[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot is now available for free
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub Copilot is now available for free
Author : ksec
Score : 348 points
Date : 2024-12-18 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| kwantaz wrote:
| Includes up to 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests per month.
| fzumstein wrote:
| So basically it's free for 1 day per month (I only use chat).
| __jl__ wrote:
| Has anyone compared the updated Copilot with Cursor? The main
| updates I am wondering about are model selection and multi-file
| edits. I used copilot before these features, changed to Cursor
| and now I am wondering how much Copilot has closed the gap.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I'm using Copilot daily and I didn't find any improvements over
| last year. I think they introduced something called Copilot
| Edits which works kind of like aider judging from screenshots,
| but it's experimental, so I didn't try it. It's basically
| glorified autocomplete and that's about it. At least I didn't
| discover anything new.
| asdev wrote:
| I ditched Copilot for Cursor and never looked back. Cursor might
| be the only other AI product with product market fit than
| ChatGPT, it's that good
| outlore wrote:
| I just downloaded Cursor yesterday.
|
| I was wondering if you have used Copilot Edits and can compare
| it to Cursor Composer? Is Cursor much more superior when it
| comes to multi-file edits?
|
| Do you also have tips for how to give Cursor some
| documentation, is there a way to make it RAG on a folder of
| markdown documentation files?
| rfoo wrote:
| The actual killer feature for me is the much superior
| autocompletion, Cursor always suggests an edit inline once I
| stopped typing, without having me to type a prompt to ask it
| to do stuff. And it feels faster than GH Copilot, too.
|
| For us who prefer coding ourselves (instead of telling LLMs
| to do stuff and review the result) it is much much better.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| But Copilot does exactly the same? You don't need to prompt
| anything.
| clvx wrote:
| Exactly. This is how it works in vim/nvim using the
| copilot.vim plugin. Unless it's refactoring multiple
| files, I don't see the value. Now that you can choose
| your own model, I don't see many benefits with Cursor.
| k__ wrote:
| Yes, sounds like Copilot but without the benefit of using
| my favourite editor.
| maxverse wrote:
| Okay, this 100% echoes my (limited) experience, and I'm
| glad I'm not imagining things.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Yeah I'm happy to check it out, Cursor isn't perfect, but at
| least it feels like it was created by people who code for a
| living versus people tasked to inject a LLM into an IDE.
| qwertox wrote:
| Automatic multiline in-line-edits blew my mind. But the AI's
| eagerness of wanting to edit something frustrated me enough to
| no longer use it.
| digging wrote:
| This has been a sticking point for me since my workplace told
| us all to start using the new copilot licenses they bought.
| The ideal workflow for me is usually inline question-and-
| answer but it tends to insist on editing the code, often in
| ways that do more than I actually wanted.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Has anyone who uses an IDE (e.g., JetBrains, not a code editor)
| moved to Cursor? I've downloaded it a few times because
| everyone raves about it, but I've always come back almost
| immediately because editors can't reliably make changes across
| projects (among many other things)... What am I missing?
|
| FWIW I use GoLand w/ Supermaven, currently.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This is the main sticking point for me, I'm not leaving
| JetBrains anytime soon. GitHub Copilot + Aider handle my
| needs beautifully and while I wish Aider had deep IDE
| integration I can work around that (Yes, I know about the
| "AI!" command thing, it's a cool idea but sucks in practice).
| Aider in browser mode has pretty much replaced my back and
| forth to ChatGPT/Claude's web UI to the point that I'm
| considering going API-only for both of those (currently pay
| for the $20/mo plan for each).
| smallerfish wrote:
| For Jetbrains users: consider voting for
| https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-2402
| solardev wrote:
| Seems like they're adding Claude in January?
| https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/terms/jetbrains-
| ai/serv...
| smallerfish wrote:
| Cool! Seems like they could have commented on that
| ticket. :)
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Jetbrains is still the leader in all of the small details
| that make navigating and working a code base easy.
|
| Copy and paste workflow is a minor slowdown, but nothing
| compared to things like smart links in terminal, auto
| detection of run configurations, etc, etc.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This. 1000x This.
|
| I watch people navigate code in VSCode and I want to pull
| my hair out. Things that I don't even think about are
| hard and/or require just falling back to search.
|
| And before "there is a plugin for that", I'm sure there
| is. I'm sure you can configure VSCode to be just as
| powerful as IDEA but the rank and file using it aren't
| doing that work to install and configure a bunch of
| plugins. So, on average, VSCode doesn't hold a candle to
| an IDEA.
|
| With Aider I skip a lot of the copy/pasting but I'd still
| copy/paste to the browser before I left IDEA.
| digging wrote:
| It's always difficult to notice features you don't know
| are missing.
