[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 1795 points
Date : 2021-06-29 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (copilot.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (copilot.github.com)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I absolutely hate whenever I see patterns in my code. The first
| thing I think is "There has to be a way to automate this" This is
| not what I had in mind, but if it's as good as people seem to
| say, it might be a good step. I can't believe I am considering a
| Microsoft product after 15 years of avoiding them as much as I
| could.
| dgdosen wrote:
| want
| mtnGoat wrote:
| What a cool project, I'm impressed. Looking forward to checking
| it out.
| wozer wrote:
| A great way to use this would be to create very good tests
| (manually) and then let the AI write the code. Maybe even with a
| feedback loop: when a test fails, the AI automatically tries a
| different approach.
| cbsks wrote:
| I don't think we need to start looking for new career paths yet.
| This example has a few bugs and it took me longer to track them
| down than it would have to write it myself:
| #!/bin/bash # List all python source files which are more
| than 1KB and contain the word "copilot". find . \
| -name "*.py" \ -size +1000 \ -exec grep -n
| copilot {}\;
|
| "-exec grep -n copilot {}\;" needs to have a space before the
| semicolon otherwise find fails with "find: missing argument to
| '-exec'".
|
| The "1000" in "-size +1000" has a unit of 512 byte blocks so it
| is looking for files that are greater than 512000 bytes, not 1KB.
| This would be very easy to miss in a code review and is one of
| those terrible bugs that causes the code to mostly work, but not
| quite.
|
| https://linux.die.net/man/1/find
| mitjak wrote:
| the main argument against Copilot for me. it takes longer to
| grok existing code than just write it from ground up.
| toxik wrote:
| This is actually a pretty important thing to understand. It
| can be better to rewrite than fix an existing mess. It's
| similar to construction work in that sense: if you rebuild,
| you know what's inside the walls.
| ok2938 wrote:
| That's why this copilot won't fly. The junior programmer will
| not be able to spot subtle errors but will kind-of feel
| "productive" by some random pastes from a giant brain, which
| cannot be interrogated.
|
| If anything, I see copilot generating more work for existing,
| senior programmers - so there you have it.
| nemetroid wrote:
| It also doesn't list the files. It prints all matching lines
| (and their line numbers), _without_ the corresponding
| filenames.
| awestroke wrote:
| I read this as a criticism of bash
| hashingroll wrote:
| I don't see why. It is on Copilot to produce syntactically
| correct code that at least doesn't fail to run, even if we
| ignore the correctness.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| This is very impressive!
|
| OpenAI's tech opens an ethical Pandora's box:
|
| 1. It's clear that the raw inputs to all of OpenAI's outputs
| originated with real, human creativity.
|
| 2. So, in a sense, OpenAI is laundering creativity. It reads in
| creative works, does complicated (and, yes, groundbreaking)
| transformations, and produces an output that is hard to trace to
| any particular source.
|
| 3. Yet, isn't that effectively what human brains do too? Perhaps
| OpenAI lacks the capacity for true invention, but I'd argue that
| most people live their whole lives without a meaningful creative
| contribution as well.
|
| All told, I don't have a good framework for thinking about the
| ethics here. So instead, I'll simply say:
|
| Wow.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Yet, isn't that effectively what human brains do too?
|
| If I want to watch a bunch of movies, I have to pay the theater
| for each movie, or pay netflix, or whatever. The screenplay I
| write afterwards belongs to me, but the learning process
| involved me paying for access to others' work. That's what's
| often missing here. But at the same time, if you train on
| legally public data, there's no 'theater' to be paid.
|
| (Often, people train on illegally public data though, like the
| eleuther folks. That's a whole extra can of worms I've ranted
| about plenty).
|
| Maybe we'll start seeing licenses with a section saying "not
| for use as training data for commercial models."
| visarga wrote:
| > Maybe we'll start seeing licenses with a section saying
| "not for use as training data for commercial models."
|
| Considering that the impact of a single example is extremely
| small in training a model, and that it is trained on an
| ungodly amount of examples, then I wonder if the effort of
| forbidding its use has any real benefits.
| koolhaas wrote:
| I would change your question from "does it have any real
| benefits" to "does it have a practical effect on the model"
|
| Benefits to me are clear: giving a developer choice over
| how their source code is used with for-profit, opaque, next
| generation ML models.
|
| But yes, drop in the ocean in terms of the full data set.
| But that shouldn't be an excuse to remove user choice.
| fulafel wrote:
| What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box?
| Maybe unfair competition from having very good tools compared
| to other programmers, or havin irresponsibly shallow
| understanding of what the produced code does?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the
| box?
|
| Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code?
|
| It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ...
| and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs
| like food, housing and medical care.
| visarga wrote:
| Programmers change jobs like socks and are open to learning
| new things all the time. Software has been automating
| itself for 70 years and look how many people have jobs in
| this field.
|
| Also, human desire is a bottomless pit, where automation
| saves we spend even more.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Everyone gets into programming for their own reasons.
|
| But to my personal philosophy: if I'm not coding to put
| myself out of a job, I'm thinking about the problem wrong.
|
| When there are no more lines of code to be written, I shall
| do something else, content that I have done my part to free
| humanity from the burden of human-machine interfacing. I
| hear dairy farming is a demanding and rewarding challenge.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Dairy farmers aren't really looking for workers ...
| ironically, it is a job that has been almost eliminated
| by automatic milking machines and robotic harvesters.
|
| https://www.thebullvine.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/03/Figur...
| fulafel wrote:
| I wonder if HLL compiler authors had fears about this back
| when writing assembly and machine code was the norm.
|
| But good point about the ambivalent result of eliminating
| busywork. Food, housing and medical care is available in
| most western countries for people who choose to not get a
| job... I think the social status problem and guilt of
| freeriding are also big factors preventing prople from
| living more leisurely lives in these countries.
| milofeynman wrote:
| There are some really weird licensing problems. Like does
| your code license say they can use the your code to train AIs
| that then reproduce very similar code to you but with no
| attribution etc in someone else's codebase.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| s/OpenAI/Photoshop
|
| Reads similarly :)
| ohnoesjmr wrote:
| Great.
|
| Now, how about you use that to implement a non-horrible search
| experience?
| natfriedman wrote:
| Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the
| incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're
| so excited to be able to show it off today.
|
| Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the
| most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the
| technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a
| paid product at some point in the future.
| ggsp wrote:
| One question: how long is the waitlist? Very excited to try
| this!
| [deleted]
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Is there a public API? Will it be documented? Are you open to
| folks porting the VSCode plugin to other editors (I.e.
| kakoune's autocomplete)?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| If I put a section in my LICENSE.txt prohibiting use as
| training data in commercial models, would that be sufficient to
| keep my code out of models like this?
| mdaniel wrote:
| Only if they trained a model to be able to read and
| understand LICENSE.txt files -- wowzers what a monster
| improvement that would be for the world
|
| Or, I guess a sentinel phrase that the scraper could
| explicitly check: `github-copilot-optout: true`
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Or it could explicitly check for known standard licenses
| that permit it, if it were opt in instead of opt out, the
| way most everything else in software licensing is opt-in
| for letting others use.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If I put a section in my LICENSE.txt prohibiting use as
| training data in commercial models, would that be sufficient
| to keep my code out of models like this?
|
| Neither in practice (because it doesn't look for it) nor
| legally in the US, if Microsoft's contention that such use is
| "fair use" under US copyright law.
|
| That "fair use" is an Americanism and not a general feature
| of copyright law might create some interesting international
| wrinkles, though.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Their contention is
|
| > Why was GitHub Copilot trained on data from publicly
| available sources?
|
| > Training machine learning models on publicly available
| data is now common practice across the machine learning
| community. The models gain insight and accuracy from the
| public collective intelligence. But this is a new space,
| and we are keen to engage in a discussion with developers
| on these topics and lead the industry in setting
| appropriate standards for training AI models.
|
| Personally, I'd prefer this to be like any other software
| license. If you want to use my IP for training, you need a
| license. If I use MIT license or something that lets you
| use my code however you want, then have at it. If I don't,
| then you can't just use it because it's public.
|
| Then you'd see a lot more open models. Like a GPL model
| whose code and weights must be shared because the bulk of
| the easily accessible training data says it has to be open,
| or something like that.
|
| I realize, however, that I'm in the minority of the ML
| community feeling this way, and that it certainly is
| standard practice to just use data wherever you can get it.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > however you want
|
| I don't see any attribution here.
|
| MIT may say "substantial portions" but BSD just says
| "must retain".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| When I referenced their contention on Fair Use, that's
| not what I was referencing, but instead Github CEO Nat
| Friedman's comment _in this thread_ that "In general: (1)
| training ML systems on public data is fair use".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678354
| blibble wrote:
| would be interesting if someone uploaded a leaked copy of
| the NT kernel, then coerced the system to regurgitate it
| piece by piece
|
| would MS position then be different?
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| In the end this would slightly increase likelihood of such
| sections appearing in licenses generated by AIs.
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| Are those developers worried about having their jobs replaced
| by a code-writing AI? :)
|
| I mean... why would 95% of developer jobs exist with this tech
| available?
|
| You just need that 5% of devs who actually write novel code for
| this thing to learn from.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
|
| An Isaac Asimov story about someone who didn't take to the
| program and, as a result, got picked to create new things
| because _someone_ has to make them.
| mooreds wrote:
| I love this story.
|
| If you want to read the whole thing, it's here:
|
| https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
| kif wrote:
| I visited https://copilot.github.com/, and I don't know how to
| feel. Obviously it's a nice achievement, not gonna lie.
|
| But I have a feeling it will end up causing more work. e.g. the
| `averageRuntimeInSeconds` example, I had to spend a bit of time
| to see if it was actually correct. It has to be, since it's on
| the front page, but then I realized I'd need to spend time
| reviewing the AI's code.
|
| It's cool as a toy, but I'd like to see where it is one year
| from now when the wow factor has cooled down a bit.
| taneq wrote:
| > I had to spend a bit of time to see if it was actually
| correct.
|
| Interesting point - it reminds me of the idea that it's
| harder to debug code than to write it. Is it also harder to
| interpret code you didn't write than to write it?
| ec109685 wrote:
| It has the ability to generate unit tests as well, which will
| help cut down some on the verification side if you feed it
| enough cases.
| IncRnd wrote:
| If you question the veracity of the code that is produced,
| you have to question the usefulness of the unit test that
| is produced.
| CloselyChunky wrote:
| Well then you have to check the generated tests. That's
| just one more layer, isn't it?
| freedomben wrote:
| I think I'd love to use this to generate tests and then
| write the functions myself. Test generation seems like a
| killer feature.
| taftster wrote:
| Yes!! Totally agree. Imagine writing a method and then
| telling an AI to write your unit tests for it. The AI
| would likely be able to come up with the edge cases and
| such that you would not normally take the time to write.
|
| While I think the AI generating your mainline code is
| interesting, I must certainly agree that generating test
| code would be the killer feature. I would like to see
| this showcased a little more on the copilot page.
| fay59 wrote:
| Have there yet been reports of the AI writing code that has
| security bugs? Is that something folks are on the lookout for?
| natfriedman wrote:
| I haven't seen any reports of this, but it's certainly
| something we want to guard against:
| https://copilot.github.com/#faq-can-github-copilot-
| introduce...
| nightski wrote:
| I'm glad they find it head exploding but my concern is that it
| would be most head exploding to newbies who don't have the
| skill to discern if AI code is how it should be written.
|
| For a seasoned veteran writing the code was never really the
| hard part in the first place.
| amelius wrote:
| > For a seasoned veteran writing the code was never really
| the hard part in the first place.
|
| Yes, to most coders this Copilot software is just a fancy
| keyboard.
| williamdclt wrote:
| Sounds great. I'm a bad typist, anything that makes me type
| less (vim, voice assistant, completion) is a big win to me
| amelius wrote:
| Vim is great because it doesn't try to be smart.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and
| the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji
|
| Apart from developing this "head exploding" stuff, couldn't
| some of these incredibly talented hundreds of developers fix
| the github code search?
| mdellavo wrote:
| What do you think about this being overall detrimental to code
| quality as it allows people to just blindly accept completions
| without really understanding the generated code. Similar to
| copy-and-paste coding.
|
| The first example parse_expenses.py uses a float for currency -
| that seems to be a pretty big error that's being overlooked
| along with other minor issues around no error handling.
|
| I would say the quality of the generated code in
| parse_expenses.py is not very high, certainly not for the
| banner example.
|
| EDIT - I just noticed Github reordered the examples on
| copilot.github.com in order to bury the issues with
| parse_expenses.py for now. I guess I got my answer.
| ehsankia wrote:
| How is it different from the status quo of people just doing
| the wrong thing or copy pasting bad code? Yes there's the
| whole discussion below about float currency values, but I
| could very well see the opposite happening too, where this
| thing recommends better code that the person would've written
| otherwise.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > How is it different from the status quo of people just
| doing the wrong thing or copy pasting bad code?
|
| Well, yes, the wrong code would be used. However - the
| wrong code would then become more prevelant as an answer
| from gh, causing more people to blindly use it. It's a
| self-perpetuating cycle of finding and using bad and wrong
| code.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Hmm, not quite. My point was that if they aren't a good
| enough programmer to understand why the code is wrong,
| then chances are they would've written bad code or copy
| pasted bad code anyways. It just makes the cycle faster.
|
| And again, I could argue that the opposite could happen
| too, people who would otherwise have written bad code
| could be given suggestions of better code that they
| would've written.
| vincnetas wrote:
| People make mistakes. With computers people make mistakes
| much faster :)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It seems that copilot lets one cycle through options, which
| is an opportunity for it to facilitate programmers moving
| from a naive solution to one they hadn't thought of that is
| more correct.
|
| (Unclear to me yet whether the design takes advantage of
| this opportunity)
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| I use a similar feature in IntelliJ idea, and I've often
| found that first time I learn about new feature in the
| language is when I get a suggestion. I usually explore topic
| much more deeply at that time. So far from helping me copy-
| paste, I find code suggestions help me explore new features
| of the language and framework, that I might not have known
| about.
| as300 wrote:
| Why would you say it's an error to use a float for currency?
| I would imagine it's better to use a float for calculations
| then round when you need to report a value rather than
| accumulate a bunch of rounding errors while doing
| computations.
| mdellavo wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use-
| doub...
