[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
Author : net01
Score : 260 points
Date : 2025-05-19 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| r0ckarong wrote:
| Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.
| postalrat wrote:
| Now developers can produce 20x the slop and refactor at 5x
| speed.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| In my experience in VSCode, Claude 3.7 produced more
| unsolicited slop, whereas GPT-4.1 didn't. Claude aggressively
| paid attention to type compatibility. Each model would have
| its strengths.
| olex wrote:
| > Once Copilot is done, it'll tag you for review. You can ask
| Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull
| request.
|
| To me, this reads like it'll be a good junior and open up a PR
| with its changes, letting you (the issue author) review and
| merge. Of course, you can just hit "merge" without looking at
| the changes, but then it's kinda on you when unreviewed stuff
| ends up in main.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| A good junior has strong communication skills, humility, asks
| many good questions, has imagination, and a tremendous amount
| of human potential.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| Management: "Why aren't you going faster now that the AI
| generates all the code and we fired half the dev team?"
| odiroot wrote:
| I'm waiting for the first unicorn that uses just vibe coding.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I expect it to be a security nightmare
| freeone3000 wrote:
| And why would that matter?
| timrogers wrote:
| Copilot pushes its work to a branch and creates a pull request,
| and then it's up to you to review its work, approve and merge.
|
| Copilot literally can't push directly to the default branch -
| we don't give it the ability to do that - precisely because we
| believe that all AI-generated code (just like human generated
| code) should be carefully reviewed before it goes to
| production.
|
| (Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)
| muglug wrote:
| > Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks
|
| Oh cool!
|
| > in well-tested codebases
|
| Oh ok never mind
| abraham wrote:
| Have it write tests for everything and then you've got a well
| tested codebase.
| eikenberry wrote:
| You forgot the /s
| danielbln wrote:
| Caveat empor, I've seen some LLMs mock the living hell out of
| everything, to the point of not testing much of anything.
| Something to be aware of.
| yen223 wrote:
| I've seen too many human operators do that too. Definitely
| a problem to watch out for
| throwaway12361 wrote:
| In my experience it works well even without good testing, at
| least for greenfield projects. It just works best if there are
| already tests when creating updates and patches.
| lukehoban wrote:
| As peer commenters have noted, coding agent can be really good
| at improving test coverage when needed.
|
| But also as a slightly deeper observation - agentic coding
| tools really do benefit significantly from good test coverage.
| Tests are a way to "box in" the agent and allow it to check its
| work regularly. While they aren't necessary for these tools to
| work, they can enable coding agents to accomplish a lot more on
| your behalf.
|
| (I work on Copilot coding agent)
| CSMastermind wrote:
| In my experience they write a lot of pointless tests that
| technically increase coverage while not actually adding much
| more value than a good type system/compiler would.
|
| They also have a tendency to suppress errors instead of
| fixing them, especially when the right thing to do is throw
| an error on some edge case.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| You can tell the AI not to suppress errors
| boomskats wrote:
| My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't
| stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've
| been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at
| least 8 times now.
|
| I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third
| authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe
| have tried a fourth time.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| I'm always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects
| because they're getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every
| day.
|
| I'd love for this to blow past cursor. Will definitely tune in
| to see it.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| >I'm always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects
| because they're getting a heavy dose of the internal hype
| every day.
|
| I'm senior enough that I get to frequently see the gap
| between what my dev team thinks of our work and what actual
| customers think.
|
| As a result, I no longer care at all what developers
| (including myself on my own projects) think about the quality
| of the thing they've built.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| What specific keynote are they referring to? I'm curious, but
| thus far my searches have failed
| babelfish wrote:
| MS Build is today
| throwaway12361 wrote:
| Word of advice: just go to YouTube and skip the MS registration
| tax
| jerpint wrote:
| These kinds of patterns allow compute to take much more time than
| a single chat since it is asynchronous by nature, which I think
| is necessary to get to working solutions on harder problems
| lukehoban wrote:
| Yes. This is a really key part of why Copilot coding agent
| feels very different to use than Copilot agent mode in VS Code.
|
| In coding agent, we encourage the agent to be very thorough in
| its work, and to take time to think deeply about the problem.
| It builds and tests code regularly to ensure it understands the
| impact of changes as it makes them, and stops and thinks
| regularly before taking action.
|
| These choices would feel too "slow" in a synchronous IDE based
| experience, but feel natural in a "assign to a peer
| collaborator" UX. We lean into this to provide as rich of a
| problem solving agentic experience as possible.