|
| I'm a near-exclusive user of VSCode (or Codium, at home)
| and like to think of myself as moderately advanced. I
| continually update my configurations and plugins to make
| my workflow easier and often see my peers stumble on
| operations that are effortless for me. It's hard to
| explain to them what they're missing until they watch me
| code. So now I'm curious about watching some typical
| Jetbrains workflows.
| pl-27 wrote:
| I will also stick with JetBrains and am impressed by aider!
| I'm using this plugin to integrate aider into IntelliJ:
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/25249-coding-aider
| Still in progress but already pretty useful
| lowkj wrote:
| I had been using JetBrains (Webstorm and PyCharm before that)
| for years now and just switched to Cursor a few months ago. I
| never liked the way AI copilots tacked onto the IDE worked
| and preferred to just use standalone ChatGPT. Been very happy
| with the Cursor experience, big improvement in UX from my
| perspective.
| asdev wrote:
| I've tried both Copilot and JetBrains AI with IntelliJ and
| both are awful compared to Cursor. No multiline editing, no
| composer, worse at writing tests etc.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Tried to move from JetBrains to VS Code with new Copilot Edit
| mode. Moved back to JetBrains and horribly outdated copy
| paste workflow ... for now. Disruption is imminent though.
| (And yes JetBrains AI integration got better but the 'insert
| code at cursor option' is laughable. There is a command to
| generate code right in the editor too, but not from chat.
| Also $10 extra. )
|
| PS: One UI feature that I haven't seen anywhere yet is not
| splitting the screen into code and chat but unifying it.
|
| Also a common approach (e.g. in openai composer) seems to be
| to modify the file line by line which takes a very long time
| if the file is long, which (agentic) tools use a diff
| approach instead?
| eastbound wrote:
| Jetbrains is getting laughingly bad at normal
| autocompletion.
|
| Autocompletiok is losing features every day, it seems. Yes,
| Jetbrains might either be removing features to move them to
| AI, or breaking features involuntarily in order to move
| faster to implement AI.
|
| Either way, AI is killing Jetbrains.
| attentive wrote:
| > which (agentic) tools use a diff approach instead?
|
| aider
| vr46 wrote:
| Yes, I finally decided not to renew my uber-cheap JetBrains
| subscription in January and shift to VSCode + Copilot with
| Claude, then tested Cursor and dropped Copilot. Cursor is
| still a bit frustrating and gets trapped in circular
| reasoning a lot, but its features are good, like creating
| files.
| matsemann wrote:
| Actually writing code is a small part of what I do in the
| IDE. So I'm not keen on jumping ship to a whole new editor
| and lose all the IDE stuff. But I do think IDEs need to step
| up. The editors will get the IDE features slowly (or be able
| to work around some of them, like how an IDE can know your
| database layout and help you write sql, the AI helpers can
| make educated guesses as well and get close), so the IDEs
| don't have a big moat.
| efsavage wrote:
| I _can 't wait_ for IntelliJ to get where Cursor appears to
| be. Being able to combine a great IDE with project-level AI
| coding will be a huge leap forward.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| I'm going to feel personally offended if Jetbrains drops
| the ball on this.
|
| Seriously, this here right now is the precise moment in
| time where people will either look back at wondering how
| such a clear leader managed to sink into insignificance, or
| not.
|
| I love IntelliJ more than my own kids, but if they don't
| add "the AI does not just talk about what code to create,
| it actually creates it, across multiple files and folders",
| then I'm out.
|
| Just yesterday I made Cursor rewrite the whole ui layer of
| my app from light-mode-only to light-and-dark-mode-with-
| switcher in one single sweep, in less than 5 minutes (it
| would have taken me hours, if not days to do it manually),
| and this is just not feasible if you have to manually copy-
| and-paste whatever Jetbrains AI spits out.
|
| Jetbrains -- Move. Now!
| stadeschuldt wrote:
| I've been using https://www.codegpt.ee with the Jetbrains
| IDEs (mainly PyCharm) and I'm pretty happy with it. You can
| also bring your own API key.
| beyang wrote:
| Check out Cody for GoLand and JetBrains:
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9682-cody-ai-coding-
| ass...
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| I'm also a JetBrains person and never really "got" VSCode. So
| cursor was not a fit for me, the VSC kn shortcuts always felt
| limiting. So I use zed since it can be configured to use JB
| kb shortcuts. And it's open source and super fast (rust-
| based)
| yoble wrote:
| I have the same issue, I tried to get into VSCode a few
| times but each time switched back to JetBrains.
|
| If your main issue is the keybinding though there is a
| vscode plugin[1] that recreates Intellij IDEA bindings,
| which I found helped smooth the transition during my
| tryouts for me.
|
| [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=k--
| kato....
| j0hnyl wrote:
| I need to try it again. When I tried it I found it was kind of
| overblown and went back to copilot. I also wasn't sure whether
| to maintain two IDEs - Cursor for scaffolding new projects, and
| VScode for daily driving.