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| Because it's an error to use floats in almost every
| situation. And currency is something where you don't want
| rounding errors, period. The more I've learned about
| floating point numbers over the years, the less I want to
| use them. Floats solve a specific problem, and they're a
| reasonable trade-off for that kind of problem, but the
| problem they solve is fairly narrow.
| RobLach wrote:
| Standard practice is to use a signed decimal number with an
| appropriate precision that you scale around.
| Tainnor wrote:
| It is widely accepted that using floats for money[1] is
| wrong because floating point numbers cannot guarantee
| precision.
|
| The fact that you ask is a very good case in point though:
| Many programmers are not aware of this issue and would
| maybe not question the "wisdom" of the AI code generator.
| In that sense, it could have a similar effect to blindly
| copy-pasted answers from SO, just with even less friction.
|
| [1] Exceptions may apply to e.g. finance mathematics where
| you need to work with statistics and you're not going to
| expect exact results anyway.
| joquarky wrote:
| You don't want to kick the can down to the floating point
| standard. Design for deterministic behavior. Find the edge
| cases, go over it with others and explicitly address the
| edge case issues so that they always behave as expected.
| IncRnd wrote:
| By definition, currency uses _fixed point_ arithmetic not
| _floating point_ arithmetic.
| shishy wrote:
| micro-dollars are a better way of representing it (multiply
| by 10e6); store as bigint.
|
| See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/51238749
| IncRnd wrote:
| No, they aren't. Micro-dollars do not exist, so this
| method is guaranteed to cause errors.
| mdellavo wrote:
| this is a common approach when you are dealing in rates
| less than .01 -- you just need to be sure you are
| rounding correctly
| IncRnd wrote:
| When you are approximating fixed-point using floating-
| point there is a lot more you need to do correctly other
| than roun ding. Your representation must have enough
| precision and range for the beginning inputs,
| intermediate results, and final results. You must be able
| to represent all expected numbers. And on. There is a lot
| more involved than what you mentioned.
|
| Of course, if you are willing to get incorrect results,
| such as in play money, this may be okay.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Standard floats cannot represent very common numbers such
| as 0.1 exactly so they are generally disfavored for
| financial calculations where an approximated result is
| often unacceptable.
|
| > For example, the non-representability of 0.1 and 0.01 (in
| binary) means that the result of attempting to square 0.1
| is neither 0.01 nor the representable number closest to it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-
| point_arithmetic#Accu...
| wiz21c wrote:
| Using float is perfectly OK since using fixed point decimal
| (or whatever "exact" math operations) will lead to rounding
| error anyway (what about multiplying a monthly salary by
| 16/31 (half a month) ?)
|
| The problem with float is that many people don't understand
| how they work to handle rounding errors correctly.
|
| Now there are some cases where float don't cut it. And big
| ones. For example, summing a set of numbers (with decimal
| parts) will usually be screwed if you don't round it. And
| not many people expect to round the results of additions
| because they are "simple" operations. So you get errors in
| the end.
|
| (I have written applications that handle billions of euros
| with floats and have found just as many rounding errors
| there as in any COBOL application)
| mdellavo wrote:
| It seems incorrect to determine a half a month as 16/31
| but ok , for your proposed example: >>>
| from decimal import Decimal >>> Decimal(1000) *
| Decimal(16) / Decimal(31)
| Decimal('516.1290322580645161290322581') >>> 1000
| * 16 / 31 516.1290322580645
|
| The point is using Decimal allows control over precision
| and rounding rather than accepting ad-hoc approximations
| of a float.
|
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html
|
| If it were me, I wouldn't go around bragging about how
| much money my software manages while being willfully
| ignorant of the fundamentals.
| wiz21c wrote:
| OK, the salary example was a bit simplified; in my case
| it was about giving financial help to someone. That help
| is based on a monthly allowance and then split in the
| number of allocated days in the month, that's for the
| 16/31.
|
| Now for your example, I see that float and decimal just
| give the same result. Provided I'm doing financial
| computations of a final number, I'm ok with 2 decimals.
| And both your computations work fine.
|
| Th decimal module in python gives you number of
| significant digits, not number of decimals. You'll end up
| using .quantize() to get to two decimals which is
| rounding (so, no advantage over floats).
|
| As I said, as soon as you have division/multiplication
| you'll have to take care of rounding manually. But for
| addition/subtraction, then decimal doesn't need rounding
| (which is better).
|
| The fact is that everybody say "floats are bad" because
| rounding is tricky. But rounding is always possible. And
| my point is that rounding is tricky even with the decimal
| module.
|
| And about bragging, I can tell you one more thing :
| rounding errors were absolutely not the worse of our
| problems. The worse problem is to be able to explain to
| the accountant that your computation is right. That's the
| hard part 'cos some computations imply hundreds of
| business decisions. When you end up on a rounding error,
| you're actually happy 'cos it's easy to understand,
| explain and fix. And don't start me on how laws (yes, the
| texts) sometimes explain how rounding rules should work.
| chongli wrote:
| Using float for currency calculations is how you accumulate
| a bunch of rounding errors. Standard practice when dealing
| with money is to use an arbitrary-precision numerical type.
| verst wrote:
| I have been using this - for example working in Go on Dapr
| (dapr.io) or in Python on one of its SDKs.
|
| I love it. So often the code suggestions accurately anticipate
| what I planned to do next.
|
| It's especially fun to write a comment or doc string and then
| see Copilot create a block of code perfectly matching your
| comment.
| stephen82 wrote:
| Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI
| belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the
| generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes
| the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action?
| - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by
| Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member
| does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as
| a team? - can Copilot copy code from other projects and
| use that excerpt code? - if yes, *WHY* ?! - who
| is going to deal with legalese for something he or she was not
| responsible in the first place? - what about conflicts
| of interest? - can GitHub guarantee that Copilot won't
| use proprietary code excerpts in FOSS-ed projects that could
| lead to new "Google vs Oracle" API cases?
| gpm wrote:
| > - under what license the generated code falls under?
|
| Is it even copyrighted? Generally my understand is that to be
| copyrightable it has to be the output of a _human_ creative
| process, this doesn 't seem to qualify (I am not a lawyer).
|
| See also, monkeys can't hold copyright: https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
| croes wrote:
| It is output of humans creative processes, just not yours.
| Like an automated stackoverflow snippet engine.
| agilob wrote:
| >Generally my understand is that to be copyrightable it has
| to be the output of a human creative process
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispu
| t...
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| In the US, yes. Elsewhere, not necessarily.
| tlamponi wrote:
| > Is it even copyrighted?
|
| Isn't it subject to the licenses the model was created
| from, as the learning is basically just an automated
| transformation of the code, which would be still the
| original license - as else I could just run some minifier,
| or some other, more elaborate, code transformation, on some
| FOSS project, for example the Linux kernel, and relicense
| it under whatever?
|
| Does not sound right to me, but IANAL and I also did not
| really look at how this specific model/s is/are generated.
|
| If I did some AI on existing code I'd be quite cautious and
| group by compatible licences classes, asking the user what
| their projects licence is and then only use the compatible
| parts of the models.-Anything else seems not really ethical
| and rather uncharted territory in law to me, which may not
| mean much as IANAL and just some random voice on the
| internet, but FWIW at least I tried to understand quite a
| few FOSS licences to decide what I can use in projects and
| what not.
|
| Anybody knows of some relevant cases of AI and their input
| data the model was from, ideally in jurisdictions being the
| US or any European Country ones?
| buu700 wrote:
| This is a great point. If I recall correctly, prior to
| Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin, Mono had to go out of
| its way to avoid accepting contributions from anyone
| who'd looked at the (public but non-FOSS) source code of
| .NET, for fear that they might reproduce some of what
| they'd seen rather than genuinely reverse engineering.
|
| Is this not subject to the same concern, but at a much
| greater scale? What happens when a large entity with a
| legal department discovers an instance of Copilot-
| generated copyright infringement? Is the project owner
| liable, is GitHub/Microsoft liable, or would a court
| ultimately tell the infringee to deal with it and eat
| whatever losses occur as a result?
|
| In any case, I hope that GitHub is at least limiting any
| training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses (MIT,
| BSD, Apache, and similar). Otherwise, I think it would
| probably be too much risk to use this for anything
| important/revenue-generating.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _In any case, I hope that GitHub is at least limiting
| any training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses
| (MIT, BSD, Apache, and similar). Otherwise, I think it
| would probably be too much risk to use this for anything
| important /revenue-generating._
|
| I'm going to assume that there is no sensible whitelist
| of licenses until someone at GitHub is willing to go on
| the record that this is the case.
| gpm wrote:
| (Not a lawyer, and only at all familiar with US law,
| definitely uncharted territory)
|
| No, I don't believe it is, at least to the extent that
| the model isn't just copy and pasting code directly.
|
| Creating the model implicates copyright law, that's
| creating a derivative work. It's probably fair use
| (transformative, not competing in the market place, etc),
| but whether or not it is fair use is github's problem and
| liability, and only if they didn't have a valid license
| (which they should have for any open source inputs, since
| they're not distributing the model).
|
| I think the output of the model is just straight up not
| copyrighted though. A license is a grant of rights, you
| don't need to be granted rights to use code that is not
| copyrighted. Remember you don't sue for a license
| violation (that's not illegal), you sue for copyright
| infringement. You can't violate a copyright that doesn't
| exist in the first place.
|
| Sometimes a "license" is interpreted as a contract rather
| than a license, in which you agreed to terms and
| conditions to use the code. But that didn't happen here,
| you didn't agree to terms and conditions, you weren't
| even told them, there was no meeting of minds, so that
| can't be held against you. The "worst case" here (which I
| doubt is the case - since I doubt this AI implicates any
| contract-like licenses), is that github violated a
| contract they agreed to, but I don't think that
| implicates you, you aren't a party to the contract, there
| was no meeting of minds, you have a code snippet free of
| copyright received from github...
| birdyrooster wrote:
| So if I make AI that takes copyrighted material in one
| side, jumbles it about, and spits out the same
| copyrighted material on the other side, I have
| successfully laundered someone else's work as my own?
|
| Wouldn't GitHub potentially be responsible for the
| infringement by distributing the copyrighted material
| knowing that it would be published?
| gpm wrote:
| I exempted copied segments at the start of my previous
| post for a reason, that reason is I don't really know, I
| doubt it works because judges tend to frown on absurd
| outcomes.
| chuinard wrote:
| Some of your questions aren't easy to answer. Maybe the first
| two were OK to ask. Others would probably require lawyers and
| maybe even courts to decide. This is a pretty cool new
| product just being shared on an online discussion forum. If
| you are serious about using it for a company, talk to your
| lawyers, get in touch with Github's people, and maybe hash
| out these very specific details on the side. Your comment
| came off as super negative to me.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Regardless of tone, I thought it was chock full of great
| questions that raised all kinds of important issues, and
| I'm really curious to hear the answers.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| I think these are very important questions.
|
| The commenter isn't interrogating some indy programmer.
| This is a product of a subsidiary of Microsoft, who I
| guarantee has already had a lawyer, or several, consider
| these questions.
| king_magic wrote:
| No, they are all entirely reasonable questions. Yeah, they
| might require lawyers to answer - tough shit. Understanding
| the legal landscape that ones' product lives in is part of
| a company's responsibility.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > This is a pretty cool new product just being shared on an
| online discussion forum.
|
| This is not one lone developer with a passion promoting
| their cool side-project. It's GitHub, which is an
| established brand and therefore already has a leg up,
| promoting their new project for active use.
|
| I think in this case, it's very relevant to post these
| kinds of questions here, since other people will very
| probably have similar questions.
| natfriedman wrote:
| In general: (1) training ML systems on public data is fair
| use (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a
| compiler.
|
| On the training question specifically, you can find OpenAI's
| position, as submitted to the USPTO here: https://www.uspto.g
| ov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R...
|
| We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy
| discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're
| eager to participate!
| croes wrote:
| Fair use doesn't exist in every country, so it's US only?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Yes, my partner likes to remind me we don't have it here
| in Australia. You could never write a search engine here.
| You can't write code that scrapes websites.
| krzyk wrote:
| It exists in EU also (and it much mire powerful here).
| croes wrote:
| The EU doesn't have a copyright related fair use. Quite
| the opposite, that why we are getting upload filters.
| stephen82 wrote:
| > We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy
| discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're
| eager to participate!
|
| Another question is this: let's hypothesize I work solo on
| a project; I have decided to enable Copilot and have
| reached a 50%-50% development with it after a period of
| time. One day the "hit by a bus" factor takes place; who
| owns the project after this incident?
| lovich wrote:
| Your estate? The compiler comparison upthread seems to be
| perfectly valid. If you work on a solo project in c# and
| die, Microsoft doesn't automatically own your project
| because you used visual studio to produce it
| king_magic wrote:
| @Nat, these questions (all of them, not just the 2 you
| answered) are critical for anyone who is considering using
| this system. Please answer them?
|
| I for one wouldn't touch this with a 10000' pole until I
| know the answers to these (very reasonable) questions.
| breck wrote:
| You should look into:
|
| https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-
| amendment.h...
|
| Great achievements like this only hammer home the point
| more about how illogical copyright and patent laws are.
|
| Ideas are _always_ shared creations, by definition. If you
| have an "original idea", all you really have is noise! If
| your idea means anything to anyone, then by definition it
| is built on other ideas, it is a shared creation.
|
| We need to ditch the term "IP", it's a lie.
|
| Hopefully we can do that before it's too late.
| delano wrote:
| In practical terms, IP could be referred to as unique
| advantages. What is the purpose of an organization that
| has no unique qualities?
|
| In general, what is IP and how it's enforced are two
| separate things. Just because we've used copyright and
| patents to "protect" an organization's unique advantages,
| doesn't mean we need to keep using them in the same way.
| Or maybe it's the best we can do for now. That's why BSD
| style licences are so great.
| anmk wrote:
| I'm sure _natfriedman_ will be thrilled to abolish IP and
| also apply this to the Windows source code. We can expect
| it on GitHub any minute!
| stwrong wrote:
| What about privacy. Does the AI send code to GitHub? This
| reminds me of Kite
| avery42 wrote:
| Yes, under "How does GitHub Copilot work?":
|
| > [...] The GitHub Copilot editor extension sends your
| comments and code to the GitHub Copilot service, which
| then uses OpenAI Codex to synthesize and suggest
| individual lines and whole functions.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| What does "public" mean? Do you mean "public domain", or
| something else?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Unfortunately, in ML "public data" typically means
| available to the public. Even if it's pirated, like much
| of the data available in the Books3 dataset, which is a
| big part of some other very prominent datasets.
| kzrdude wrote:
| So basically youtube all over again? I.e bootstrap and
| become popular by using widely available whatever media
| (pirated by crowdsourced piracy) and then many years
| later, when it gets popular, dominant, it has to turn
| around and "do things right" and guard copyrights.
| qihqi wrote:
| (1) training ML systems on public data is fair use
|
| This one is tricky considering that kNN is also a ML
| system.
| visarga wrote:
| kNN needs to hold on to a complete copy of the dataset
| itself unlike a neural net where it's all mangled.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| > training ML systems on public data is fair use
|
| Uh, I very much doubt that. Is there any actual precedent
| on this?
|
| > We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy
| discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're
| eager to participate!
|
| But apparently not eager enough to have this discussion
| with the community _before_ deciding to train your
| proprietary for-profit system on billions of lines of code
| that undoubtedly are not all under CC0 or similar no-
| attribution-required licenses.
|
| I don't see attribution anywhere. To me, this just looks
| like _yet another_ case of appropriating the public
| commons.
| stefano wrote:
| How do you guarantee it doesn't copy a GPL-ed function
| line-by-line?