|
| (I'm working on Copilot coding agent)
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using
| gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major
| productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM
| chat interface).
|
| I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the
| architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One
| easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions
| (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's
| not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask
| about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of
| doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the
| wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately.
|
| I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single
| evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks,
| I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)
| falcor84 wrote:
| > LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture,
| otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt
|
| I wonder if the next phase would be the rise of (AI-driven?)
| "linters" that check that the implementation matches the
| architecture definition.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| And now we've come full circle back to UML-based code
| generation.
|
| Everything old is new again!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single
| evening.
|
| This is a feature, not a bug. LLMs are going to be the next
| "OMG my AWS bill" phenomenon.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Cline very visibly displays the ongoing cost of the task.
| Light edits are about 10 cents, and heavy stuff can run a
| couple of bucks. It's just that the tab accumulates faster
| than I expect.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > Cline very visibly displays the ongoing cost of the task
|
| LLMs are now being positioned as "let them work
| autonomously in the background" which means no one will be
| watching the cost in real time.
|
| Perhaps I can set limits on how much money each task is
| worth, but very few would estimate that properly.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > LLMs are now being positioned as "let them work
| autonomously in the background"
|
| The only people who believe this level of AI marketing
| are the people who haven't yet used the tools.
|
| > which means no one will be watching the cost in real
| time.
|
| Maybe some day there's an agentic coding tool that goes
| off into the weeds and runs for days doing meaningless
| tasks until someone catches it and does a Ctrl-C, but the
| tools I've used are more likely to stop short of the goal
| than to continue crunching indefinitely.
|
| Regardless, it seems like a common experience for first-
| timers to try a light task and then realize they've spent
| $3, instantly setting expectations for how easy it is to
| run up a large bill if you're not careful.
| eterm wrote:
| > Light edits are about 10 cents
|
| Some well-paid developers will excuse this with, "Well if
| it saved me 5 minutes, it's worth an order of magnitude
| than 10 cents".
|
| Which is true, however there's a big caveat: Time saved
| isn't time gained.
|
| You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't
| actuall get those 1,000 hours back.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Hourly_rate / 12 = 5min_rate If
| light_edit_cost < 5min_rate then savings=true
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't
| actuall get those 1,000 hours back.
|
| What do you mean?
|
| If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm
| able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save"
| 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs
| $5 and I pay $4, I saved $
| eterm wrote:
| My point is that saving 1,000 hours each day doesn't
| actually give you 1,000 hours a day to do things with.
|
| You still get your 24 hours, no matter how much time you
| save.
|
| What actually matters is the value of what is delivered,
| not how much time it actually saves you. Justifying costs
| by "time saved" is a good way to eat up your money on
| time-saving devices.
| philkuz wrote:
| I think that models are gonna commoditize, if they haven't
| already. The cost of switching over is rather small,
| especially when you have good evals on what you want done.
|
| Also there's no way you can build a business without
| providing value in this space. Buyers are not that dumb.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If you want to use Cline and are at all price sensitive (in
| these ranges) you have to do manual context management just for
| that reason. I find that too cumbersome and use Windsurf
| (currently with Gemini 2.5 pro) for that reason.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single
| evening.
|
| Consider using Aider, and aggressively managing the context
| (via /add, /drop and /clear).
|
| https://aider.chat/
| danenania wrote:
| My tool Plandex[1] allows you to switch between automatic and
| manual context management. It can be useful to begin a task
| with automatic context while scoping it out and making the
| high level plan, then switch to the more 'aider-style' manual
| context management once the relevant files are clearly
| established.
|
| 1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
|
| Also, a bit more on auto vs. manual context management in the
| docs: https://docs.plandex.ai/core-concepts/context-
| management
| gen220 wrote:
| I, too, recommend aider whenever these discussions crop up;
| it converted me from the "AI tools suck" side of this
| discussion to the "you're using the wrong tool" side.
|
| I'd also recommend creating little `README`'s in your
| codebase that are mainly written with aider as the intended
| audience. In it, I'll explain architecture, what code makes
| (non-)sense to write in this directory, and so on. Has the
| side-effect of being helpful for humans, too.
|
| Nowadays when I'm editing with aider, I'll include the
| project README (which contains a project overview + pointers
| to other README's), and whatever README is most relevant to
| the scope of my session. It's super productive.