| redox99 wrote:
| midjourney definitely has PMF.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Unfortunately for me in enterprise it was impossible to
| convince them to allow us to use cursor since they're not well
| known like GitHub/Microsoft so they're afraid of what they'd do
| with our data.
|
| We are allowed Copilot and Chatgpt because of an enterprise
| contract with each. Luckily copilot has been improving but
| there definitely was a while where it felt way behind the jumps
| other products have had in the past year or so.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| ... and they aren't concerned with what microsoft is doing
| with it?
| kittikitti wrote:
| Microsoft is a monopoly and they've done everything they
| can to scare people about AI.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Part of the hangup is that startups are shit at dealing
| with enterprise privacy contracts, whereas Microsoft
| probably has a whole department for that.
|
| A product can work however it works, good or bad, but if
| you can't wrap contractual guarantees around it that are
| palatable to your enterprise customers, you're not going to
| get enterprise sales.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Can Cursor sign a DPA in addition to an enterprise contract
| where they actually have to put into concise writing what
| they are and aren't doing with our data? Microsoft will.
| Amazon will. But in my experience a lot of smaller players
| can't or won't. That's a legal blocker.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Microsoft already has access to all of your code on Github.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| and your partner network, and your commit patterns, and
| your bug list, and your remote IP address while working,
| and you have to authenticate to them each time you use it
| (which means that they can turn off your access)
| area51org wrote:
| My company isn't. Apparently, "We've heard of Microsoft" ==
| "They won't do anything wrong with our data" in the minds
| of non-technical lawyer types.
| gdhkgdhkvff wrote:
| This is such a common lazy cynical take on HN. "Microsoft
| is evil, therefore they will destroy their enterprise
| customer relationships by stealing their enterprise
| customer data, despite the fact that they explicitly state
| they will not do that."
|
| I would understand this mindset when it comes to consumer
| uses of it, but enterprise is where Microsoft makes its
| money and it would have to be the dumbest business decision
| ever to ruin the enterprise cash cow by doing that.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Sticking with Jetbrains (Pycharm) which has good CoPilot
| integration (has an extension for Claude as well but I haven't
| gotten it working). Tried Cursor but I didn't find it
| compelling enough to switch.
| maxverse wrote:
| I went from VSCode to Cursor 3 months ago. Might come back to
| VSCode for this, but so far, Cursor feels snappier than
| copilot.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I actually closed by Github account because I don't want to
| support AI or have my code trained on AI. Now I'm extra happy I
| shut it down.
| fifilura wrote:
| > I don't want to support AI or have my code trained on AI.
|
| What are your arguments for this?
| karmajunkie wrote:
| GP doesn't actually need arguments for it. As change agents
| AI companies need to argue why they should be allowed to
| train on others' code, and clearly in GP's case they've
| failed to meet the burden of proof.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| 1. I believe AI is detrimental. It makes us go too fast. It's
| all about production now, pure efficiency over individuals.
|
| 2. AI is too dangerous. Whatever innovations used for benign
| applications will be eventually used for more dangerous
| applications such as advanced genetic engineering and the
| military.
|
| 3. AI uses too much energy. It's disrespectful to the
| resources that we have.
|
| 4. AI is an apex technology amongst technologies designed to
| further enrich the elite and strengthen the power structure.
|
| 5. AI will also be used to completely replace workers at a
| speed much faster than other automations and I don't agree
| with that. The new jobs that have been created are demeaning
| such as "AI Prompt Engineer".
|
| 6. AI is one step closer to technology creating autonomous
| technology, and that's a bad thing.
|
| Society needs to slow down and find alternative, more
| sustainable solutions. AI is aligned with short-term economic
| efficiency and that is detrimental.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I strongly agree with your points 1, 3, 4 and 5, and I
| would add another one:
|
| _7. This idea of "AI" and how it is expected to be used is
| detrimental to human intellectual development, particularly
| for junior generations, and the presumption that AI will
| solve everything is what actually may bring us closer to
| the world of Idiocracy._
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I agree with that. I think AI may not make us dumber in
| every way, but it certainly will make us dumber when it
| comes to being able to plot out independent, large-scale
| solutions. We will be as dependent on AI for certain
| sorts of decision-making as we are on water treatment to
| treat our polluted water sources.
| rybosworld wrote:
| > AI is an apex technology amongst technologies designed to
| further enrich the elite and strengthen the power
| structure.
|
| This one I somewhat agree with. Ideally these technologies
| are owned by nobody.
|
| Though it does give me hope when I see Facebook of all
| companies leading the charge in regards to open sourcing
| AI. The fact that their business model incentivizes them to
| do this, is good (lucky) for everyone, whatever your other
| opinions of the company are.
| jmathai wrote:
| This is a very good starting list.
| fifilura wrote:
| Thank you for your reply.