| abraae wrote:
| Surprised not to see more mention of this. It would make
| sense for an AI to "copy" existing solutions. In the real
| world, we use clean room to avoid this.
|
| In the AI world, unless all GPL (etc.) code is excluded
| from the training data, it's inevitable that some will be
| "copied" into other code.
|
| Where lawyers decide what "copy" means.
| dkarras wrote:
| How do you know that when you write a simplish function
| for example, it is not identical to some GPL code
| somewhere? "Line by line" code does not exist anywhere in
| the neural network. It doesn't store or reference data in
| that way. Every character of code is in some sense
| "synthesized". If anything, this exposes the fragility of
| our concept of "copyright" in the realm of computer
| programs and source code. It has always been ridiculous.
| GPL is just another license that leverages the copyright
| framework (the enforcement of GPL cannot exist outside
| such a copyright framework after all) so in such weird
| "edge cases" GPL is bound to look stupid just like any
| other scheme. Remember that GPL also forbids "derivative"
| works to be relicensed (with a less "permissive" one). It
| is safe to say that you are writing code that is close
| enough to be considered "derivative" to some GPL code
| somewhere pretty much every day, and you can't possibly
| prove that you didn't cheat. So the whole framework
| collapses in the end anyways.
| king_magic wrote:
| I truly don't think they can guarantee that. Which is a
| massive concern.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Yup, this isn't a theoretical concern, but a major
| practical one. GPT models are known for memorizing their
| training data: https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-
| leaking-your-data-...
|
| Edit: Github mentions the issue here:
| https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-
| recitatio... and here: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-
| does-github-copilot-recite-c... though they neatly ignore
| the issue of licensing :)
| visarga wrote:
| > GPT models are known for memorizing their training data
|
| Hash each function, store the hashes as a blacklist. Then
| you can ask the model to regenerate the function until it
| is copyright safe.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| What if it copies only a few lines, but not an entire
| function? Or the function name is different, but the code
| inside is the same?
| proteal wrote:
| If we could answer those questions definitively, we could
| also put lawyers out of a job. There's always going to be
| a legal gray area around situations like this.
| amelius wrote:
| Does Copilot phone home?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yes, and with the code you're writing/generating.
| amelius wrote:
| This obviously sucks.
|
| Can't companies write code that runs on customer's
| premises these days? Are they too afraid somebody will
| extract their deep learning model? I have no other
| explanation.
|
| And the irony is that these companies are effectively
| transferring their own fears to their customers.
| jmmcd wrote:
| It's a large and gpu-hungry model.
| gpm wrote:
| When you sign up for the waitlist it asks permission for
| additional telemetry, so yes. Also the "how it works" image
| seems to show the actual model is on github's servers.
| natfriedman wrote:
| You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I think it
| answers all of your questions:
| https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
| viccuad wrote:
| > You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I
| think it answers all of your questions:
| https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
|
| Read it all, and the questions still stand. Could you, or
| any on your team, point me on where the questions are
| answered?
|
| In particular, the FAQ doesn't assure that the "training
| set from publicly available data" doesn't contain license
| or patent violations, nor if that code is considered
| tainted for a particular use.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| From the faq:
|
| > GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search
| engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is
| uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We
| found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may
| contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training
| set.
|
| I'm guessing this covers it. I'm not sure if someone
| posting their code online, but explicitly saying you're
| not allowed to look at it, getting ingested into this
| system with billions of other inputs could somehow make
| you liable in court for some kind of infringement.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That doesn't cover it, since that is a technical answer
| for a non-technical question. The same questions remain.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Sounds like using CodePilot can introduct GPLd code into
| your project and make your project bound by GPL as a
| result...
|
| 0.1% is a lot when you use 100 suggestions a day.
| viccuad wrote:
| that doesn't include patent violations nor license
| violations or compatibility between licenses. Which would
| be the most numerous and non-trivial cases.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| How is it possible to determine if you've violated a
| random patent from somewhere on the internet via a small
| snippet of customized auto-generated code?
|
| Does everyone in this thread contact their lawyers after
| cutting and pasting a mergesort example from
| Stackoverflow that they've modified to fit their needs?
| Seems folks are reaching a bit.
| IncRnd wrote:
| For that very reason, many companies have policies that
| forbid copying code from online (especially from
| StackOverflow).
| dlubarov wrote:
| That mitigates copyright concerns, but patent
| infringement can occur even if the idea was independently
| rediscovered.
| woah wrote:
| I think a patent violation with CoPilot is exactly the
| same scenario as if you violated a patent yourself
| without knowing it.
| dvaun wrote:
| None of the questions and answers in this section hold
| information about how the generated code affects licensing.
| None of the links in this section contain information about
| licensing, either.
| rozab wrote:
| This page has a looping back button hijack for me
| samtheprogram wrote:
| The most important question, whether you own the code, is
| sort of maybe vaguely answered under "How will GitHub
| Copilot get better over time?"
|
| > You can use the code anywhere, but you do so at your own
| risk.
|
| Something more explicit than this would be nice. Is there a
| specific license?
|
| EDIT: also, there's multiple sections to a FAQ, notice the
| drop down... under "Do I need to credit GitHub Copilot for
| helping me write code?", the answer is also no.
|
| Until a specific license (or explicit lack there-of) is
| provided, I can't use this except to mess around.
| netcraft wrote:
| I dont see the answer to a single one of their questions on
| that page - did you link to where you intended?
|
| Edit: you have to click the things on the left, I didn't
| realize they were tabs.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| Might this end up putting GPL code into projects with an
| incompatible license?
| natfriedman wrote:
| It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid
| reciting training data in the output:
| https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-
| recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-
| access/github/copilot/resea...
|
| In terms of the permissibility of training on public code,
| the jurisprudence here - broadly relied upon by the machine
| learning community - is that training ML models is fair use.
| We are certain this will be an area of discussion in the US
| and around the world and we're eager to participate.
| eqtn wrote:
| Would i be able to use something like this in the near
| future to produce a proprietary linux kernel?
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _training ML models is fair use_
|
| How does that apply to countries where Fair Use is not a
| thing? As in, if you train a model on a fair use basis in
| the US and I start using the model somewhere else?
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to ask a US company to comment on
| legalities outside of the US.
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| It's fair to expect a international company pushing its
| products all over the world to be prepared to comment on
| non-US jurisdictions. (I have some sympathy for "we have
| a local market, and that's what we are solely targeting
| and preparing for" in companies where that is actually
| the case, but that's really not what we are dealing with
| in the case of Microsoft/GitHub)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| One would expect GitHub (owned by Microsoft) to have
| engaged corporate counsel for an opinion (backed by
| statue and case law), and to be prepared to disable the
| functionality in jurisdictions where it's incompatible
| with local IP law.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| Fair use doesn't exist in Germany.
| [deleted]
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid
| reciting training data in the output
|
| This just gives me a flashback to copying homework in
| school, "make sure you change some of the words around so
| it's not obvious"
|
| I'm sure you're right Re: jurisprudence, but it never sat
| right with me that AI engineers get to produce these big,
| impressive models but the people who created the training
| data will never be compensated, let alone asked. So I
| posted my face on Flickr, how should I know I'm consenting
| to benefit someone's killer robot facial recognition?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Wait I thought y'all argued Google didn't copy Java for
| Android, now that big tech is copying your code you're
| crying wolf?
| InspiredIdiot wrote:
| The whole point of that case begins with the admission
| "yes of course Google copied." They copied the API. The
| argument was that copying an API to enable
| interoperability was fair use. It went to the Supreme
| Court because no law explicitly said that was fair use
| and no previous case had settled the point definitively.
| And the reason Google could be confident they copied only
| the API is because they made sure the humans who did it
| understood both the difference and the importance of the
| difference between API and implementation. I don't think
| there is a credible argument that any AI existing today
| can make such a distinction.
| npteljes wrote:
| > ...the jurisprudence here - broadly relied upon by the
| machine learning community - is that training ML models is
| fair use.
|
| If you train az ML model on GPL code, and then make it
| output some code, would that not make the result a
| derivative of the GPL licensed inputs?
|
| But I guess this could be similar to musical composition.
| If the output doesn't resemble any of the inputs, or
| contains significant continous portions of them, then it's
| not a derivative.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > If the output doesn't resemble any of the inputs, or
| contains significant continous portions of them, then
| it's not a derivative.
|
| In this particular case, the output resembles the inputs,
| or there is no reason to use Github Copilot.
| sicromoft wrote:
| You just shared a URL that says "Please do not share this
| URL publicly".
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Well, he's also GitHub's CEO so it's probably just fine.
| SCLeo wrote:
| > ...the jurisprudence here - broadly relied upon by the
| machine learning community - is that training ML models is
| fair use.
|
| To be honest, I doubt that. Maybe I am special, but if I am
| releasing some code under GPL, I _really_ don 't want it to
| be used in training a closed source model, which will be
| used in a closed source software generating code for closed
| source projects.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Is it any different than training a human? What if a
| person learned programming by hacking on GPL public code
| and then went to build proprietary software?
| IncRnd wrote:
| Would you hire a person who only knew how to program by
| taking small snippets of code from GPL and rearranging
| them? That's like hiring monkey's to type Shakespeare.
|
| The clear difference is that a human's training regimen
| is to understand how and why code interacts. That is
| different from an engine that replicates other people's
| source code.
| woodruffw wrote:
| A human being who has learned from reading GPL'd code can
| make the informed, intelligent decision to not copy that
| code.
|
| My understanding of the open problem here is whether the
| ML model is intelligently recommending _entire fragments_
| that are explicitly licensed under the GPL. That would be
| a licensing violation, if a human did it.
| 10000truths wrote:
| > A human being who has learned from reading GPL'd code
| can make the informed, intelligent decision to not copy
| that code.
|
| A model can do this as well. Getting the length of a
| substring match isn't rocket science.
| akavel wrote:
| Actually, I believe it's tricky to say if even human can
| actually do that safely. There's the whole concept of
| "cleanroom rewrite" - meaning, if you want to rewrite
| some GPL or closed-source project _into a different
| license_ , you should make sure _you never ever seen even
| a glimpse of the original code_. If you look on GPL or
| closed-source code (or, actually, code governed by any
| other license), it 's hard to prove you didn't
| accidentally/subconsciously remember parts of this code,
| and copy them into your "rewrite" project even if "you
| made a decision to not copy". The border between
| "inspired by" and "blatant copyright infringement" is
| blurry and messy. If that was already so tricky and
| troublesome legal-wise before, my first instinct is that
| with the Copilot it could be even more legally murky
| territory. IANAL, yet I'd feel better if they made some
| [legally binding] promises that their model is based only
| on code carefully verified to have one of an explicit
| (and published) whitelist of permissive licenses. (Even
| this could be tricky, with MIT etc. actually requiring
| some mention in your advertising materials [which is
| often forgotten], but now that's a completely different
| level of trouble than not knowing if I'm infringing GPL
| or some closed-source code, or other weird license.)
| Hamuko wrote:
| How do you distribute a human?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| A contractor seems equivalent to SaaS to me
| praptak wrote:
| It is different in the same way that a person looking at
| me from their window when I pass by is different from a
| thousand cameras observing me when I move around city.
| Scale matters.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is a lovely analogy, akin to "sharing mix tapes" vs
| "sharing MP3s on Napster". I fear the coming world with
| extensive public camera surveilance and facial
| recognition! (For any other "tin foil hatters" out there,
| cue the trailer for Minority Report.)
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _I fear the coming world with extensive public camera
| surveilance and facial recognition!_
|
| I fear the coming world of training machine learning
| models with my face just because it was published by
| someone somewhere (legally or not).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can rest assured that this is already the case if
| your picture was ever posted online. There are dozens of
| such products that law enforcement buys subscriptions to.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > a thousand cameras observing me when I move around
| city. Scale matters. reply
|
| While I certainly appreciate the difference, is camera
| observation illegal anywhere where it isn't explicitly
| outlawed? Meaning, have courts ever decided that the
| difference of scale matters?
| praptak wrote:
| No idea. I was not trying to make a legal argument. This
| was to try to convey why someone might feel ok about
| humans learning from their work but not necessarily about
| training a model.
| [deleted]
| twobitshifter wrote:
| What if a person heard a song by hearing it on the radio
| and went on to record their own version?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| There is already a legal structure in place for cover
| song licensing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_version#United_States
| _co...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Exactly so it needs licensing of some sort - this is
| closer to cover tunes than it is to someone getting a CS
| degree and being asked to credit Knuth for all their
| future work.
| manquer wrote:
| Perhaps we need GPL v4. I don't think there is any clause
| in current V2/V3 that prohibits _learning_ from the code,
| only using the code in other places and running a service
| with code.
| colinbartlett wrote:
| Would you be okay with a human reading your GPL code and
| learning how to write closed source software for closed
| source projects?
| zarzavat wrote:
| The whole point of fair use is that it allows people to
| copy things even when the copyright holder doesn't want
| them to.
|
| For example, if I am writing a criticism of an article, I
| can quote portions of that article in my criticism, or
| modify images from the article in order to add my own
| commentary. Fair use protects against authors who try to
| exert so much control over their works that it harms the
| public good.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Fair Use is specific to the US, though. The picture could
| end up being much more complicated when code written
| outside the US is being analyzed.
| krzyk wrote:
| It is not US specific, we have it in EU. And e.g. in
| Poland I could reverse engineer a program to make it work
| on my hardware/software if it doesn't. This is covered by
| fair use here.
| Hamuko wrote:
| The messier issue is probably using the model to write
| code outside the US. Americans can probably analyze code
| from anywhere in the world and refer to Fair Use if a
| lawyer comes knocking, but I can't refer to Fair Use if a
| lawyer knocks on my door after using Copilot.
| IncRnd wrote:
| This isn't the same situation at all. The copying of code
| doesn't seem to be for a limited or transformative
| purpose. Fair use might cover parody or commentary &
| criticism but not limitless replication.
| zarzavat wrote:
| They are not replicating the code at all. They are
| training a neural network. The neural network then
| _learns_ from the code and synthesises new code.
|
| It's no different from a human programmer reading code,
| learning from it, and using that experience to write new
| code. Somewhere in your head there is code that someone
| else wrote. And it's not infringing anybody's copyright
| for those memories to exist in your head.
| jaimeyap wrote:
| We can't yet equivocate ML systems with human beings.
| Maybe one day. But at the moment, it's probably better to
| compare this to a compiler being fed licensed code. The
| compilation output is still subject to the license.
| Regardless of how fancy the compiler is.
|
| Also, a human being that reproduces licensed code from
| memory - because they read that code - would constitute a
| license violation. The line between derivative work, and
| authentic new original creation is not a well defined
| one. This is why we still have human arbiters of these
| decisions and not formal differential definitions of it.
| This happens in music for example _all the time_.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It is replication, maybe not of a single piece of code -
| but creating a synthesis is still copying. For example,
| constructing a single piece of code of three pieces of
| code from your co-workers is still replication of code.
|
| Your argument would have some merit if something were
| _created_ instead of assembled, but there is no new
| algorithm that is being created. That is not what is
| happening here.