|
| I'm yet to find a model that beats the cost-effectiveness of
| Sonnet 3.7. I've tried the latest deepseek models, and while
| I love the price (nearly 50x cheaper?), it's just far too
| error-prone compared to Sonnet 3.7. It generates solid plans
| / architecture discussions, but, unlike Sonnet, the code it
| generates often confidently off-the-mark.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| While its being touted for Greenfield projects I've notices a
| lot of failures when it comes to bootstrapping a stack.
|
| For example it (Gemini 2.5) really struggles with newer
| ecosystem like Fastapi when wiring libraries like SQLAlchemy,
| Pytest, Python-playwright, etc., together.
|
| I find more value in bootstrapping myself, and then using it to
| help with boiler plate once an effective safety harness is in
| place.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I loathe using AI in a greenfield project. There are simply too
| many possible paths, so it seems to randomly switch between
| approaches.
|
| In a brownfield code base, I can often provide it reference
| files to pattern match against. So much easier to get great
| results when it can anchor itself in the rest of your code
| base.
| imiric wrote:
| The trick for greenfield projects is to use it to help you
| design detailed specs and a tentative implementation plan.
| Just bounce some ideas off of it, as with a somewhat smarter
| rubber duck, and hone the design until you arrive at
| something you're happy with. Then feed the detailed
| implementation plan step by step to another model or session.
|
| This is a popular workflow I first read about here[1].
|
| This has been the most useful use case for LLMs for me.
| Actually getting them to implement the spec correctly is the
| hard part, and you'll have to take the reigns and course
| correct often.
|
| [1]: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-
| atm/
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| $15 in an evening sounds like a great deal when you consider
| the cost of highly-paid software engineers
| taurath wrote:
| > Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested
| codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending
| tests, refactoring, and improving documentation.
|
| Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems
| to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase
| has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work.
|
| I think its somewhat telling that they can't share numbers for
| how they're using it internally. I want to know that Microsoft,
| the company famous for dog-fooding is using this day in and day
| out, with success. There's real stuff in there, and my brain has
| an insanely hard time separating the trillion dollars of hype
| from the usefulness.
| twodave wrote:
| I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code
| is generated in some way. [0]
|
| In any case, I think this is the best use case for AI in
| programming--as a force multiplier for the developer. It's for
| the best benefit of both AI and humanity for AI to avoid
| diminishing the creativity, agency and critical thinking skills
| of its human operators. AI should be task oriented, but high
| level decision-making and planning should always be a human
| task.
|
| So I think our use of AI for programming should remain heavily
| human-driven for the long term. Ultimately, its use should
| involve enriching humans' capabilities over churning out
| features for profit, though there are obvious limits to that.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-
| much-a...
| tmpz22 wrote:
| How much of that is protobuf stubs and other forms of banal
| autogenerate code?
| twodave wrote:
| Updated my comment to include the link. As much as 30%
| specifically generated by AI.
| shafyy wrote:
| I would still wager that most of the 30% is some
| boilterplate stuff. Which is ok. But sounds less
| impressive with that caveat.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| The 2nd paragraph contradicts the title.
|
| The actual quote by Satya says, "written by software".
| twodave wrote:
| Sure but then he says in his next sentence he expects 50%
| by AI in the next year. He's clearly using the terms
| interchangeably.
| greatwhitenorth wrote:
| How much was previously generated by intellisense and other
| code gen tools before AI? What is the delta?
| ilaksh wrote:
| You might want to study the history of technology and how
| rapidly compute efficiency has increased as well as how
| quickly the models are improving.
|
| In this context, assuming that humans will still be able to
| do high level planning anywhere near as well as an AI, say
| 3-5 years out, is almost ludicrous.
| _se wrote:
| Reality check time for you: people were saying this exact
| thing 3 years ago. You cannot extrapolate like that.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| > I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS
| code is generated in some way. [0]
|
| Similar to google. MS now requires devs to use ai
| timrogers wrote:
| We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and
| more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That
| dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable
| feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent
| ready to launch today.
|
| So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees
| in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost
| 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot.
|
| In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is
| actually the #5 contributor - so we really are using Copilot
| coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;)
|
| (Source: I'm the product lead at GitHub for Copilot coding
| agent.)
| binarymax wrote:
| So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project?
| What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?
| timrogers wrote:
| What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend
| more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less
| of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks.