|
| I am currently having a ride with chatgpt allowing me to
| write applications at 3 times the speed compared to before
| (where before may be "never" for some technologies) and I
| am happy for everyone contributing to this.
|
| But all your points are well grounded, I will have to
| figure out a way to think about them, while keeping my day
| job.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I don't begrudge you for trying to keep your job. I
| myself do things for my own job that I consider
| questionable. I guess it's all something we should think
| about.
| Eggpants wrote:
| ChatBLT and Copilot break every license of every repo
| they were trained on. Even the most liberal project
| license states you have to include, and not modify, the
| license file. So you're glad for code thieves.
| Interesting...
|
| So to give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not
| just another dude who has hitched their financial wagon
| to this current AI slopfest, I just retried a question
| about writing OSSEC rules and the response, while
| convincing looking, was completely wrong. Again.
| barrell wrote:
| Faster is not necessarily better, and if 2/3 of your
| value comes from LLMs, that doesn't bode well for job
| security.
|
| There's a lot that engineers can due that are well beyond
| the limits of LLMs. If you really want to keep your day
| job, I would really commit yourself to that gap when you
| can!
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Given that AI output can't be copyrighted, how do you
| protect and distribute the project you are working on?
| rvz wrote:
| All of the above. It is even worse than crypto.
|
| The AI proponents that support this have no serious
| solution to the mass displacement of jobs thanks to AI.
| They actually don't mention any alternative solutions and
| instead scream about nonsense such as UBI which has never
| worked at a large sustainable scale.
|
| > Society needs to slow down and find alternative, more
| sustainable solutions. AI is aligned with short-term
| economic efficiency and that is detrimental.
|
| I don't think they can come up with sensible alternatives
| or any sustainable solutions to the jobs displaced as there
| is no alternative.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Curious: where was UBI ever tried at a large scale?
| EFreethought wrote:
| There are a couple of sentences in "Dune" about this:
|
| "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the
| hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted
| other men with machines to enslave them."
|
| Granted, most of us are not choosing this.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I would say we have already chosen this.
| Diti wrote:
| I have the same opinion as the person you replied to. My
| arguments are basically that I don't support plagiarism, and
| LLMs/diffusion models of our generation have been trained on
| a massive corpus of copyrighted material, ignoring the
| fundamentals of the Berne Convention.
|
| I belong to an internet community whose artists make for a
| third of its population - they are mostly hostile to
| generative art and never gave their consent for their art to
| be plagiarized, yet their artstyle end up in Civitai and
| their content shows up on haveibeentrained.com.
|
| Personally, my hostility towards generative art would stop if
| training was opt-in, and I would use GitHub again if it, AT
| LEAST, allowed members to opt-OUT.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Private repos exist for a reason. It's reasonable that if you
| don't want humans seeing your code that machines should also
| not see your code.
| itronitron wrote:
| i recently learned about sourcehut.org which has "No AI
| features whatsoever"
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Nice! I am definitely using this.
| norir wrote:
| Unfortunately sourcehut has its own cultural issues.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| It's quite easy to set up cgit, laminar and gitolite to
| self host.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is great as an entry point to programming and also good for
| startups.
|
| and with the recent addition to o1 in Cursor the price of a mid-
| senior is set to around $20.
|
| It has been a while since my business needed to hire more senior
| engineers for a while, I only needed around 1 or 2 and the rest
| as interns using Copilot or Cursor.
|
| This is a great time to build projects and get into programming
| for everyone.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| That free plan sounds too limited for continuous use. Is this the
| sort of plan that will convert non-users into paying customers?
|
| Compared to other paid plans for various AI services, this one
| seems like it's relatively the most enticing.
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, this is meant to expose people to Copilot and convince
| them to subscribe.
| semiinfinitely wrote:
| soon: copilot generates a comment recommending a SaaS product 25%
| of the time. Pay $5 month to disable ads-comments
| paxys wrote:
| Really hope I don't get my open source maintainer Pro plan bumped
| down to free.
| kdaigle wrote:
| It didn't. If you had a complimentary Copilot Pro plan, you'll
| continue to have it so you're good!
| simonw wrote:
| The FAQ entry about the free tier for open source maintainers
| is still live here: https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-
| source-projects-ca...
| OutOfHere wrote:
| You can confirm at https://github.com/settings/copilot that
| you're still on the Pro plan.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'd prefer something where I can bring my own model and pay the
| API costs directly, rather than yet another $20+/m/dev fee
|
| The free plan is not going to work for professional coding
| beyang wrote:
| FYI, you can do that with Cody + Ollama. A good portion of our
| user community does exactly that:
| https://sourcegraph.com/blog/local-code-completion-with-olla...
| verdverm wrote:
| I don't want a local LLM, it is slower, less capable, and
| slows the computer down generally
|
| What I would like is a deep integration with VS Code using my
| preferred foundational model
|
| I see Cursor has their own model and support for 2
| foundational models, but not my preferred model and they
| charge a monthly fee.