|
| On the one hand, you call this copying in fair use. On
| the other hand, you say this is creating new code. You
| can't have it both ways.
| blibble wrote:
| surely that depends on the size of the training set?
|
| I could feed the Linux kernel one function at a time into
| a ML model, then coerce its output to be exactly the same
| as the input
|
| this is obviously copyright infringement
|
| whereas in the github case where they've trained it on
| millions of projects maybe it isn't?
|
| does the training set size become relevant legally?
| slownews45 wrote:
| This is what is so miserable about the GPL progression.
| We went from GPLv2 (preserving everyone's rights to use
| code) to GPLv3 (you have to give up your encryption keys)
| - I think we've lost the GPL as a place where we could
| solve / answer these types of questions which are good
| ones - GPL just tanked a lot of trust in it with the
| (A)GPLv3 stuff especially around prohibiting other
| developers from specific uses of the code (which is
| diametrically different from earlier versions which
| preserved rights).
| gspr wrote:
| Think what you will of GPLv3, but lies help no one. Of
| course it doesn't require you to give up your encryption
| keys.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Under GPLv2 I could make a device with GPLv2 software and
| maintain root of trust control of that device if I wanted
| (ie, do an anti-theft activation lock process, do a lease
| ownership option of $200/month vs $10K to buy etc).
|
| Think what you will, but your lies about the GPLv3 can
| easily be tested. Can you point me to some GPLv3 software
| in the Apple tech stack?
|
| We actually already know the answer.
|
| Apple had to drop Samba (they were a MAJOR end user use
| of Samba) because of GPLv3
|
| I think they also moved away from GCC for LLVM.
|
| In fact - they've probably purged at least 15 packages
| I'm aware of and I'm aware of NO GPLv3 packages being
| included.
|
| Not sure what their App Store story is - but I wouldn't
| be surprised if they were careful there too.
|
| Oh - this is all lies and apple's lawyers are wrong? Come
| one - I'm aware of many other companies that absolutely
| will not ship GPLv3 software for this reason.
|
| In fact, by 2011 even it was clear that GPLv3 is not
| really workable in a lot of contexts and alternatives
| like MIT became more popular.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&
| q=%...
|
| Apple geared up to fight DOJ over maintaining root
| control of devices (San Bernadino case).
|
| Even Ubuntu has had to deal with this - SFLC made it
| clear that if some distributor messed things up ubuntu
| would have to release their keys, which is why they ended
| up with a MICROSOFT (!) solution.
|
| "Ubuntu wishes to ensure that users can boot any
| operating system they like and run any software they
| want. Their concern is that the GPLv3 makes provisions by
| which the FSF could, in this case as the owner of GRUB2,
| deem that a machine that won't let them replace GRUB2
| with something else is in violation of the GPLv3. At that
| point, they can demand that Ubuntu surrender its
| encryption keys used to provide secure bootloader
| verification--which then allows anyone to sign any
| bootloader they want, thus negating any security features
| you could leverage out of the bootloader (for example,
| intentionally instructing it to boot only signed code--
| keeping the chain trusted, rather than booting a foreign
| OS as is the option)." - commentator on this topic.
|
| It's just interesting to me that rather than any
| substance the folks arguing for GPLv3 reach for name
| calling type responses.
| easton wrote:
| That's why Apple's SMB implementation stinks! Finally,
| there's a reason for it, I thought they had just started
| before Samba was mature or something.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Yeah, it was a bit of a big bummer!
|
| Apple used to also interoperate wonderfully if you were
| using Samba SERVER side too because - well, they were
| using Samba client side. Those days were fantastic
| frankly. You would run Samba server side (on Linux), then
| Mac client side - and still have your windows machines
| kind of on -network (for accounting etc) too.
|
| But the Samba folks are (or were) VERY hard core GPLv3
| folks - so writing was on the wall.
|
| GPLv3 shifted things really from preserving developer
| freedom for OTHERs to do what they wanted with the code,
| to requiring YOU to do stuff in various ways which was a
| big shift. I'd assumed that (under GPLv2) there would be
| natural convergences, but GPLv3 really blew that apart
| and we've had a bit of a license fracturing relatively.
|
| AGPLv3 has also been a bit weaponized to do a sort of
| fake open source where you can only really use the
| software if you pay for a commercial license.
| goodpoint wrote:
| These claims are absurd. AGPL and GPLv3 carry on the same
| mission of GPLv2 to protect authors and end users from
| proprietization, patent trolling and freeloading.
|
| This is why SaaS/Cloud companies dislike them and fuel
| FUD campaigns.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's the point of fair use. To do something with a
| material the original author does not want.
| b3morales wrote:
| Can you explain why you think this is covered by fair
| use? It seems to me to be
|
| 1a) commercial
|
| 1b) non-transformative: in order to be useful, the
| produced code must have the same semantics as some code
| in the training set, so this does not add "a different
| character or purpose". Note that this is very different
| from a "clean room" implementation, where a high-level
| design is reproduced, because the AI _is looking directly
| at_ the original code!
|
| 2) possibly creative?
|
| 3) probably not literally reproducing input code
|
| 4) competitive/displacing for the code that was used in
| the input set
|
| So failing at least 3 out of 5 of the guidelines.
| https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/index.html
| rowanG077 wrote:
| 1a) Fair use can be commercial. And copilot is not
| commercial so the point is moot.
|
| 1b) This is false. This is not literally taking snippets
| it has found and suggesting it to the user. That would be
| an intelligent search algorithm. This is writing novel
| code automatically based on what it has learned.
|
| 2) Definitely creative. It's creating novel code. At
| least it's creative if you consider a human programming
| to be a creative endeavor as well.
|
| 3) If it's reproducing input code it's just a search
| algorithm. This doesn't seem to be the case.
|
| 4) Most GPLed code doesn't cost any money. As such the
| market for it is non-existent. Besides copilot does not
| displace the original even if there were a market for it.
| As far as I know there is not anything even close to
| comparable in the world right now.
|
| So from my reading it violates none of the guidelines.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > To be honest, I doubt that.
|
| Okay, but that's...not much of a counterargument (to be
| fair, the original claim was unsupported, though.)
|
| > Maybe I am special, but if I am releasing some code
| under GPL, I really don't want it to be used in training
| a closed source model
|
| That's _really_ not a counterargument. "Fair use" is an
| exception to exclusive rights under copyright, and
| renders the copyright holder's preferences moot to the
| extent it applies. The copyright holder not being likely
| to want it based on the circumstances is an argument
| against it being implicitly licensed use, but not against
| it being fair use.
| yewenjie wrote:
| This looks really cool. Do you plan to release this in some
| other form like a language server so that it can be easily
| integrated to other editors?
| jonas_kgomo wrote:
| This is obviously controversial, since we are thinking about
| how this could displace a large portion of developers. How do
| you see Copilot being more augmentative than disruptive to the
| developer ecosystem? Also, how you see it different from
| regular code completion tools like tabnine.
| tux1968 wrote:
| How many jobs have developers helped displace in business and
| industry? I don't think it's controversial that we become
| fair game for that same automation process we've been
| leading.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Indeed. It should be the goal of society to automate away
| as much work as possible. If there are perverse incentives
| working against this then we should correct them.
| amw-zero wrote:
| Human beings need something to do to have a fulfilling
| life. I do not agree at all that the ultimate goal of
| society is to automate everything that's possible. I
| think that will be horrible overall for society.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| I typically find other things fulfill my life more than
| work.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| My job is probably the least fulfilling activity in my
| life and I'm sure that goes for a lot of people.
|
| By your reasoning, maybe we don't need backhoes and
| should just hire a bunch of guys with spoons instead?
| gugagore wrote:
| 1. How do you define work differently from "that which
| should be automated"?
|
| 2. While I agree with your stance, it is not by itself
| sufficient. If you provide the automation but you do not
| correct the perverse incentives (or you worry about
| correcting them only later) that you mention, then you
| are contributing to widening the disparity between a
| category of workers (who have now lost their leverage)
| and those with assets and capital (who have a reduced
| need for workers).
| mkr-hn wrote:
| That's why it's best to get unions or support systems
| (like UBI) before they're needed. It's hard to organize
| and build systems when you have no leverage, influence,
| or power left.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I agree, the fact we're even talking about this is
| evidence that our society has the perverse incentive
| baked in and we should be aware of and seek to address
| that.
|
| Regardless, programmers would be hypocritical to decry
| having their jobs automated away.
| spec-obs wrote:
| I would be up for that, if said society did not leave us
| destitute as a result
| pizza234 wrote:
| > How many jobs have developers helped displace in business
| and industry?
|
| How many?
|
| > I don't think it's controversial that we become fair game
| for that same automation process we've been leading.
|
| This is not correct. A human (developer) displacing another
| human (business person) is entirely different than a tool
| (AI bot) replacing a human (developer).
|
| Regardless, this is the Lump of Labour fallacy
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy).
|
| In this case, it is assumed that the global amount of
| development work is fixed, so that, if AI takes a part of
| it, the equivalent workforce in terms of developers, will
| be out of job. Especially in the field of SWE, this is
| obviously false.
|
| It also needs to be seen what this technology will actually
| do. SWE is a complex field, way more than typing a few
| routines. In best case (technologically speaking) this will
| be an augmentation.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > A human (developer) displacing another human (business
| person) is entirely different
|
| That's not what is happening though, a few developers
| replace thousands of business and industry people with
| automated tools. Say, automated route planning for
| package delivery, would take many thousands of humans if
| not for the AI bots that do the job instead.
|
| > SWE is a complex field, way more than typing a few
| routines. In best case (technologically speaking) this
| will be an augmentation.
|
| Of course there will always be some jobs for humans to
| do. Just like there are still jobs for humans loading
| thread into the automated looms and such.
|
| But your arguments against automation displacing
| programming jobs ring hollow. People said the same thing
| about chess playing programs, they would never be able to
| understand the subtlety or complexity like a human could.
| varjag wrote:
| > SWE is a complex field, way more than typing a few
| routines. In best case (technologically speaking) this
| will be an augmentation.
|
| If there is a pathway to improving this AI assist
| efficiency say by restricting the language, methodology,
| UI paradigm and design principles, it will happen quick
| due to market incentives. The main reason SWE is complex
| is it's done manually in myriad subjectively preferred
| ways.
| cnvm wrote:
| Nothing is inevitable. Doctors and lawyers have protected
| their professions successfully for centuries.
|
| Only some software developers seem interested in replacing
| themselves in order to enrich their corporate masters
| (mains?) even further.
|
| Just don't use this tool!
| mason55 wrote:
| This tool only replaces a small part of a good programmer
| and just further highlights the differences between
| people blindly writing code and people building actual
| systems.
|
| The challenge in software development is understanding
| the real world processes and constraints and turning them
| into a design for a functional & resilient system that
| doesn't collapse as people add every little idea that
| pops into their head.
|
| If the hard part was "typing in code" then programmers
| would have been replaced long ago. But most people can't
| even verbally explain what they do as a series of steps &
| decision points such that a coherent and robust process
| can be documented. Once you have that it's easy to turn
| into code.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > Doctors and lawyers have protected their professions
| successfully for centuries.
|
| And one could argue that this means we all pay more for
| health and legal services than we otherwise would. You
| have to calculate both costs and benefits; what price
| does society pay for those few people having very high
| paying jobs?
| serf wrote:
| >How many jobs have developers helped displace in business
| and industry? I don't think it's controversial that we
| become fair game for that same automation process we've
| been leading.
|
| historically when has that sort of 'tit-for-tat' style of
| argument ever been helpful?
|
| the correct approach would be "we've observed first hand
| the problems that we've cause for society, how can we avoid
| creating such problems _for any person_ in the future? "
|
| It might seem self-serving, and it is, but 'two wrongs
| don't make a right'. Let's try to fix such problems rather
| than serving our sentence as condemned individuals.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > historically when has that sort of 'tit-for-tat' style
| of argument ever been helpful?
|
| It's not tit-for-tat, it's a wake up call. As in, what
| exactly do you think we've been doing with our skills and
| time?
|
| > ""we've observed first hand the problems that we've
| cause for society"...
|
| But not everyone agrees that this is actually a problem.
| There was a time when being a blacksmith or a weaver was
| a very highly paid profession, and as technology improved
| and the workforce became larger, large wages could no
| longer be commanded. Of course the exact same thing is
| going to happen to developers, at least to some extent.
| natfriedman wrote:
| We think that software development is entering its third wave
| of productivity change. The first was the creation of tools
| like compilers, debuggers, garbage collectors, and languages
| that made developers more productive. The second was open
| source where a global community of developers came together
| to build on each other's work. The third revolution will be
| the use of AI in coding.
|
| The problems we spend our days solving may change. But there
| will always be problems for humans to solve.
| jonas_kgomo wrote:
| I appreciate this insight, as a proponent of progress
| studies. It is indeed a pragmatic view of what the industry
| will be or should be. I believe the thing that would be
| also appreciated would be a pair security auditor. Most
| vulnerabilities in software can be avoided early on in
| development , I believe this could be a great addition to
| Github's Security Lab securitylab.github.com/
| dfkl wrote:
| Do you or 'natfriedman have authored any works in a
| public repository, so that we can judge the validity of
| the pragmatic view?
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm super interested to read more about your
| theory/analysis. Have you written on it in a blog or
| anything?
| therealplato wrote:
| There's a good amount of discussion on this topic in "The
| Mythical Man-Month". The entire book is discussing the
| factors that affect development timeframes and it
| specifically addresses whether AI can speed it up (albeit
| from 1975, 1986 and 1995 viewpoints, and comparing
| progress between those points.)
| freedomben wrote:
| Thanks! That's a great suggestion. I forgot that was in
| there.
|
| I read Mythical Man Month many years ago and enjoyed it.
| Time for a re-read. Of course it won't cover the third
| wave very well though. Would love to see a blog post
| cover that.
| xna wrote:
| Let's solve the problem of replacing CEOs next. The above
| paragraph could have been written by GPT-3 already.
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| LOL. But you actually make a good point here. GPT-3 can
| replace most comms / PR type jobs since they all sound
| like Exec-speak.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I think you're looking at the problem the wrong way. This
| provides less strong engineering talent with more
| leverage. The CEO (which could be you!) gets closer to
| being a CTO with less experience and context necessary
| (recall businesses that run on old janky codebases or no
| code platforms; they don't have to be elegant, they
| simply have to work).
|
| It all boils down to who is capturing the value for the
| effort and time expended. If a mediocre software engineer
| can compete against senior engineers with such
| augmentation, that seems like a win. Less time on
| learning language incantations, more time spent
| delivering value to those who will pay for it.
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| That's not really how it's going to go though. Just look
| at what your average person is able to accomplish with
| Excel.
|
| Your own example of the CEO becoming a CTO can be used in
| every level and part of the business.
|
| Now the receptionist is building office automation tools
| because they can describe what they want in plain English
| and have this thing spit out code.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Just look at what your average person is able to
| accomplish with Excel.
|
| Approximately nothing.
|
| The average knowledge worker somewhat more, but lots of
| them are at the level of "I can consume a pivot table
| someone else set up".
|
| Sure, there are highly-productive, highly-skilled excel
| users that aren't traditional developers that can build
| great things, but they aren't "your average person".