|
| Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating
| documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates -
| and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can
| take the load of that and free me up to work on the most
| interesting and complex problems.
| binarymax wrote:
| Thanks for the response... do you see a future where
| engineers are just prompting all the time? Do you see a
| timeline in which todays programming languages are "low
| level" and rarely coded by hand?
| petetnt wrote:
| What about developers who do enjoy writing for example
| high quality documentation? Do you expect that the status
| quo will be that most of the documentation will be AI
| slop and AI itself will just bruteforce itself through
| the issues? How close are we to the point where the AI
| could handle "tricky dependency updates", but not being
| able to handle "most interesting and complex problems"?
| Who writes the tests that are required for the "well
| tested" codebases for GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to work
| properly?
|
| What is the job for the developer now? Writing tickets
| and reviewing low quality PRs? Isn't that the most boring
| and mundane job in the world?
| doug_durham wrote:
| If find your comment "AI Slop" in reference to technical
| documentation to strange. It isn't a choice between
| finely crafted prose versus banal text. It's
| documentation that exists versus documentation that
| doesn't exist. Or documentation that is hopelessly out of
| date. In my experience LLMs do a wonderful job in
| translating from code to documentation. It even does a
| good job inferring the reason for design decisions. I'm
| all in on LLM generated technical documentation. If I
| want well written prose I'll read literature.
| petetnt wrote:
| Documentation is not just translating code to text - I
| don't doubt that LLMs are wonderful at that: that's what
| they understand. They don't understand users though, and
| that's what separates a great documentation writer from
| someone who documents.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Great technical documentation rarely gets written. You
| can tell the LLM the audience they are targeting and it
| will do a reasonable job. I truly appreciate technical
| writers, and hold great ones in special esteem. We live
| in a world where the market doesn't value this.
| skydhash wrote:
| The market value good documentation. Anything critical
| and commonly used is pretty well documented (linux,
| databases, software like Adobe's,...). You can see how
| many books/articles have been written about those
| systems.
| sourdoughness wrote:
| We're not talking about AI writing books about the
| systems, though. We're talking about going from an
| undocumented codebase to a decently documented one, or
| one with 50% coverage going to 100%.
|
| Those orgs that value high-quality documentation won't
| have undocumented codebases to begin with.
|
| And let's face it, like writing code, writing docs does
| have a lot of repetitive, boring, boilerplate work, which
| I bet is exactly why it doesn't get done. If an LLM is
| filling out your API schema docs, then you get to spend
| more time on the stuff that's actually interesting.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _Most developers don 't love writing tests, or updating
| documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates_
|
| So they won't like working on their job ?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| You know exactly what they meant, and you know they're
| correct.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I like updating documentation and feel that it's fairly
| important to be doing myself so I actually understand
| what the code / services do?
|
| I use all of these tools, but you also know what "they're
| doing"...
|
| I know our careers are changing dramatically, or going
| away (I'm working on a replacement for myself), but I
| just like listening to all the "what we're doing is
| really _helping you_... "
| ilaksh wrote:
| That's a completely nonsensical question given how quickly
| things are evolving. No one has a five year project
| timeline.
| binarymax wrote:
| Absolutely the wrong take. We MUST think about what might
| happen in several years. Anyone who says we shouldn't is
| not thinking about this technology correctly. I work on
| AI tech. I think about these things. If the teams at
| Microsoft or GitHub are not, then we should be pushing
| them to do so.
| ilaksh wrote:
| He asked that in the context of an actual specific
| project. It did not make sense way he asked it. And it's
| the executive's to plan that out five years down the
| line.. although I guarantee you none of them are trying
| to predict that far.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What model does it use? gpt-4.1? Or can it use o3 sometimes?
| Or the new Codex model?
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Question you may have a very informed perspective on:
|
| where are we wrt the agent surveying open issues (say, via
| JIRA) and evaluating which ones it would be most effective at
| handling, and taking them on, ideally with some check-in for
| conirmation?
|
| Or, contrariwise, from having product management agents which
| do track and assign work?
