tracing, etc.)
         | as well.
         | 
         | Sourcegraph is also free to use and downloadable as a local app
         | (https://docs.sourcegraph.com/app) or you can use
         | sourcegraph.com for open source. Our intention is to sell to
         | teams/companies, while making tools for individual devs free to
         | use. There have been a few cases in the past where we've
         | misstepped and come across as selling to individual devs. If
         | this ever happens, please flag to me
         | (https://twitter.com/beyang) or sqs (https://twitter.com/sqs)
         | directly and we'll correct it.
        
           | silverlake wrote:
           | Does Cody work with App (local Sourcegraph)?
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-28 23:01 UTC)