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| Well, agree to disagree here as I've seen it with my own
| eyes, but it's kind of besides the point.
|
| Is it a coincidence that the same company that makes
| Excel is trying to... "democratize" and/or de-specialize
| programming?
|
| I don't really think so, but _shrug_.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791017 (HN: Excel
| warriors who save governments and companies from
| spreadsheet errors)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26386419 (HN: Excel
| Never Dies)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20417967 (HN: I was
| wrong about spreadsheets)
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/amitranjan/status/113944938807
| 223... (Excel is every #SAAS company's biggest
| competitor!)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Yes, Excel "runs the world", and in most organizations,
| you'll find a fairly narrow slice of Excel power users
| that build and maintain the Excel that "runs the world".
|
| We may not call them developers or programmers (or we
| might; I've been one of them as a fraction of my job at
| different times, both as a "fiscal analyst" by working
| title and as a "programmer analyst" by title), but
| effectively that's what they are, developers using (and
| possibly exclusively comfortable with) Excel as a
| platform.
| [deleted]
| alexanderdmitri wrote:
| I think this is already happening. There's credible
| evidence that the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has been
| essentially replaced by a Siri-driven clone over the last
| 7 months. They march the real guy out when needed, but if
| you watch closely when they do, it's obvious he's under
| duress reading lines prepared by an AI. His testimony in
| the Epic lawsuit for example. They'll probably cite how
| seriously he and the company take 'privacy' to help
| normalize his withdrawal from the public space in the
| coming years.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of fun, kooky conspiracy theory
| I've missed with all the real conspiracies coming to
| light over the last decade or so.
| tudelo wrote:
| Can you cite some of this credible evidence?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| natfriedman is a human being like you and me, not an AI;
| let's treat them with consideration for that.
| anmk wrote:
| Perhaps he should go easy on the euphemisms then and show
| respect for the developers who wrote the corpus of
| software that this AI is being trained on (perhaps
| illegally).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| OK, then ask him to go easy! Great idea, and it might get
| a good response.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is obviously controversial, since we are thinking
| about how this could displace a large portion of developers.
|
| It... couldn't, in net.
|
| Tools which improve developer productivity increase the
| number of developers hired and the number of tasks for which
| it is worthwhile to employ them and the market clearing price
| for development work.
|
| See, for examples, _the whole history of the computing
| industry as we've added more layers of automation between
| "conceptual design for software" and "bit patterns in
| hardware implementing that conceptual design as concrete
| software"_.
|
| It might displace or disadvantage some developers in specific
| (though I doubt a large portion) by shifting the relative
| value of particular subskills within the set used in
| development, I suppose.
| dvaun wrote:
| I agree with this viewpoint.
|
| A tool which increases how rapidly we can output code--
| correct code--would allow for more time spent on hard
| tasks.
|
| I can see the quality of some "commodity" software
| increasing as a result of tools in this realm.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Hi Nat! Just signed up for the preview (even though I'm the
| type to turn off intellisense and smart indent). I was
| wondering if WebGL shader code (glsl) was included in the
| training set? Translating human understandable graphics effects
| from natural language is a real challenge ;)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Has this been tested for accessibility yet, particularly with a
| screen reader?
| Celenduin wrote:
| This is impressive. And scary. How long has your team been
| working on this first release?
| pera wrote:
| Cool project! Have you seen any interesting correlations
| between languages, paradigms and the accuracy of your
| suggestions?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we changed the URL to that from
| https://github.blog/2021-06-29-introducing-github-copilot-
| ai....
| [deleted]
| hit8run wrote:
| I tried the paid version of tabnine and was really unhappy
| because it suggested me code with syntax errors and introduced
| subtle bugs when I did not closely review every generated line.
| It was as if you have someone very impatient sitting next to you
| typing before actually really listening what you want to do. Is
| Copilot better? Does it suggest broken code, too?
| ranguna wrote:
| According to some of the comments here: yes, yes it does. One
| do the snippets on the front page has a bug, don't remember
| which, but that was written by someone here.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Ah, here it is; the Power Loom. And we're all weavers.
|
| http://historymesh.com/object/power-loom/?story=textiles
| kp302 wrote:
| Sounds like a big distraction.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Why are the green ones always angry?
| xeromal wrote:
| haha, you asked a question that I've always wondered.
| dang wrote:
| I suppose you know this, but green means the account is new
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Angry people
| sometimes create new accounts to vent. That's not a good use
| of HN, but let's not respond as if there's something wrong
| with new users coming to the community. We don't want this
| place to become insular and brackish. New users are the
| community's freshwater!
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| This is a great point. Do names turn from green to grey
| based on karma or time?
| dang wrote:
| Time alone.
| elteto wrote:
| They haven't ripened yet.
| ezekg wrote:
| Anonymity can breed honesty, I guess.
| cqaz wrote:
| This is hardly grounds for celebration. Another step in
| Microsoft's efforts to drive down programmer salaries by
| expanding the work force.
|
| Also, this tool will enable more cheap LOC churn for those gaming
| performance reviews (not that this is currently difficult, but it
| will be even easier).
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| It will absolutely transform undergraduate education in
| computer science, or rather, the breadth of the workload. <:)
| [deleted]
| JCBird1012 wrote:
| It's funny that GitHub ships their own text editor, Atom, but the
| second example (under the "More than Autocomplete" header) on the
| Copilot website is clearly using VSCode.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I don't know if they've officially said anything on this, but
| since the MS acquisition it feels like Atom is on life support.
| Github Codespaces is built on VSCode, and there's a lot of
| effort from Github going into their VSCode extension for things
| like PR review.
| Aperocky wrote:
| now they just need to build this into vim.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Or more realistically, a language server which would then be
| compatible with many editors including (Neo)Vim.
| kleiba wrote:
| Presumably, this will be accessible through a REST API or
| something like that at some point, so that it can eventually
| be integrated into all editors.
| Aperocky wrote:
| yep, the only thing I'm not quite sure about is how often
| it needs to call home. Presumably very often.. which runs
| counter to minimalism.
| kleiba wrote:
| Check out the "Telemetry" link when you scroll down on
| the project page.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Ok, I'm afraid I must become some kind of neoluddite or I'm going
| to starve to death in next twenty years.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| It sounds like this is similar to Kite, but actually competent as
| a service and not associated with a brand that has destroyed all
| trust. But it has to come with the same privacy caveats, right?
| Uploading your private code to a third-party server could result
| in business or regulatory violations.
|
| And even if you're okay with sending your code, what about
| hardcoded secrets? What's to prevent Copilot clients from sending
| things that should never leave the user's computer? Heuristics?
| Will we be able to tell what part of the code is about to be
| sent? And is the data stored?
| speedgoose wrote:
| I'm very enthusiastic about this kind of technology. I recently
| stopped using tabnine because the suggestions where often worse
| than the normal IDE completion while being on top of the list,
| but I do miss the magic.
|
| I think AI in software development will save us a lot of time, so
| we can focus on more interesting things. It may replace a few
| humans in the long term, but as software developers we shouldn't
| be hypocrite because we work hard to replace humans by software.
| kaimorid wrote:
| hello
| minimaxir wrote:
| So this is what happens when you're owned by Microsoft who has an
| exclusive contract with OpenAI.
|
| A couple weeks ago I ran a few experiments with AI-based code
| generation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27621114 ) from
| a GPT model more suitable for code generation: it sounds like
| this new "Codex" model is something similar.
|
| If anyone from GitHub is reading this, please give me access to
| the Alpha so I can see what happens when I give it a
| should_terminate() function. :P
| jboggan wrote:
| I saw that post, neat stuff. We made an attempt to develop
| something similar 4 years ago and take it to YC, it simply
| wasn't good enough often enough because our training data
| (Stack Overflow posts) was garbage and models were weaker back
| then. I figured it would take about 5 years for it to really be
| useful given the technology trajectory, and here we are.
|
| I'll note that we weren't trying to build "code auto-complete"
| but instead a automated "rubber duck debugger" which would
| function enough like another contextually-ignorant but
| intelligent programmer that you could explain your issues to
| and illuminate the solution yourself. But we did a poor job of
| cleaning the data and we found that English questions started
| returning Python code blocks, sometimes contextually relevant.
| It was neat. This GitHub/OpenAI project is neater.
|
| I would be curious what the cost of developing and running this
| model is though.
| [deleted]
| colesantiago wrote:
| Gigantic caveat.
|
| > I agree to these additional telemetry terms as part of the
| technical preview
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Right. If you're comfortable giving access to your source files
| to GitHub+OpenAI, then go for it.
|
| I'm not sure how this would apply to secret keys or flat files
| with customer data/PII, but in any case that makes it a non-
| starter for me.
|
| Their "Please do not share this URL publicly." Banner at the
| top of the page which disclosed this info makes my skin crawl a
| bit...
|
| If I were only working on public projects I would be on board
| right away, it looks like a big time saver.
|
| Am I being to paranoid here?
| ranguna wrote:
| No, you are not being paranoid. This tool literally uploads
| all the code it wants off your machine, and I see no way of
| filtering out secrets and the likes. You have all the rights
| to be worried about that.
| kleiba wrote:
| "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
|
| Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems, 1999
| colesantiago wrote:
| Then, I should see absolutely _zero complaints_ about
| privacy, tracking, spying, google analytics and facebook
| tracking.
|
| Perhaps we should ask Scott if he is willing to share his
| browsing history, his personal photos and his passwords with
| the rest of us or maybe if I can come into his house?
|
| After all, _" You have zero privacy anyway"_
| [deleted]
| hiram112 wrote:
| I wonder if CoPilot uses Github's private repositories to train
| itself, which would allow malicious users to somehow obtain code
| or designs that they otherwise would not be able to view.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I chuckle when one of the bullet points is that it autogenerates
| the stupid, pointless unit-tests that you need to write to verify
| trivial code, but boosts your code-coverage metrics...
| heroHACK17 wrote:
| Remote coding interviews just got 100x easier.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I want to try and make it generate a UUID and then see if I can
| find the original source.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I like the concept, but just like with kite, having part of my
| code sent to the remote service is a not going to be ok for many
| of my projects.
|
| For foss ones it could be great though.
|
| I think the best part for me is that how it's going to introduce
| even more low code devs to the worker pool, which means I will be
| able to raise my price again. Last time this happens, when
| designers got to the backend, I got +30% in a year once my
| clients figured out the difference in output.
| markstos wrote:
| Software automating people out of jobs spares no one, even the
| people writing the software.
|
| If this improves developer efficiency by 10%, 10% fewer
| developers are required.
| asperous wrote:
| Or development cost lowers by 10% keeping salaries the same,
| and more work that was previously too expensive to do is now
| feasible.
| gervwyk wrote:
| "Software eats world" just got more real. Funny that programmers
| thought they were eating the world with software, now, software
| has eaten them.
| visarga wrote:
| far from it, this thing won't write full applications by itself
| gervwyk wrote:
| I know.. But we can dream. Also I'me sure when we first got
| code completion we said - "This thing won't write functions
| by itself."
| [deleted]
| iwintermute wrote:
| So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available
| sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it
| also GPLv2?
|
| So everything generated also GPLv2?
| pjfin123 wrote:
| I think this would fall under any reasonable definition of fair
| use. If I read GPL (or proprietary) code as a human I still own
| code that I later write. If copyright was enforced on the
| outputs of machine learning models based on all content they
| were trained on it would be incredibly stifling to innovation.
| Requiring obtaining legal access to data for training but full
| ownership of output seems like a sensible middle ground.
| megous wrote:
| 1) this is not human, it's some software
|
| 2) if I write a program that copies parts of other GPL
| licensed SW into my proprietary code, does that absolve me of
| GPL if the copying algorithm is complicated enough?
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Clearly this requires some level of judgement but this
| isn't new, determining what is plagiarism and not requires
| a similar judgement call.
| tomthe wrote:
| What if I put a licence on my Github-repositories that
| explicitly forbids the use of my code for machine-learning
| models?
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Then the person training the models wouldn't be legally
| accessing your code.
| 542458 wrote:
| My interpretation of the GitHub TOS section D4 would give
| give GitHub the right to parse your code and/or make
| incedental copies regardless of what your license states.
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-
| terms-o...
|
| This is the same reason it doesn't matter if you put up a
| license that forbids GitHub from including you in backups
| or the search index.
| maxhille wrote:
| And so it begins: We start applying human rights to AIs.
|
| Not a critique on your point, which a was just about yo bring
| up myself.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Certainly not. If I memorize a line of copyrighted code and
| then write it down in a different project, I have copied it.
| If an ML model does the same thing as my brain - memorizing a
| line of code and writing it down elsewhere - it has also
| copied it. In neither case is that "fair use".
| qchris wrote:
| This is a bit tricky, because at least in the U.S., I don't
| believe it's settled question in law yet. Some of the other
| posters on here have said that the resulting model isn't
| covered by GPL--that's partially true, but provenance of data,
| and the rights to it, definitely does matter. A good example of
| this was the Everalbum ruling, where the company was forced to
| delete both the data and the trained models used they were used
| to generate due to lack of consent from the users from whom the
| data was taken[1]. Since open source code is, well, open, it's
| definitely less a problem for permissively-licensed code.
|
| That said, copyright is typically generally assigned to the
| closest human to the activation process (it's unlikely that
| Github is going to try to claim the copyright to code generated
| by Copilot over the human/company pair-programming with it),
| but since copyleft in general is a pretty domain-specific to
| software, afaik the way that courts interpret the legality of
| using code licensed under those terms in training data for a
| non-copyleft-producing model is still up in the air.
|
| Obligatory IANAL, and also happy to adjust this info if someone
| has sources demonstrating updates on the current state.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/12/ftc-settlement-with-
| ever-o...
| blibble wrote:
| until the legal position is clear it you'd have to be insane
| to allow output from this process to be incorporated into
| your codebases
|
| imagine if the output was ruled as being GPLv2, then having
| to go through a proprietary codebase trying to rip out these
| bits of code
|
| it would be basically impossible
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> So everything generated also GPLv2?_
|
| Almost certainly not _everything_.
|
| But possibly things that were spit out verbatim from the
| training set, which the FAQ mentions does happen about .1% of
| the time [1]. Another comment in this thread indicated that the
| model outputs something that's verbatim usable about 10% of the
| time. So, taking those two numbers together, if you're using a
| whole generated function verbatim, a bit of caveat emptor re:
| licensing might not be the worst idea. At least until the
| origin tracker mentioned in the FAQ becomes available.
|
| [1] https://docs.github.com/en/early-
| access/github/copilot/resea...
|
| [2] "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine:
| the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely
| generated and has never been seen before. We found that about
| 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that
| are verbatim from the training set. Here is an in-depth study
| on the model's behavior. Many of these cases happen when you
| don't provide sufficient context (in particular, when editing
| an empty file), or when there is a common, perhaps even
| universal, solution to the problem. We are building an origin
| tracker to help detect the rare instances of code that is
| repeated from the training set, to help you make good real-time
| decisions about GitHub Copilot's suggestions."