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Check out this idea: https://fairwitness.bot
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44030394).
|
| The entire website was created by Claude Sonnet through
| Windsurf Cascade, but with the "Fair Witness" prompt
| embedded in the global rules.
|
| If you regularly guide the LLM to "consult a user
| experience designer", "adopt the multiple perspectives of a
| marketing agenc", etc., it will make rather decent
| suggestions.
|
| I've been having pretty good success with this approach,
| granted mostly at the scale of starting the process with
| "build me a small educational website to convey this
| concept".
| aegypti wrote:
| Tell Claude the site is down!
| overfeed wrote:
| > we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contributed by
| Copilot
|
| I'm curious to know how many Copilot PRs were _not_ merged
| and /or required human take-overs.
| sethammons wrote:
| textbook survivorship bias
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
|
| every bullet hole in that plane is the 1k PRs contributed
| by copilot. The missing dots, and whole missing planes, are
| unaccounted for. Ie, "ai ruined my morning"
| n2d4 wrote:
| It's not survivorship bias. Survivorship bias would be if
| you made any conclusions from the 1000 merged PRs (eg.
| "90% of all merged PRs did not get reverted"). But simply
| stating the number of PRs is not that.
| tines wrote:
| As with all good marketing, the conclusions omitted and
| implied, no?
| MoreQARespect wrote:
| If they measured that too it would make it harder to
| justify a MSFT P/E ratio of 29.6.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| "We need to get 1000 PRs merged from Copilot" "But that'll
| take more time" "Doesn't matter"
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I do agree that some scepticism is due here but how can
| we tell if we're treading into "moving the goal posts"
| territory?
| overfeed wrote:
| I'd love to know where you think the starting position of
| the goal posts was.
|
| Everyone who has used AI coding tools interactively or as
| agents knows they're unpredictably hit or miss. The old,
| non-agent Copilot has a dashboard that shows org-wide
| rejection rates for for paying customers. I'm curious to
| learn what the equivalent rejection-rate for the agent is
| for the people who make the thing.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent
| itself is actually the #5 contributor - so we really are
| using Copilot coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;)
|
| Really cool, thanks for sharing! Would you perhaps consider
| implementing something like these stats that aider keeps on
| "aider writing itself"? - https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html
| KenoFischer wrote:
| What's the motivation for restricting to Pro+ if billing is
| via premium requests? I have a (free, via open source work)
| Pro subscription, which I occasionally use. I would have been
| interested in trying out the coding agent, but how do I know
| if it's worth $40 for me without trying it ;).
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| When I repeated to other tech people from about 2012 to 2020
| that the technological singularity was very close, no one
| believed me. Coding is just the easiest to automate away into
| almost oblivion. And, too many non technical people drank the
| Flavor Aid for the fallacy that it can be "abolished"
| completely soon. It will gradually come for all sorts of
| knowledge work specialists including electrical and
| mechanical engineers, and probably doctors too. And, of
| course, office work too. Some iota of a specialists will
| remain to tune the bots, and some will remain in the fields
| to work with them for where expertise is absolutely required,
| but widespread unemployment of what were options for
| potential upward mobility into middle class are being
| destroyed and replaced with nothing. There won't be
| "retraining" or handwaving other opportunities for the
| "basket of labor", but competition of many uniquely, far
| overqualified people for ever dwindling opportunities.
|
| _It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
| his salary depends upon his not understanding it._ - Upton
| Sinclair
| kenjackson wrote:
| I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at
| the time. We generally believed that automation would get
| rid of repetitive work that didn't require a lot of
| thought. And in many ways programming was seen almost at
| the top of the heap. Intellectually demanding and requiring
| high levels of precision and rigor.
|
| Who would've thought (except you) that this would be one of
| the things that AI would be especially suited for. I don't
| know what this progression means in the long run. Will good
| engineers just become 1000x more productive as they manage
| X number of agents building increasingly complex code (with
| other agents constantly testing, debugging, refactoring and
| documenting them) or will we just move to a world where we
| just have way fewer engineers because there is only a need
| for so much code.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| > I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical
| at the time.
|
| Well, that's back rationalization. I saw the advances
| like conducting meta sentiment analysis on medical papers
| in the 00's. Deep learning was clearly just the
| beginning. [0]
|
| > Who would've thought (except you)
|
| You're othering me, which is rude, and you're speaking as
| though you speak for an entire group of people. Seems
| kind of arrogant.
|
| 0. (2014) https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_won
| derful_and_te...
| throw1235435 wrote:
| Its interesting that even people initially skeptical are
| now thinking they are on the "chopping block" so to
| speak. I'm seeing it all over the internet and the slow
| realization that what supposed to be the "top of the
| heap" is actually at the bottom - not because of
| difficulty of coding but because the AI labs themselves
| are domain experts in software and therefore have the
| knowledge and data to tackle it as a problem first. I
| also think to a degree they "smell blood" and fear, more
| so than greed, is the best marketing tool. Many invested
| a good chunk of time on this career, and it will result
| in a lot of negative outcomes. Its a warning to other
| intellectual careers that's for sure - and you will start
| seeing resistance to domain knowledge sharing from more
| "professionalized" careers for sure.