|
| Supposedly: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-
| machine-learning/g...
|
| but do I still have to pay microsoft $20+ per month? what I
| really want is pay-per-usage, not pay-for-access+usage
| rvz wrote:
| Microsoft (unsurprisingly) has won the race to zero.
|
| We have had them 'embrace' the wider developer and open-source
| ecosystem by buying GitHub.
|
| Then they have 'extended' this with partnerships and deep
| developer integrations in VSCode and exclusive partnerships with
| OpenAI which in the background was used to build the best tools
| on the Microsoft platform with added enhancements and extensions.
|
| Now in the new intelligence age, we finally have the definition
| of what 'Extinguish' looks like to competitors wanting to compete
| with the best tools available, _For free_.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I think you're ignoring the part where a MBA shows up, figures
| they have a valuable monopoly and starts it's extortion racket.
|
| Realize: most of the digital ecosystem runs on whales, and
| thats who businesses go after. As long as wealth inequality
| thrives, that's the enshittification cycle.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Bundling this with GitHub and giving it away for free reminds
| me of other times they've pulled this same tactic like with
| Teams. I don't know why people respect Satya too much - he's
| just another typical Microsoft monopolist. Others can also act
| unethically and abuse market position to grow their company.
| snide wrote:
| Anyone using the Neovim plugin and suddenly starting to get rate
| limit errors? I'm already on pro, but it's asking me to upgrade
| to pro in Neovim?
| barrell wrote:
| This happened to me as well. Came back from several weeks off
| and I kept getting these rate limit windows in vim today. I
| was/om on the OSS pro plan so I just figured the gravy train
| ended and unsintalled it
| heywire wrote:
| I saw a post on Reddit that said this was a bug and they're
| working on it.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Great. More easily generated garbage code written by other people
| for me to review.
| olup wrote:
| I use supermaven and cline with my own API key, a setup superior
| to cursor imo. Tried to go back to gh copilot yesterday but
| couldn't bear it for a full workday, and reverted to my previous
| arrangement.
| jasondjk wrote:
| This looks really interesting, cursor has been way better than
| copilot for me but supermaven looks great. I went down the
| rabbit hole with:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLQuBSuzu2w&t=661s
|
| Your setup sounds interesting. What sort of API key do you use?
| olup wrote:
| We have an openai account for the company, so I mainly use
| gpt4o or 4o mini with supermaven and cline. I think Claude
| 3.5 works even better.
| uludag wrote:
| I feel like this free plan is just enough to get someone hooked
| and require them to upgrade to paid.
|
| Like, imagine GPS navigation wasn't widespread and there was a
| paid service that gave you 20 free trips. Eventually your normal
| navigation skills would atrophy and you'd be obliged to purchase.
| skybrian wrote:
| Some will want to pay more for better service, but it seems
| likely to be plenty for people who aren't full-time programmers
| and don't write code every day?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| This, but _every single thing we rely on_.
|
| Real AI is definitely a rubicon.
| snug wrote:
| Of course it is, why would they give away something without
| trying to capitalize on it later
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Congratulations, you are one of today's 10000* to learn about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware and free trials.
|
| *https://xkcd.com/1053/
| beyang wrote:
| For those looking for a free coding assistant they can also use
| at work / in the enterprise, Cody has had a free tier for awhile:
| https://sourcegraph.com/cody
|
| - Works with local models
|
| - Context-aware chat with very nice ergonomics (we see
| consistently more chats per day than other coding assistants)
|
| - Used by both indie devs and devs at very large enterprises like
| Palo Alto Networks
|
| - Hooks nicely into code search, which is important for building
| a strong mental model inside large, messy codebases
|
| - Open source core
| acc_297 wrote:
| Interesting, I cancelled my plan a couple weeks ago so I suppose
| it's nice to know my vscode plugin won't stop working at the end
| of the month.
|
| If I ever pay for a different AI product I would prefer a pay-by-
| the-token plan vs a monthly charge since there are often spans of
| several weeks where I'm not using the tools at all.
| mehh wrote:
| I cancelled mine today, as I've moved to cursor, so this is a
| great news as I'd still want to use it sometime.
|
| I do think this slightly aggressive tactic, I'm sure they claim
| otherwise!
| thot_experiment wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a free/local alternative Continue +
| Ollama is acceptable. If you're just doing run of the mill
| programming it will work well out of the box.
|
| I'm glad it's open source so I was able to fix most of the issues
| I had with it and now my copy is in a great place. The
| documentation is in places many versions behind the actual code
| so it can be tough to figure out how to set things up when you're
| venturing off the beaten path. That all being said the
| granularity of control you have when using local models leads to
| an experience that's far better than Cursor/Copilot, I really
| enjoy that it _reads my mind_ a lot of the time now (because I
| have prompt engineered it to know how I think).