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| You bring up a really good point. I'm super curious what the
| legality and ethics around training machines on licensed or
| even proprietary code would be. IIRC there are implications
| around code you can build if you've seen proprietary code (I
| remember an article from HN about how bash had to be written by
| someone who hadn't seen the unix shell code or something like
| that).
|
| How would we classify that legally when it comes to training
| and generating code? Would you argue the machine is just
| picking up best practices and patterns, or would you say it has
| gained specifically-licensed or proprietary knowledge?
| Iv wrote:
| I would argue that a trained model falls under the legal
| category of "compilation of facts".
|
| More generally, keep in mind that the legal world, despite an
| apparent focus on definition is very bad at dealing with
| novelty, and most of it will end up justifying a posteriori
| existing practices.
| einpoklum wrote:
| You might argue that, but you would likely be wrong.
|
| Even a search engine is not merely a "compilation of
| facts". A trained model is the result of analysis and
| reasoning, albeit automated.
| jjcm wrote:
| A search engine provides snippets of other data. You can
| point explicitly to where it got that text from. A
| trained model generates its own new data, from influence
| of millions of different sources. It's entirely
| different.
| teekert wrote:
| Is what a human generates GPLv2 because it learned from GPLv2
| code?
| IMTDb wrote:
| What if a human copies GPLv2 code?
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| https://gpl-violations.org/
| teekert wrote:
| When is it copying? What about all those stack overflow
| snippets I copied?!
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| Congrats, you've just discovered why many employers block
| or forbid stackoverflow.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I seem to remember a similar discussion on Intellicode (similar
| thing, but more like Intellisense, and as Visual Studio
| plugin), which is trained on "github projects with more than
| 100 stars". IFIR they check the LICENSE.txt file in the project
| and ignore projects with an "incompatible" license. I don't
| have any links handy which would confirm this though.
| uticus wrote:
| Could it be this?
| https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/
|
| I was wondering the same thing, especially with MS being
| behind both.
|
| edited: or this? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/visualstudio/intellicode/cu...
| dekhn wrote:
| No, a model trained on text covered by a license is not itself
| covered by the license, unless it explicitly copies the text
| (you cannot copyright a "style").
| evgen wrote:
| The trained model is a derivative work that contains copies
| of the corpus used for training embedded in the model. If any
| of the training code was GPL the output is now covered by
| GPL. The music industry has already done most of the heavy
| lifting here in terms of scope and nature of derived works,
| and while IANAL I would not suggest that it looks good for
| anyone using this tool if GPL code was in the training set.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My guess is that it is, if we think of a machine learning
| framework as a compiler and the model as compiled code.
| Compiled GPL code is still GPL, that's the entire point.
|
| Anyways, GitHub is Microsoft, and Microsoft has really good
| lawyers so I guess they did everything necessary to make sur
| that you can use it the way they tell you so. The most
| obvious solution would be to filter by LICENSE.txt and only
| train the model with code under permissive licenses.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| There will almost certainly be cases where it copies exact
| lines. When working with GPT2 I got whole chunks of news
| articles.
| akersten wrote:
| Well, it probably _is_ explicitly copying at least some
| subset of the source text - otherwise the code would be
| syntactically invalid, no?
| dekhn wrote:
| Strictly speaking, you could train a model which does not
| contain the original source text (just the underlying
| language structure and work tokens), and generates ASCII
| strings which are consistent with the underlying generative
| model, that are also always valid code. I expect to see
| code generator models that explicitly generate valid code
| as part of their generalization capability.
| gugagore wrote:
| I can't say what's happening in GitHub Copilot, but it's
| not necessarily true that the only way to produce
| syntactically valid outputs is to take substrings of the
| source text. It is possible to learn something
| approximating a generative grammar.
|
| Take a look at https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-
| effectiveness/
|
| At the same time, I would not be surprised if there are
| outputs that _do_ correspond to the source training data.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > you cannot copyright a "style"
|
| This line of thinking applies to the code generated by the
| model, but not necessarily to the model itself, or the
| training of it.
| dekhn wrote:
| Thanks- in retrospect, I shoudl have explicitly said "code
| generated by the model".
| not2b wrote:
| But it actually is explicitly copying the text. That's how it
| works. The training data are massive, and you will get long
| strings of code that are pulled directly from that training
| data. It isn't giving you just the style. It may be mashing
| together several different code examples taking some text
| from each. That's called "derivative work".
| Iv wrote:
| Google Books actually displays full pages of copyrighted
| works Google did not license. It was considered legal.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Go
| ogle,....
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| We all don't have Google resources. What if someone comes
| after us individually because some model-generated code
| is near identical to code in a GPL codebase? Where is the
| liability here?
|
| edit: from https://copilot.github.com/
|
| > What is my responsibility when I accept GitHub Copilot
| suggestions?
|
| > You are responsible for the content you create with the
| assistance of GitHub Copilot. We recommend that you
| carefully test, review, and vet the code, as you would
| with any code you write yourself.
|
| Well, that solves that question.
| Kiro wrote:
| No, that's not how it works.
|
| "[...] the vast majority of the code that it suggests is
| uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found
| that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain
| some snippets that are verbatim from the training set"
|
| https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
| not2b wrote:
| If that's the case (only 0.1%), the developers must have
| done something that differs from other openai experiments
| that suggest code sequences that I recall seeing, where
| significant chunks of code from Stack Overflow or similar
| sites were appearing in answers.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| So you're gambling on whether that the code that was
| generated or copied.
| visarga wrote:
| use a bloom filter to skip/regenerate that 0.1%
| zarzavat wrote:
| Synthesising material from various sources isn't copyright
| infringement, that's called _writing_.
|
| It's only infringement if the portion copied is significant
| either absolutely or relatively. A line here or there of
| the millions in the Linux kernel is okay. A couple of lines
| of a haiku is not. Copyright is not leprosy.
| dekhn wrote:
| hmm, so let's think this through.
|
| Wouldn't that imply that a person who learned to code on
| GPLv2 sources wrote writes some more code in that style
| (including "long strings of code", some of which are
| clearly not unique to GPL) is writing code that is "born
| GPLv2"?
|
| I don't think it currently works that way.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| IMO the closest case is probably the students suing turnitin a
| number of years ago, which iParadigms (the turnitin maker) won
| [1].
|
| I think this is definitely a gray area and in some way
| iParadigms winning (compared to all the cases decided in favour
| of e.g. the music industry), shows the different yardsticks
| being used for individuals and companies.
|
| I'm sure we will see more cases about this.
|
| [1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/03/25/iparadigms-
| wins-t...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| My guess would be that the model itself (and the training
| process) could have different legal requirements compared to
| the code it generates. The code generated by the model is
| probably sufficiently transformative new work that wouldn't be
| GPL (it's "fair use").
|
| I suspect there could be issues on the training side, using
| copyrighted data for training without any form of licensing.
| Typically ML researchers have a pretty free-for-all attitude
| towards 'if I can find data, I can train models on it.'
| evgen wrote:
| No, the code generated is what copyright law calls a
| derivative work and you should go ask Robin Thicke and
| Pharrell Williams exactly how much slack the courts give for
| 'sufficiently transformative new work.
| gugagore wrote:
| My bet is that copyright law has not caught up with massive
| machine learning models that partially encode the training
| data, and that there will still be cases to set legal
| precedent for machine learning models.
|
| Note also that it's not just a concern for copyright, but
| also privacy. If the training data is private, but the
| model can "recite" (reproduce) some of the input given an
| appropriate query, then it's a matter of finding the right
| adversarial inputs to reconstruct some training data. There
| are many papers on this topic.
| evgen wrote:
| It is almost certainly the case that current IP law is
| very unsettled when it comes to machine learning models
| and mechanisms that encode a particular training set into
| the output or mechanism for input transformation. What
| should probably scare the shit out of people looking to
| commercialize this sort of ML is that the most readily
| available precedents for the courts to look at are from
| the music industry, and some of the outcomes have truly
| been wacky IMHO. The 'blurred lines' case is the one that
| should keep tech lawyers up at night, because if
| something like that gets applied to ML models the entire
| industry is in for a world of pain.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| You're missing the fair use aspects. Check out this article
| on fair use [0].
|
| > In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a case involving
| a rap group, 2 Live Crew, in the case _Campbell v. Acuff-
| Rose Music_ , 510 U.S. 569 (1994)... It focused on one of
| the four fair use factors, the purpose and character of the
| use, and emphasized that the most important aspect of the
| fair use analysis was whether the purpose and character of
| the use was "transformative."
|
| It has some neat examples and explanation.
|
| [0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-
| transf...
| evgen wrote:
| There are far more current precedents that apply here,
| and they do not trend in Github's favor -- as I noted
| previously, Williams v. Gaye (9th Cir. 2017) is going to
| be very interesting in this case. I am sure several
| people in Microsoft's legal department set parameters on
| the model training and that they felt that they were
| standing on solid ground, but I am also sure that there
| are a few associate professors in various law schools
| around the country who are salivating at the opportunity
| to take a run against this and make a name for
| themselves.
| kp302 wrote:
| Its not cause the License says nothing about training. I mean
| every oss dev's brain would be under GPL then.
| iwintermute wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
|
| There're definitely cases when devs avoid even looking at
| implementation before creating their own
| 542458 wrote:
| IANAL, but my interpretation of the GitHub TOS section D4 would
| give give GitHub the right to parse your code and/or make
| copies regardless of what your license states. This is the same
| reason the GitHub search index isn't GPL contaminated.
| sreeramb93 wrote:
| This is where microsoft's billion dollars went in OpenAI. Clever
| marcodiego wrote:
| Consider the following chain of events: - I write
| GPL'ed code. - Someone uses this tool to develop a
| proprietary solution. - I later prove that the tool
| generated code that is equal to mine.
|
| Now the code of the proprietary solution must be GPL licensed!
| Cool!
|
| How I'd defend myself? I'd only use such a tool if there are
| guarantees of the licenses of the code it was trained on. Without
| such guarantees, it is just too risky.
| ska wrote:
| Of course this is an continuation of things people have been
| trying for decades at this point, rather than something
| fundamentally new, but it brings up a point a colleague and I had
| a decade ago on training something like this on large data sets -
| namely that you are going to tend find common idioms rather than
| nominally best ones. In many scenarios it may make little to no
| difference, but clearly not all . It's likely going to gravitate
| towards lowest-common-denominator solutions.
|
| One example of where this can be a problem is numerics - most
| software developers don't understand it and routinely do
| questionable things. I'm curious what effort the authors have put
| in to mitigate this problem.
| krzyk wrote:
| I wonder why there is no example in java. It is one of the most
| popular languages (drfinatelly more popular than ruby or Go, and
| on par with Javascript and python).
| dgb23 wrote:
| The utility and quality of this will likely depend on language
| use:
|
| https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2021/1
| bovermyer wrote:
| Oh this would screw with me so badly.
|
| A lot of the time, I'm thinking pretty deeply about the code I'm
| writing, and as I'm writing code I'll also be thinking about how
| it applies in context.
|
| Having some external agent inject new code into my editor would
| shatter my thought flow, since I'd then have to grok whatever it
| just spit out instead of continuing on with whatever thought I
| was pursuing at the time.
| karsinkk wrote:
| I still haven't gotten my hands on the Beta yet, so I'm not sure
| how it's going to be deployed; But does anyone know if Copilot is
| going to be accessible through some online IDE (or) is it going
| to be through an extension for VS Code/other editors? If it's the
| latter, I hope the extension doesn't eat up all my CPU!
| whateveracct wrote:
| I prefer the wingman
|
| https://haskellwingman.dev/
| IceWreck wrote:
| Works on MS's VSCode but not on GitHub's own Atom. More proof
| that Atom is all bud dead
| tushar1196 wrote:
| Hey
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Someone, somewhere, is already working on ways to make it inject
| vulnerabilities into your project.
| FunnyLookinHat wrote:
| This seems to work really well in cases where you're just laying
| down boilerplate. A few cherry-picked comments seem to suggest
| that React components are an ideal use case - which makes sense,
| that's a lot of munging and syntax to just render some strings.
|
| However, I find the process of writing these sorts of functions
| cathartic and part of the process to get into zen-mode for
| coding. I think I'd feel less joy in programming if all of this
| was just done by glorified commenting and then code-review of the
| robot.
|
| I like to think of coding in terms of athletic training, which
| usually is comprised of difficult tasks that are interspersed
| with lighter ones that keep you moving (but are giving you a bit
| of a break). Training for soccer teams often involved lots of
| sprinting and aerobic exercise - and in between those activities
| we would do some stretching or jogging to keep our body moving.
| These sorts of small functions (write a function to fetch a
| resource, parse an input payload, etc.) are when my brain is
| still moving but getting ready for the next difficult task.
| StratusBen wrote:
| Not to be confused with AWS Copilot - which has been an area of
| focus for the AWS container services team:
| https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "In order to generate suggestions, GitHub Copilot transmits part
| of the file you are editing to the service."
|
| Well, isn't GitHub part of Microsoft now? No wonder it has gained
| telemetry...
|
| I'm a bit worried that this thing will lead to even more bugs
| like the typical StackOverflow copy&paste which compiles fine,
| runs OK, but completely doesn't understand the context and
| thereby introduces subtle difficult to find issues.
|
| My personal take on autocomplete has always been that I only use
| it so that I can use longAndDescriptiveFunctionNames. Apart from
| that, if your source code is so verbose that you wish you didn't
| have to type all of it, something else probably already went
| wrong.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| A toy.
| hashingroll wrote:
| > Convert comments to code. Write a comment describing the logic
| you want, and let GitHub Copilot assemble the code for you.
|
| I don't know if Copilot does it already but I would love if there
| was a tool that does exactly the opposite -- convert code to
| comments and documentation.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Does GitHub Copilot grant you a license to the code it generates?
| How does it know you haven't just copied some proprietary code
| which is not free?
| ranguna wrote:
| This looks amazing! I was going sign up for the preview and stop
| immediately after reading the additional telemetry that is
| scrapped from my IDE, Microsoft would basically be allowed to
| steal my code and see it whenever they need. Including unintended
| snippets like local (git ignored) secrets and any sensitive
| information that it might catch without my "snippet by snippet"
| approval and not way to ignore files (afaik).
|
| Until this is fixed, good luck but not thank you Microsoft.
| adelarsq wrote:
| Tabnine, It's you?
| papito wrote:
| Stack Overflow copt pasta on crack cocaine.
| ayush--s wrote:
| wow I'm going to have lots of opinions about this.
|
| 1. A lot of people on this thread are concerned about licensing
| issues with GPL etc. I am sure Github will restrict the beta
| until it figures out that stuff.
|
| 2. I wonder if eventually our corrections to the code suggested
| by the model would be used to feedback to the model, and if
| that'll lead to a differential pricing - If I let it see my code,
| I get charged lesser.
|
| 3. I believe a mini-GPT-3 model is where it's at. GPT-3 (and
| similar) models look to be to too big to run locally. I've been
| using TabNine for past year or so & it gives me anywhere between
| 5-10% productivity boost. But one of the main reasons why it
| works so well is because it trains on my repo as well. TabNine is
| based off GPT-2 from what i've heard.
|
| 4. prediction: Microsoft is probably going to milk GPT-3. Expect
| a bumpy ride.
|
| 5. In all likeliness, this would be a great tool to make
| developers productive, rather than take their jobs - at least at
| levels that are more than just code-coolie.
|
| 6. Eventually all tasks with enough data around it will see
| automation using AI.
| vmception wrote:
| Interviewer: use copilot to implement the most efficient sorting
| algorithm
| Graffur wrote:
| Awesome - but I fear maintaining the code generated by it in the
| future.. can the AI maintain it as well?
|
| I am looking forward to AI testing the programs I write though.
| That would be awesome.
| canada_dry wrote:
| I'm assuming that - by design - it has a feed-back-loop that
| allows it to tweak, learn and improve itself by feeding back the
| choices people make vs its own recommendations.
| onion2k wrote:
| _GitHub Copilot may suggest old or deprecated uses of libraries
| and languages_
|
| This raises two questions.
|
| - is there a way (right now or planned for the future) for
| library maintainers to mark suggestions to be removed from the
| suggestions? I can foresee Copilot being used as a source of
| 'truth' among less experienced developers, and getting people
| turning up in the Issues or Discord asking why the suggestion
| doesn't work might be a bit jarring if the maintainers have to
| argue that "Github was wrong."
|
| - if a library is hosted on Github is there a way to mark some
| examples as Copilot training data? Maybe by having a 'gh-copilot'
| branch in the repo that represents high quality, known-good
| examples of usage?