|
| My view is in between yours: A bit of column A and B in
| the sense both outcomes to an extent will play out. There
| will be less engineers but not by the factor of
| productivity (Jevon's paradox will play out but
| eventually tap out), there will be even more software
| especially of the low end, and the ones that are there
| will be expected to be smarter and work harder for the
| same or less pay grateful they got a job at all. There
| will be more "precision and rigor", more keeping up
| required by workers, but less reward for the workers that
| perform it. In a capitalist economy it won't be seen as a
| profession to aspire to anymore by most people.
|
| Given most people don't live to work, and use their
| career to also finance and pursue other life meanings it
| won't be viable for most people long term especially when
| other careers give "more bang for buck" w.r.t effort put
| into them. The uncertainty in the SWE career that most I
| know are feeling right now means to newcomers I recommend
| on the balance of risk/reward its better to go another
| career path especially for juniors who have a longer
| runway. To be transparent I want to be wrong, but the
| risk of this is getting higher now everyday.
|
| i.e. AI is a dream for the capital class, and IMO
| potentially disastrous for social mobility long term.
| dsl wrote:
| > In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent
| itself is actually the #5 contributor
|
| How does this align with Microsoft's AI safety principals?
| What controls are in place to prevent Copilot from deciding
| that it could be more effective with less limitations?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Haha
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| > 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot
|
| I'd like a breakdown of this phrase, how much human work vs
| Copilot and in what form, autocomplete vs agent. It's not
| specified seems more like a marketing trickery than real data
| ctkhn wrote:
| That's great, our leadership is heavily pushing ai-generated
| tests! Lol
| mjr00 wrote:
| From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a _very_
| management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an
| Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP
| because they refused to install the internal AI coding
| assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI"
| as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI
| assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally.
| Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# and PowerShell which
| limits its usefulness at MS.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| If you aren't using AI day-to-day then you're not adapting.
| Software engineering is not going to look at all the same in
| 5-10 years.
| mjr00 wrote:
| What does this have to do with my comment? Did you mean to
| reply to someone else?
|
| I don't understand what this has to do with AI adoption at
| MS (and Google/AWS, while we're at it) being management-
| driven.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| That's exactly what senior executives who aren't coding are
| saying everywhere.
|
| Meanwhile, engineers are using it for code completion and
| as a Google search alternative.
|
| I don't see much difference here at all, the only habit to
| change is learning to trust an AI solution as much as a
| Stack Overflow answer. Though the benefit of SO is each
| comment is timestamped and there are alternative takes,
| corrections, caveats in the comments.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| It's just tooling. Costs nothing to wait for it to be
| better. It's not like you're going miss out on AGI. The
| cost of actually testing every slop code generator is non-
| trivial.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| AIs are boring
| mrcsharp wrote:
| > Microsoft, the company famous for dog-fooding
|
| This was true up around 15 years ago. Hasn't been the case
| since.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| GitHub had this exact feature late last year itself, perhaps
| under a slightly different name.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Are you thinking if Copilot Workspaces?
|
| That seemed to drop off the Github changelog after February.
| I'm wondering if that team got reallocated to the copilot
| agent.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Probably. Also this new feature seems like an
| expansion/refinement of Copilot Workspaces to better fit the
| classic Github UX: "assign an issue to Copilot to get a PR"
| sounds exactly like the workflow Copilot Workspaces wanted to
| have when it grew up.
| timrogers wrote:
| I think you're probably thinking of Copilot Workspace
| (<https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-
| copilo...>).
|
| Copilot Workspace could take a task, implement it and create a
| PR - but it had a linear, highly structured flow, and wasn't
| deeply integrated into the GitHub tools that developers already
| use like issues and PRs.
|
| With Copilot coding agent, we're taking all of the great work
| on Copilot Workspace, and all the learnings and feedback from
| that project, and integrating it more deeply into GitHub and
| really leveraging the capabilities of 2025's models, which
| allow the agent to be more fluid, asynchronous and autonomous.
|
| (Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Is Copilot a classic case of slow megacorp gets outflanked by
| more creative and unhindered newcomers (ie Cursor)?