|
| Ultimately, isn't this just the way of things? https://thot-
| experiment.github.io/forever-problems/?set%20up...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| On what kind of hardware/GPU are you running that locally?
| deathtrader666 wrote:
| M1 MacBook Pro is sufficient for a Qwen model.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| with how much ram though?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 2x 1080Ti, ~25t/s
| Zopieux wrote:
| Tried a few models and was extremely disappointed by how dumb
| the completions are. Basically useless. What local ollama-
| available models do you recommend?
| sorenjan wrote:
| Have you tried Qwen 2.5 coder? I've only done very little
| testing, but it seemed to work pretty well. I used the 14B
| version.
|
| https://ollama.com/library/qwen2.5-coder
| meta_x_ai wrote:
| A software developer's time is much more precious than wasting
| time on sub-optimal models.
|
| Open Weights models has it's place (in training custom agents
| and custom services), but if you are knowledge worker, using a
| model even 5% less than SOTA is extremely dumb
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 100% disagree with this take, the flexibility in controlling
| the prompt leads to QwenCoder2.5-32b outperforming gpt-o1 and
| claude sonnet 3.5 for nearly everything that I use it for
| (true for Gemma-27b and llama3.3-70b, though in this context
| I'm almost always using the former). A specialist model
| that's specifically prompted to do the correct thing will
| outperform a SOTA generic model with a one size fits all
| system prompt. This is why small autocomplete models can very
| obviously outperform larger models at that specific task. I
| am speaking 100% from experience and ignoring all benchmarks
| in forming this view btw, so maybe it's just my specific
| situation.
|
| Also, in general I don't find the difference between SOTA
| models and local models to be that significant in the real
| world even when used in the exact same way.
| k__ wrote:
| Sounds great.
|
| Does this run with VSCode and how hard is it to set this
| up?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| yes, the vscode extension is a one click install, so is
| ollama which is a separate project that provides local
| inference
|
| you'll then have to download a model, which ollama makes
| very easy. choosing which one will depend on your
| hardware but the biggest QwenCoder2.5 you can fit is a
| very solid starting place. it's not ready for your
| grandma, but it's easy enough that I'd trust a junior dev
| to be able to get it done
| flyingpenguin wrote:
| I found the plugin did not prompt the model often enough. I
| would finish writing aline, and go to a new line and sit there
| waiting to see what the AI thought would be next, only to
| realize continue wasn't prompting...
| scosman wrote:
| Acceptable UX maybe, but the gap between Sonnet 3.5 and open
| models isn't worth it. I know people are going to pitch qwen
| coder 72b, but it's still a long way off on benchmarks and my
| time matters more.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| You're the second person in this thread to make this point,
| what are you using it for? I find the difference is basically
| negligible (in the sense that both get the busywork right and
| both fail at anything complicated)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Link should be announcement post:
|
| _Announcing 150M developers and a new free tier for GitHub
| Copilot in VS Code_
|
| https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| Started using Supermaven since it was free and Copilot wasn't,
| but I stayed because it's faster and uses recent diffs to aid in
| generation
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Copilot in VSCode is so far behind Windsurf, not terribly excited
| about this and still happy to pay for a Codeium pro account. My
| only fear is someone buying them and screwing up model access,
| but maybe it's fine if that is Anthropic. GPT-4 is terrible at
| coding and o-1 isn't tell tiene for practical use.
| skybrian wrote:
| For anyone else who never heard of Windsurf, it seems this was
| announced a month ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127882
| vazma wrote:
| Tried windsurf and the beginning was amazing, last few days I
| start realizing that is getting annoyingly stupid and slow.
| Open reddit and realized lots of people had the same issue
| with a lot of wild theories about it. I stopped my
| subscription and I am considering trying cursor just to
| compare. Tldr;xtrying an agent Ai coding assistant was
| amazing and I think I will never go back!
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| They use a lot of custom models and logic chaining, so I
| think this is more search and retrieval optimization or
| similar problems, I guess maybe some Anthropic API issues
| as well. I've seen the variance too and was wondering if
| was load related. Overall, still loving it, even if there's
| some bleeding edge bumpiness.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Concur. Dropped Copilot for Cursor and then tried Windsurf.
| Windsurf is the keeper for me.
| bbbruno222 wrote:
| Before GitHub Copilot was a paid feature. This only shows to the
| Cursor team that they are going to the right direction.
|
| The slow elephant enterprise GitHub will never be as good/fast as
| Cursor, they had their chance but they have joined the party of
| "keeping the devs under our umbrella with free features" too
| late.
| layer8 wrote:
| If Cursor remains successful, they're likely to turn into a
| slow elephant enterprise as well eventually. That's rather the
| rule than the exception, unfortunately.