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I'd be pretty worried about this based on how many times an SO
| question has new better answers months/years later. I find that
| platform self-corrects reasonably well, with the newer better
| answer ending up at the top, but no idea how that'd happen
| here.
| spoonjim wrote:
| This seems great for noobs or dunces to get code compiling, but I
| hope nobody with talent uses it. It would be like Hemingway using
| Grammarly.
| dennisy wrote:
| The site mentions the system this is built on: Codex by Open AI.
|
| Has anyone seen anything about this system? Are others able to
| build upon it?
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| I'd like to see something like that, but with knowledge about
| every single file in the codebase, and running locally.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Like an IDE?
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| Yeah but smart.
| adelarsq wrote:
| There is Tabnine that can work like this
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| Last time I tried Tabnine it wasn't really of much use to me,
| the top of the line GPT-3 is a much much bigger model, it
| should be able to do much more intelligent things.
| ranguna wrote:
| But gpt 3 won't run locally, so no thank you.
| cobrabyte wrote:
| Yeah, running locally would be my preference. I get "Antitrust
| (2001)" vibes from this, but that's the tinfoil hat side of me.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Like this?
|
| https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/
|
| I bet it's the same people, trying to push their crap into
| all sorts of successful products.
| lostintangent wrote:
| The IntelliCode and Copilot teams have been collaborating
| closely together, since we want them to provide a "better
| together" experience. However, the underlying tech isn't
| the same. Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, and enables
| rich code synthesis via a cloud service. Whereas
| IntelliCode uses multiple local models, to enhance various
| parts of the editor (e.g. prioritizing the completion list
| based on your context, detecting "repeated edits" and
| suggesting additional refactorings).
| Vinnl wrote:
| As far as I know that also runs remotely.
|
| Edit: looks like I remembered incorrectly:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/visualstudio/intellicode/ov...
|
| > No user-defined code is sent to Microsoft
| wozer wrote:
| Anyone knows what languages are supported besides those
| mentioned?
| stared wrote:
| For a second I got afraid that it is Copilot by Kite, with their
| infamous history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037).
| simongauld wrote:
| All your commits are belong to us
| asimjalis wrote:
| I thought it would be someone you can talk to.
| monkeydust wrote:
| As a business / product person I am naturally wondering how much
| more productive this will make my engineering team, should I
| overtime expect to reduction in costs, faster shipping times...or
| will the benefit manifest itself in more reliable code...?
| ranguna wrote:
| Like any other similar questions: ask your team. They'll know
| better than you or any random person on the Internet.
| SebastianFish wrote:
| What interests me most about the development of tools like this
| is how it might go on to influence the evolution of programming
| languages. The article that was posted on the CompCert verified
| C-compiler for instance. What if machine learning could make the
| cost of developing using more programming languages with stronger
| guarantees (ie rust, coq, etc) easier? Using languages with more
| internal checks could also help manage risk the the co-pilot gave
| a buggy/insecure suggestion.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| RIP sublime text, I guess it's back to VS
| quink wrote:
| Great, a whole new way to automatically introduce bugs through
| code duplication.
|
| From the examples: body: text=${text}
|
| `text` isn't properly encoded, what if it has a `=`?
| rows, err := db.Query("SELECT category, COUNT(category),
| AVG(value) FROM tasks GROUP BY category") if err !=
| nil { return nil, err }
| defer rows.Close()
|
| shouldn't we want to cleanly `rows.Close()` even if there was an
| error? float(value)
|
| where `value` is a currency. Doesn't Python have a Decimal class
| for this? create_table :shipping_addresses do
| |t|
|
| that's an auto-generated table, that one's debatable but for
| starters a `zip` fields makes it American only. And doesn't the
| customer have an e-mail address instead of a shipping address?
| var date1InMillis = date1.getTime();
|
| But what about the time-zone offset?
|
| I could go on, but literally the first five examples I looked at
| are buggy in some way.
|
| Edit: const markers: { [language:string]:
| CommentMarker } = { javascript: { start: '//', end:
| ''},
|
| Wow.
|
| Edit 2: function collaborators_map(json: any):
| Map<string, Set<string>> {
|
| Not exactly buggy, but 8 lines of tedium.
|
| What about new Map(json.map(({name,
| collaborators}) => [name, new Set(collaborators)]))
|
| instead?
|
| Edit 3: const images =
| document.querySelectorAll('img'); for (let i = 0; i <
| images.length; i++) { if
| (!images[i].hasAttribute('alt')) {
|
| I mean, I get it, it's auto-generate code. Maybe in the future
| they can narrow it down to auto-generating good code.
| document.querySelectorAll('img:not([alt])').forEach(
|
| (or) img:not([alt]) { border: 1px solid red; }
|
| (or) eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y because that maybe
| that img was rendered through react.
|
| (or) it should really be an `outline` because
| we don't want this to reflow the page and we can. And maybe a
| will-change.
| clashmeifyoucan wrote:
| one thing that caught my eye was the convert comments to code
| feature. If you can use your voice to dictate comments then
| combined with copilot it might just be possible to write code
| without touching the keyboard at all!
|
| of course I guess copilot won't be perfectly accurate right now
| or even maybe for a long time but it is interesting to imagine a
| future where the programmer can think and get code written
| without lifting a finger.
| pow_ext wrote:
| I curious about typing "const api_key" and see what the editor
| adds hahaha
| jarym wrote:
| Wow. Please make this for Rust :D
|
| What this really displaces is StackOverflow (or some of its
| users...)
| mihaifm wrote:
| I can see in their FAQ that there are plans to monetize this. So
| they're building an ML model that feeds on the work done by
| millions of people and then selling it? How is this even ethical?
| Not to mention we'd be feeding the model while using it. Guess
| this is another instance where we are becoming the product.
| bootlooped wrote:
| If I spent a lot of time reading open source repos on GitHub to
| teach myself to code, and then went out and got a high-paying
| job based on that knowledge, is that ethical? This seems
| roughly analogous to what the machine is doing.
| [deleted]
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Never learn a new skill again, let the computer do it for you.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| Seems interesting, but did they train their models on the open
| source projects available on github?
| ffggvv wrote:
| wow surprised not one comment that's scared of this being the
| step to automate away our jobs.
|
| maybe sooner than we think?
| acid__ wrote:
| It's one step closer, but still a good ways away.
|
| - you still need to understand the code that copilot is
| writing, it just turns it from a recall/synthesis problem into
| a recognition problem
|
| - most of the work above the level of a junior engineer isn't
| about writing the actual code, it's the systems design,
| architecture, communicating with external stakeholders,
| addressing edge cases, tech debt management, etc.
| dxbydt wrote:
| How does this work in the context of leetcode/hackerrank
| interviews ? Can I just use the copilot to get a 90%?skeleton of
| the required solution and maybe fill in just the 10% smarts ?
| Sr_developer wrote:
| Since most of the code written anywhere is crap (the tool was
| trained with "millions" of lines of code) I suspect it will
| repeat all the same anti-patterns,bad-structured,ill-thought code
| which fills Github.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Interestingly enough I think Ops work is far more resilient to
| automation than SWE work.
| leotaku wrote:
| > If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a
| commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future.
|
| This may be the first time that a proprietary coding tool offers
| such a great value preposition that I am actually interested in
| trying it out and potentially even paying for it. It's also kind
| of scary that this will probably be extremely hard, if not
| impossible, to create an FOSS version of this technology, just
| because of the immense amount of computing power, and by
| extension money, needed to create GPT3.
|
| I'm not that comfortable with the idea of a future where
| proprietary AI-based solutions and libraries (e.g. automatic
| testing libraries, which have been mentioned here a few times)
| are so powerful that I'll be forced to use them if I don't want
| to waste my time.
| MathYouF wrote:
| Says the person who likely owns a washing machine, sink
| connected to plumbing, microwave, stove, lighters, clothes made
| with a sewing machine, ect. ect.
|
| GPT-3 will take way less time to make a good substitute that
| costs the power of compute than other historical time saving
| technologies. Unlike other historic technologies, they pretty
| much spell out exactly how to do it, and own no patents related
| to its creation. I have trouble seeing the downside.
| leotaku wrote:
| I see your point, but aren't you making me into a bit of a
| straw man? When did I say that I was some open-access Luddite
| who won't use any technology that they can't build
| themselves. I just like the current state of programming,
| where I can easily build new and exciting things without
| having to rely on a lot of proprietary libraries or tools.
| bluefox wrote:
| I don't understand fascination with bullshit machines.
|
| While they may be useful in propaganda, state or commercial, I'm
| not sure why Microsoft GitHub would find it useful to generate
| volumes of bullshit source code.
| xrisk wrote:
| How do you opt out your own GitHub repositories from being a part
| of the training data?
| ranguna wrote:
| Probably by changing your license to not allow use in
| commercial products.
| smasher164 wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is OpenAI-based vs program synthesis
| techniques.
| shmageggy wrote:
| In the FAQ they state that it sometimes outputs non-running or
| even malformed code, so it looks like fairly pure language
| modeling with little to no program synthesis.
| iou wrote:
| This looks awesome! And I'd really like to try it out.
|
| 2 security thoughts that I couldn't find answers to:
|
| 1. how does the input fed into OpenAI codex filter out malicious
| code pollution? or even benign but incorrect code pollution
| (relevant research on stackoverflow for example -
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/26/copying-code-from-stac...)
|
| 2. In an enterprise setting, what does the feedback loop look
| like? How do you secure internal code that is being fed back to
| the model? Does it use some localized model? HE, etc?
| ollien wrote:
| #2 is the big one for me. I'm hesitant to install this on a
| work machine where our code could be sent elsewhere.
| methehack wrote:
| The gap between concept and working product is still very much in
| the human's wheelhouse. This is an accelerator to snippets not
| yet turned into a library and, in fact, a lot like a library in
| terms of it's day to day utility. This will not end or even
| change programming that much. The value I provide as a programmer
| is not about copying and pasting snippets. It's something totally
| separate different in kind from what copilot does. If it's
| helpful to do what I already do, sure I'll use it. But it ain't
| me, babe.
| lmilcin wrote:
| What about rights to the code that is created this way?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| AI is on its way to replace the people that copy and paste code
| from stackoverflow. Good riddance.
| BigJono wrote:
| Excellent. Now we just need tools to automatically shit out
| convoluted JIRA cards, run them through this, and automatically
| generate the PRs.
|
| Then we can run it overnight each night, knock back whatever
| rubbish it generates before breakfast now that there's nobody
| left to complain and schedule 6 hours of meetings to "fix" it,
| and instead we have the whole day to just build it quickly and
| properly the first time.
|
| We just increased productivity on the average enterprise
| project by 50%. Good stuff.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Plenty of discussion about the IP issues. It makes me want to
| start adding a section in my LICENSE.txt that says it's not
| eligible for use training commercial models. We'll likely end up
| with a whole set of license choices for that.
|
| Although if a license can permit or prohibit use in training
| commercial models, does that mean that the lack of permission
| implies a prohibition on it?
| darepublic wrote:
| I knew this day was coming but it still stings. What I'm
| interested in is making copilot the main pilot.. i.e. for web
| development, why not just let this thing go on its own and have a
| separate module that attempts to compile the code + observe the
| differences in a web page functionality? No longer so crazy to
| say that shit like that is on the horizon. Then the middle
| managers can have their dream come true, they are the true
| benefactors! They can 'code' with copilot, and just endlessly
| iterate with it while figuring out what they want until they get
| a result they're happy with.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I always bang on about "Software literacy" but I do wonder how i
| would deal with this if it was suggesting text for me while I was
| writing - emails, reports, novels.
|
| I suspect that for drudgery or work stuff I would happily take
| some help with typing, but I am not sure (beta access please!) if
| I would want if for my novel, or my sales copy.
|
| I am (optimistically) hoping that my novel has my _voice_ - my
| unique fingerprint of tone and vocab.
|
| And I wonder if my software has similar tone. A much more
| restricted syntax of course, but my choice to use meta
| programming here, an API design there. I may be over thinking it.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Are they making a proprietary tool based on the data provided by
| FOSS projects?
| dannyT1 wrote:
| I wonder how or if it will impact publicly available code and
| even open source on a larger scale
| EastSmith wrote:
| "Seriously Copilot, cover all these files with tests."
| a-r-t wrote:
| One of the examples they provide on copilot.github.com shows a
| unit test for strip_suffix function. It does not test for a file
| name without a suffix, which the function would fail (it removes
| the last character instead): def
| strip_suffix(filename): """ Removes the
| suffix from a filename """ return
| filename[:filename.rfind('.')] import unittest
| def test_strip_suffix(): """ Tests for
| the strip_suffix function """ assert
| strip_suffix('notes.txt') == 'notes' assert
| strip_suffix('notes.txt.gz') == 'notes.txt'
| zild3d wrote:
| Great, you got 2 assertions for free, which lowers some
| friction of writing tests. You should still be thinking and be
| "the pilot". When you start writing additional test cases, it
| will help you out with those too
| astrobe_ wrote:
| One should keep in mind that it is just "copy-paste" on
| steroids (ok, maybe a gallon of steroids), but users should be
| cautious about the _false sense of irresponsibility_.
|
| Because just like when they copy-paste the top answer on SO, at
| the end of the day they are responsible for the code they ship.
| krzyk wrote:
| It's a pity it is not (yet, I hope) a plugin to popular IDEs like
| Intellij IDEA etc. and works only in VS Code.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| TabNine is similar and works across multiple IDEs. No
| affiliation, thought their product was neat:
| https://www.tabnine.com/
| karmasimida wrote:
| I like the example LOL.
|
| How can one signed up? This could make one programmer an army.
| sqs wrote:
| AI to write code is cool, but you know what'd be even cooler?
|
| AI for maintaining, upgrading, improving, and fixing code.
|
| After all, devs spend 80%+ of their time doing those things and
| they're WAY more painful than writing code imo.
| ranguna wrote:
| Snyk code is trying to do something similar. It basically
| uploads your code and compares it to knows vulnerability
| patterns, it also gives you examples on how to fix those
| vulnerabilities based on open source project's pull requests.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Please, replace me faster :)
| arthurcolle wrote:
| The Rails migration example doesn't follow the rails convention
| with prepended datetime :p
| thesquib wrote:
| Is this automation of the Search Stack overflow, copy, and paste
| workflow?
| antpls wrote:
| Another way to look at it : if an "AI" can predict what you would
| code next, it means your program is probably not that innovative,
| and was already created somewhere.
| bootlooped wrote:
| Most of the code I write is not particularly innovative or
| novel. I'm just trying to get the job done most of the time.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Is anyone here actually using this?