|
| It seems Copilot could have really owned the vibe coding space.
| But that didn't happen. I wonder why? Lots of ideas gummed up in
| organizational inefficiencies, etc?
| ilaksh wrote:
| This is a direct threat to Cursor. The smarter the models get,
| the less often programmers really need to dig into an IDE, even
| one with AI in it. Give it a couple of years and there will be
| a lot of projects that were done just by assigning tasks where
| no one even opened Cursor or anything.
| theusus wrote:
| I have been so far disappointed by copilot's offerings. It's just
| not good enough for anything valuable. I don't want you to write
| my getter and setter. And call it a day.
| rvz wrote:
| I think we expected disappointment with this one. (I expected
| it at least)[0]
|
| But the upgraded Copilot was just in response to Cursor and
| Winsurf.
|
| We'll see.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904611
| asadm wrote:
| In the early days on LLM, I had developed an "agent" using github
| actions + issues workflow[1], similar to how this works. It was
| very limited but kinda worked ie. you assign it a bug and it
| fired an action, did some architect/editing tasks, validated
| changes and finally sent a PR.
|
| Good to see an official way of doing this.
|
| 1. https://github.com/asadm/chota
| nodja wrote:
| I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will
| slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with
| copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes
| to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick
| (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to
| 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and
| forth with something that takes this long is not productive. It's
| literally faster to open claude/chatgpt on a new tab and paste
| the question and code there and paste it back into vscode than
| using their ask/edit/agent tools.
|
| I've cancelled my copilot subscription last week and when it
| expires in two weeks I'll mostly likely shift to local models for
| autocomplete/simple stuff.
| brushfoot wrote:
| My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to
| several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds.
|
| That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent
| edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck
| was, but it hasn't come back.
|
| I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I
| dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot,
| and it's snappy.
| nodja wrote:
| Here's a video of what it looks like with sonnet 3.7.
|
| https://streamable.com/rqlr84
|
| The claude and gemini models tend to be the slowest (yes,
| including flash). 4o is currently the fastest but still not
| great.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| For me, the speed varies from day to day (Sonnet 3.7), but
| I've never seen it this slow.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Several minutes? Something is seriously wrong. For most models,
| it takes seconds.
| nodja wrote:
| 2m27s for a partial response editing a 178 line file (it
| failed with an error, which seems to happen a lot with
| claude, but that's another issue).
|
| https://streamable.com/rqlr84
| joelthelion wrote:
| I don't know, I feel this is the wrong level to place the AI at
| this moment. Chat-based AI programming (such as Aider) offers
| more control, while being almost as convenient.
| sync wrote:
| Anthropic just announced the same thing for Claude Code, same
| day: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-
| action...
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| And Google's version: https://jules.google
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Which model does it use? Will this let me select which model to
| use? I have seen a big difference in the type of code that
| different models produce, although their prompts may be to
| blame/credit in part.
| qwertox wrote:
| I assume you can select whichever one you want (GPT-4o,
| o3-mini, Claude 3.5, 3.7, 3.7 thinking, Gemini 2.0 Flash,
| GPT=4.1 and the previews o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and 04-mini),
| subject to the pricing multiplicators they announced recently
| [0].
|
| Edit: From the TFA: Using the agent consumes GitHub Actions
| minutes and Copilot premium requests, starting from
| entitlements included with your plan.
|
| [0] https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-
| copilot/monitori...
| shwouchk wrote:
| I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and
| scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use
| dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the
| correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Given that PRs run actions in a more trusted context for
| private repos, this is a bit concerning.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| This is something I've noticed as well with different AIs. They
| seem to disproportionately trust data read from the web. For
| example, I asked to check if some obvious phishing pages were
| scams and multiple times I got just a summary of the content as
| if it was authoritative. Several times I've gotten some random
| chinese repo with 2 stars presented as if it was the industry
| standard solution, since that's what it said in the README.
|
| On an unrelated note, it also suggested I use the "Strobe"
| protocol for encryption and sent me to https://strobe.cool
| which is ironic considering that page is all about making one
| hallucinate.
| jaymzcampbell wrote:
| > ... sent me to...
|
| Oh wow, that was great - particularly if I then look at my
| own body parts (like my palm) that I know are not moving,
| it's particularly disturbing. That's a really well done
| effect, I've seen something similar but nothing quite like
| that.