| forty wrote:
| Is there any solution that is 1- fully local 2- open source 3-
| fast on CPU only 4- provide reasonable good results for smart
| auto complete ?
|
| I don't want my work to depend on proprietary or even worse,
| online, software. We (software engineer) got lucky that all the
| good tools are free software and I feel we have a collective
| interest in making sure it stays that way (unless we want to be
| like farmers having to pay Monsanto tax for just being able to
| work because we don't know how to work differently anymore)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 3- fast on CPU only
|
| Unless you've got a CPU with AI-specific accelerators and
| unified memory, I doubt you're going to find that.
|
| I can't imagine any model under 7B parameters is useful, and
| even with dual-channel DDR5-6400 RAM (Which I think is 102
| GB/s?) and 8-bit quantization, you could only generate 15
| tokens/sec, and that's assuming your CPU can actually process
| that fast. Your memory bandwidth could easily be the
| bottleneck.
|
| EDIT: If I have something wrong, I'd rather be corrected so I'm
| not spreading incorrect information, rather than being silently
| downvoted.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| deepseek-1b, qwen2.5-coder:1.5b, and starcoder2-3b are all
| pretty fast on cpu due to their small size, you're not going
| to be able to have conversations with them or ask them to
| perform transformations on your code but autocomplete should
| work well
| samuel wrote:
| Fast on cpu it's just not realistic.
|
| Open source, fast and good: openrouter with opensource models
| (Qwen, Llama,etc...) It's not local but these is no vendor
| lockin, you can switch to another provider or invest in a gpu.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Working with people who use this stuff a lot has made my current
| job just so so much harder in every way its astonishing. I used
| to solve problems with code, now I feel like hermeneut or dream
| analyzer: absent of human intention, codebases quickly become
| these weird piles of different idioms, even without considering
| the hallucinations (those have definitely cost me a few sleepless
| nights now either way).
|
| But I am just venting. All of yall have clearly won, I get it. I
| am just grateful I have lived a full life doing other things
| other than computers, so this all isn't too sad other than the
| prospect of being poor again.
|
| I will always have my beautiful emacs and I will always be
| hacking. I will always have my Stallman, my Knuth, my Andy Wingo,
| my SICP. I feel it is accomplishment enough to have progressed in
| this career as I have, especially as a self taught developer. But
| I kinda want to let yall deal with slop now, you really seem to
| like it!
|
| Maybe I'll get another degree now, or just make some silly music
| and video games again. It's liberating just thinking about being
| free from this "new way" we work now.
|
| Thanks for all the fish though!
| forty wrote:
| Wait a bit, it won't last
| xandrius wrote:
| I hear you. There was something special about the old days when
| programming was all about taking your time, thinking through
| every step, and truly understanding what you were building. I
| miss the days of punching cards -- there was a certain
| simplicity to it. You'd write your code, feed it into the
| machine, and if it broke, it was _your_ fault. There was no
| hiding behind tests or CI /CD pipelines, no auto-fixes or
| layers of abstraction. It was just you and the machine, and
| every bug was a lesson you had to learn the hard way. The
| feedback loop was slow, but it was real.
|
| Now, everything feels automated, fast, and often a bit too
| dumb. Sure, it's easier, but it's lost that raw connection to
| the work. We've abstracted away so much that it's hard to feel
| like we're truly engineering something anymore -- it's more
| like patching together random components and hoping it holds. I
| think we lost something when we all started staring at screens
| all day and disconnected from the hands-on nature of building.
| There's a lot of slop now, and while some people thrive on
| that, it's not for everyone.
| hkaal wrote:
| It is part of the great plan:
|
| - Buy GitHub and devalue all individual projects by soft-
| forcing most big projects to go there and lose their branding.
|
| - Gamify and make "development" addictive.
|
| - Use social cliques who hype up each other's useless code and
| PRs and ban critics.
|
| - Make kLOC and plagiarism great again!
|
| This all happened before "AI". "AI" is the last logical step
| that will finally destroy open source, as planned by Microsoft.
| mistercheph wrote:
| llama3.3:70b-instruct-q4_K_M (~43 GB, 2x 3090/4090 or fast memory
| cpu inference on e.g. macs)
|
| or
|
| qwen2.5-coder:32b-instruct-q5_K_M (~23 GB)
|
| or
|
| gemma2:9b-instruct-q6_K (~7.5 GB)
|
| and
|
| https://github.com/bernardo-bruning/ollama-copilot
|
| or alternatively:
|
| https://github.com/ollama/ollama +
| https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Or just get yourself a cerebras cluster and run full
| llama-3.1-405B.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Not for vs2022?
| butz wrote:
| Are there any local models that provide only very limited
| knowledge, e.g. autocomplete and chat for single programming
| language? Or is my thinking, that such limited model would be
| smaller and work faster even on CPU, is incorrect?
| HyprMusic wrote:
| I believe Jetbrains' built in models work like that but
| unfortunately they force you to disable any competing AI chat
| plugins so you lose out on access to Claude etc. if you use
| them.
| richardw wrote:
| I assume the recommendation-edit feedback loop is valuable and so
| is access to code/text that isn't on GitHub yet? Email says
| "GitHub and affiliates may use your data for product
| improvement." Access to all the little changes in between commits
| seems valuable. If you're looking to compete on access to data I
| imagine this helps.
|
| Experts weigh in pls?
| elcapitan wrote:
| Is there some way to check what I currently use? I rarely use
| chat, so 50 per month probably wouldn't be an issue, but
| completion has become my main completion tool, not sure if I'd
| stay under 2000..
| ryandrake wrote:
| Came here to ask the same question. I bet I have 2000+ code
| completions in a single, fevered, Mountain Dew fueled day of
| coding, which would be my quota for a month of the free tier.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Anyone tried replit? Is it worth the money with free copilot now
| from Github?
| pestkranker wrote:
| I hope access to Code Review in GitHub will be available to paid
| users soon! It's going to be a game changer as a first level of
| code review before real people get involved with the PR.
| timrogers wrote:
| I love to hear this as the PM for Copilot code review at
| GitHub!
|
| We're running a preview of the code review feature right now,
| and are looking forward to opening it to all paid subscribers
| soon.
|
| If you'd like to try it sooner, I can hook you up - just email
| my HN username @github.com :)
| igorguerrero wrote:
| I think this is a bad move... I immediately switched, 2000
| completions for me (I have it disabled by default on Neovim) is
| enough, and 50 chats, more than enough I didn't even know they
| had chat like ChatGPT.
| orra wrote:
| I like the mediocrity of the example they headlined: the user
| asks for unit tests. Copilot writes only two test cases, so not
| exactly great coverage. Plus, the test cases uses python's
| unittest, which isn't as slick as pytest.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I use Copilot a lot for writing specs. I've come to prefer that
| it only writes one or two specs to start. It's a good way for
| me to quickly review it has the structure correct. When it
| throws too many at me at once, it can be harder to make broad
| tweaks.
|
| As for `pytest`, I just have to remind it I'm using pytest.
| "Write pytests for this" is sufficient to get it to do what I
| want.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| You can write a prompt stating how tests should be writen in
| your project. It goes on some .vscode file. It's consulted
| anytime it's writing a test, even in a conversation. I state
| where my factory fixtures are to be found.
| sionisrecur wrote:
| Well they didn't ask for pytest tests. I wonder if AIs are like
| bored developers, doing the minimum necessary to complete the
| task instead of going the extra mile and make things better.
| Perhaps that will be the differentiator in the future. Or they
| just need to adjust the pre-prompt.
| siilats wrote:
| For JetBrains IDE-s the open source CodeGPT plugin works much
| better. Many more models to choose from
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Any mobile devs here using Copilot, Cursor or Supermaven? I am
| curious if you have any recommendations.
| flawn wrote:
| On Mobile, my experience was really poor. It really does not
| perform for e.g. Flutter. Probably not too much training data
| on Flutter Code.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Microsoft giving away a losing product for free is the exact kind
| of thing that proves they're too big. This is just a desperate
| move to suck oxygen away from startups in this same space that
| compete with them. We need new antitrust laws ASAP.
| CliveBloomers wrote:
| So you don't have to pay the yearly fee? Also did anyone get the
| email and Outlook picked up the link as harmful?
| sitkack wrote:
| They need more training data.
| limerickwin wrote:
| hm.. it seems like I won't use this service for a while as I got
| the following error message while starting IntelliJ today: You've
| reached your monthly code completion limit. Upgrade your plan to
| Copilot Pro (30-day Free Trial) or wait until -4712-01-01 for
| your limit to reset to continue coding with GitHub Copilot.
| huqedato wrote:
| I switched to Codeium free tier three months ago and never looked
| back to Copilot since then. Copilot is a mess on Julia and
| Elixir/Erlang code.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| They appear to be SO excited about their new feature that they
| sent an email about it to every single email address associated
| with my Github accounts. Which is quite a few addresses that have
| been used for git commits over the years.
| hug wrote:
| Does that include the email addresses configured in your
| ~/.gitconfig?
|
| If so, I apologise to fart@butts.com.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing
| to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now
| stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but
| also now stored in an _invisible proprietary database_
| daemin wrote:
| The StackOverflow database was open source for a while, but I
| haven't checked for a data dump since the new management came
| in.
| Terretta wrote:
| I think you'd find society-at- _small_ was _contributing_ ,
| with perhaps 10x larger yet still quite small number _posting_
| but watering down useful contributions, 100x that lurking, and
| 1000x that just drive-by copy-pasting from SO to their IDE.
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