| qwertox wrote:
| In hindsight it was a mistake that Google killed Google Code.
| Then again, I guess they wouldn't have put enough effort into it
| to develop into a real GitHub alternative.
|
| Now Microsoft sits on a goldmine of source code and has the
| ability to offer AI integration even to private repositories. I
| can upload my code into a private repo and discuss it with an AI.
|
| The only thing Google can counter with would be to build tools
| which developers install locally, but even then I guess that the
| integration would be limited.
|
| And considering that Microsoft owns the "coding OS" VS Code, it
| makes Google look even worse. Let's see what they come up with
| tomorrow at Google I/O, but I doubt that it will be a serious
| competition for Microsoft. Maybe for OpenAI, if they're smart,
| but not for Microsoft.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Or they'll just buy Cursor
| geodel wrote:
| You win some you lose some. Google could have continued with
| Google code. Microsoft could've continued with their phone OS.
| It is difficult to know when to hold and when to fold.
| abraham wrote:
| Gemini has some GitHub integrations
|
| https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Google Cloud has a pre-GA product called "Secure Source
| Manager" that looks like a fork of Gitea:
| https://cloud.google.com/secure-source-manager/docs/overview
|
| Definitely not Google Code, but better than Cloud Source
| Repositories.
| fvold wrote:
| The biggest change Copilot has done for me so far is to have me
| replace my VSCode with VSCodium to be sure it doesn't sneak any
| uploading of my code to a third party without my knowing.
|
| I'm all for new tech getting introduced and made useful, but
| let's make it all opt in, shall we?
| qwertox wrote:
| Care to explain? Where are they uploading code to?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Kicking the can down the road. So we can all produce more code
| faster but there is NSB. Most of my time isn't spent writing the
| code anyway.
| sudhar172 wrote:
| Nice
| azhenley wrote:
| Looks like their GitHub Copilot Workspace.
|
| https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace
| net01 wrote:
| on a other note https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/17700
| GitHub's automated auto-merged DMCA sync PRs get automated
| copilot reviews for every single one.
|
| AMAZING
| quantadev wrote:
| I love Copilot in VSCode. I have it set to use Claude most of the
| time, but it let's you pick your fav LLM, for it to use. I just
| open the files I'm going to refactor, type into the chat window
| what I want done, click 'accept' on every code change it
| recommends in it's answer, causing VSCode to auto-merge the
| changes into my code. Couldn't possibly be simpler. Then I
| scrutinize and test. If anything went wrong I just use GitLens to
| rollback the change, but that's very rare.
|
| Especially now that Copilot supports MCP I can plug in my own
| custom "Tools" (i.e. Function calling done by the AI Agent), and
| I have everything I need. Never even bothered trying Cursor or
| Windsurf, which i'm sure are great too, but _mainly_ since
| they're just forks of VSCode, as the IDE.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Have you tried the agent mode instead of the ask mode? With
| just a bit more prompting, it does a pretty good job of finding
| the files it needs to use on its own. Then again, I've only
| used it in smaller projects so larger ones might need more
| manual guidance.
| alvis wrote:
| God save the juniors...
| sethops1 wrote:
| > Copilot coding agent is rolling out to GitHub Mobile users on
| iOS and Android, as well as GitHub CLI.
|
| Wait, is this going to pollute the `gh` tool? Please tell me this
| isn't happening.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| ubuntu@pc:~$ gh --help
|
| Sure! How can I help you?
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| UX-wise...
|
| I kind of love the idea that all of this works in the familiar
| flow of raising an issue and having a magic coder swoop in and
| making a pull request.
|
| At the same time, I have been spoiled by Cursor. I feel I would
| end up preferring that the magic coder is right there with me in
| the IDE where I can run things and make adjustments without
| having to do a followup request or comment on a line.
| allthenopes25 wrote:
| "Drowning in technical debt?"
|
| Stop fighting and sink!
|
| But rest assured that with Github Copilot Coding Agent, your
| codebase will develop larger and larger volumes of new, exciting,
| underexplored technical debt that you can't be blamed for, and
| your colleagues will follow you into the murky depths soon.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Major scam alert, they are training on your code in private repos
| if you use this
|
| You can tell because they advertise "Pro" and "Pro+" but then the
| FAQ reads,
|
| > Does GitHub use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train
| GitHub's model? > No. GitHub does not use either Copilot Business
| or Enterprise data to train its models.
|
| Aka, even paid individuals plans are getting brain raped
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