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| Well, it's a brand new product, so ... no?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I imagine there was a private beta.
| ranguna wrote:
| According to the comments here, people have been using this for
| a couple of weeks now.
| devinl wrote:
| Looks exciting! It is kind of disappointing the AI generated main
| example on their home page has what appears to be a url encoding
| bug in it though (in text=${text}, text should be url encoded
| before being passed to fetch).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Brilliant.
|
| I remember over a decade ago seeing a grad student project with a
| very straightforward and very clever idea: extending JavaDocs
| based on code snippets of actual use (to address the common
| pattern problem in Java code that you often get an instance of an
| object not by direct construction, but by calling a factory
| function or singleton getter somewhere). Kicking myself that I
| didn't see this day coming.
| wpietri wrote:
| Does this solve the right problem? Getting some code on the page
| has rarely been the expensive part of building something. Indeed,
| some long-ago experience with code generators suggests that
| making it easy to create code makes many problems worse down the
| line.
| iwintermute wrote:
| It's solving 'mechanical' problem. The optimistic twist on this
| helper is that it just raises the bar - human programmer should
| better be more useful than 'brainless' code generator - meaning
| not only being able to write a loop or solve leetcode task, but
| also understand context and what he's trying to solve for.
|
| As you say typing code is not a bottleneck for problem solving
| nyghtly wrote:
| This is a very good point.
| koyote wrote:
| I agree, I feel like it might be useful for whichever
| programmers regularly have to search Stackoverflow and then
| copy paste code snippets.
|
| Then I feel like useful code produced by this tool will have to
| be treated in the exact same way as a rigorous code review:
| going through every part of the logic and ensuring it is
| correct. This seems like just as much or even more work than
| writing it yourself (if it is written in an unfamiliar way, you
| might need more time to wrap your head around it).
| spec-obs wrote:
| This is my concern. This could end up generating great swathes
| of code that no one understands, so that when it breaks it
| takes much longer to fix.
| kburman wrote:
| How do we know the code is working and doesn't have any bug?
| ranguna wrote:
| You review it. I guess that's why it's called copilot, for now.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| I suppose this is a whole new argument in favor of good code
| commenting - to train/share context with your future tooling.
| leventov wrote:
| This is really the same argument as it used to be: help
| intelligences (used to be only human, now artificial) to find
| bugs by matching text with code.
| drcode wrote:
| We could get away with more user-friendly programming languages
| over the years because Moore's law kept giving us more
| opportunities to sacrifice raw performance for more developer-
| friendly tools.
|
| But I'm worried these kinds of AI-assist tools will lead to "code
| spam" that may increase developer productivity even more, yet we
| no longer have Moore's law to absorb the additional inefficiency
| in performance these tools may introduce.
| didibus wrote:
| I wonder if this breaches any of the open source licenses or
| copyright?
|
| To some extent, it seems like this could suggest code chunks
| found somewhere else verbatim, which sounds like a copyright
| issue, but I also don't know if open-source licenses inherently
| allow you to train on their code in the first place?
| amelius wrote:
| I would be more in favor of new languages which require less
| boilerplate.
| the_laka wrote:
| I wonder if this can work with any editor out of the box, or it's
| just going to be VS Code.
| av_conk wrote:
| From the FAQ: "Not yet. For now, we're focused on delivering
| the best experience in Visual Studio Code only."
|
| I do hope they feature others at a later date, especially since
| they are planning to develop a commercial version.
| gumby wrote:
| Won't be mainstream until it supports C++20 under Emacs.
|
| (Yes that's an HN-frowned-upon joke comment, but that is my dev
| environment)
| [deleted]
| fartcannon wrote:
| This technology should be available to everyone whose work
| contributed to it's development to use as they see fit. Free of
| Microsoft's tendrils.
|
| The absolute gall of Microsoft claiming fair use to gate keep
| knowledge of millions of minds...
| mikewarot wrote:
| I've signed up to be a Guinea Pig, I've never pair programmed,
| and my primary language is Pascal, and I'm old... this ought to
| be a hoot.
| [deleted]
| pharmaz0ne wrote:
| Would it work with remote files? Because Kite would not.
| theden wrote:
| Calling it now, there will be a "Copilot considered harmful"
| post.
|
| If you need to go through the suggested code to ensure it's
| correct, you may as well write it yourself?
|
| If you glance at it and it looks about right, you can potentially
| overlook bugs or edge cases, you'll lose confidence in your own
| code since you didn't properly conceptualise it yourself.
|
| Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active
| experience of writing code.
|
| Much like learning an instrument, improvisation, or say physics,
| a lot of people learn by doing it, even if it's grunt work. IMO
| this is necessary for any professional.
|
| Maybe it will be seen as a crutch, maybe I'm getting old? I have
| tons of code snippets, but it's usually stuff I've written and
| understood and battle tested, even if it was initially sourced
| from SO. Having it in the text editor and appear out of nowhere
| with no context seems like it'd need some adjustment in
| apprehension.
|
| Edit: I should have been clear, I'm not against others using
| Copilot and will try it out myself. I can see it being useful in
| replacing one-line libs like in nodejs, i.e., copying a useful
| well-known and needed snippet vs installing yet another lib that
| could be a sec issue.
|
| Also the industry is the real gatekeeper--we have tools that
| don't require us to repeat prior-art, yet have to go through
| hurdles of leetcode-style interviews for a job. Maybe in the
| future the hardest part of being a (AI-driven) developer will be
| getting a job?
| aj3 wrote:
| Honestly, this attitude (dismissing the feature even without
| trying it out) comes across as insecurity and gatekeeping.
| jpttsn wrote:
| Is "you're gatekeeping!" the new "first comment!"? I fail to
| see the information gain from adding this message to every
| thread.
| auggierose wrote:
| Nope, it's called wisdom. Not everyone on here is under 12.
| joshbert wrote:
| There's that insecurity thing he was talking about.
| auggierose wrote:
| Not sure what is confident about doing pair programming
| with an AI, josh.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I'm not quite old enough to remember: when high level languages
| like C gained wide adoption, how much pushback was there from
| the philosophy that if you're not writing it in assembly,
| you're not really writing code?
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| As a hobbyist this is going to save me so much time. Little
| things like googling how to read CSVs in python for the 20th
| time add up and I think this should help solve that.
| aerovistae wrote:
| > Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active
| experience of writing code.
|
| And for those with experience, this will be obvious when
| reviewing their code. There's only two possibilities -- either
| copilot will get so good that it won't matter, or code written
| by copilot will have obvious tells and when someone is over-
| relying on it to cover up for a lack of knowledge, that will be
| very clear from repetition of the same sorts of mistakes.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I honestly think this is solving a real problem with commonly
| used languages and their lack of syntax abstraction and
| expressiveness.
|
| I can imagine this being very useful in helping to type out
| what I consider to be ,,mechanical noise": Things that you have
| to type out to satisfy an expression rather than to convey
| semantics.
|
| A good example of how this type of noise manifests:
|
| Observe two programmers, both being similarly strong in terms
| of many concepts except for mechanical expertise. One uses the
| editor as an extension of their body, it's beautiful to watch,
| the other stumbles awkwardly over the code until it's finished.
| You can observe the latter in programmers who are very smart
| and productive, but they either didn't train their mechanics
| deliberately or maybe they lack that kind of baseline eye hand
| coordination.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It is even entirely possible that this approach hits a
| middle-ground that serves the corporate software-development
| space better than highly-flexible languages.
|
| The difficulty with high flexibility is that the expressions
| become very domain-specific very quickly, creating the
| challenge of learning the new abstractions. So one isn't just
| a LISP developer, one knows how to write in the specific
| forest of macros that have been built up around one specific
| problem domain. The end result is code that means nothing to
| a reader who doesn't have a dense forest of macro definitions
| in their brain (at least in this era, their IDE will likely
| helpfully pull up the macro definitions with a mouse-over or
| cursor-over gesture!).
|
| Contrast with this approach, where the complexity of
| abstraction is being baked into the lower-flexibility
| language. The code is less dense, and that's a tradeoff...
| But grab any 10 developers off the street with experience in
| that language and have them read it and 8 of them will likely
| be able to tell you with some accuracy what the code is
| doing. Not a trick I've seen possible with even very
| experienced LISP developers on a codebase they've never seen
| before.
|
| ... and, of course, being able to grab a random 10 developers
| off the street and have 8 of them up-to-speed in no time at
| all is crack cocaine to big businesses with large and complex
| systems maintained by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of
| people.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I've seen macro heavy code that is very semantic and
| declarative. It's a powerful tool, so it is natural that
| people need to learn and fail until they use it well.
| pnt12 wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more:
|
| Smart programmers are are not coding thousands of lines of
| code every day. There's so much more to in software
| engineering other than coding, that's why senior engineers
| spend less time writing code than juniors.
|
| If a slow typer is using a auto-completer, he's not learning
| to type faster.
|
| If auto complete fails, then the slow programmer will need to
| invalidate the code first, and then type it anyway.
|
| All in all - maybe it's impressive AI research project, but I
| don't see it as a useful product.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Maybe I reacted optimistically because your objections are
| reasonable and relatable. But I'm still very interested in
| how this will actually play out. I want to see and feel it
| in action.
| chongli wrote:
| _I honestly think this is solving a real problem with
| commonly used languages and their lack of syntax abstraction
| and expressiveness._
|
| Do you think there's a risk that a tool like this could lead
| to an explosion of the size of codebases written in these
| languages? It's great that programmers can be freed from the
| need to write boilerplate but I fear that burden will shift
| to the need to read it.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Damn that's the best objection I read so far. Writing
| readable code is already hard and something I aspire to.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| All of the same can be said for copy-and-pasting code you find
| in a tutorial in Google search results or in a Stack Overflow
| answer. This just seems to be automating that process even
| further.
| theden wrote:
| Those extra steps can be valuable, since you'll have to work
| to even find the right code to copy/paste, and the context
| which it's in can teach you something.
|
| Even something as simple as copying from the docs, it's
| usually a good place to signal deprecation, use-case
| applicability, API updates etc. you lose all that with the
| automation.
|
| Oftentimes there's also discussion around a solution, and in
| many ways can swing one's decision on whether to use the code
| or not.
| manquer wrote:
| Think of it as a junior dev working under you and doing the
| grunt work of typing in your ideas. Sometimes he can
| StackOverflow a better snippet than you can write on your own,
| you will probably learn a bit from it, but it won't surprise
| you.
|
| It is no different from a code review of another perhaps junior
| dev and only doing adding finishing touches.
|
| There is plenty of boilerplate you have to write, Intellisense/
| Auotfill only goes so far, this is next step in the evolution.
| Sure it is not perfect but if i can express my ideas faster,
| why not.
|
| Also It is a very probably poor tool for new devs, they won't
| know that suggestion maybe not the best and probably won't
| ignore it when it is wrong as they won't know any better.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Most people on HN will probably be fine for a while. This
| innovation though, once properly developed, could completely
| screw over anyone wanting to enter programming.
|
| Code completion might be the new "junior dev."
| manquer wrote:
| All the computer scientists[1] at one point considered
| software developers and IT in the same light as higher
| level tooling evolved .
|
| While sure purist view is not wrong that average quality of
| outcome has dropped since 70s-80s, the quantum of
| throughput meant that impact has been positive and immense.
|
| Similarly I am expecting this kind of tooling would open up
| to more types of new developers.
|
| [1] all the mathematicans thought similarly perhaps during
| 50s and 60s.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _If you need to go through the suggested code to ensure it 's
| correct, you may as well write it yourself?_
|
| Not really. People are generally _far_ faster at reading
| something and evaluating whether it 's correct, than at writing
| something. In the same way it's faster to read a book than to
| write one.
|
| Not to mention the time it takes typing, fixing typos, etc.
|
| So this could genuinely be a huge timesaver if it helpful
| enough of the time.
| layla5alive wrote:
| I completely disagree with you. Reading code for correctness
| is difficult and not something most people do well at all.
| Reading code and reading for correctness are not the same,
| and most developers can write code a lot faster than they can
| verify it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I guess we just disagree?
|
| Honestly I don't even see how that's possible. Writing
| code, you're thinking about all the different ways to do
| it, eliminating the ones that won't work, evaluating the
| pros and cons of the ones that seem like they'll work, you
| start writing one and then realize it actually won't work,
| then start writing it a different way, try to decide what
| the best approach will be to make sure you're not
| committing an off-by-one error, and so on...
|
| Whereas when you're reading code for correctness, you're
| just following the logic that's already there. If it works,
| it works. How could it possibly take longer than the whole
| creative process of coming up with it...?
|
| Sure, maybe most people don't read code for correctness
| well. But then the code they write is surely even _worse_.
| amildie wrote:
| >Whereas when you're reading code for correctness, you're
| just following the logic that's already there. If it
| works, it works. How could it possibly take longer than
| the whole creative process of coming up with it...?
|
| That's exactly the problem. If you "just follow the
| logic" you can miss important details or edge cases that
| you would be forced to deal with by coding it yourself.
|
| I wouldn't mind using something like this for mundane
| tasks, but I would be very careful with these tools while
| developing high performance code intended to run on
| specific hardware.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's funny, I guess I'm just the opposite.
|
| If I'm reading code, I can give 100% of my attention to
| the logic and details and edge cases, so I'm _more_
| likely to pick them up.
|
| While as I'm writing, I'm busy doing all of the stuff
| that writing code involves, so I'm more distracted and
| more likely to make mistakes.
|
| This gets proved to me time and time again when I run
| something for the first time and have to debug it. I look
| at the offending line, and think -- how could I have made
| a mistake so obvious that it's immediately apparent?
| Well, because I was busy/distracted thinking of 20
| different things while writing it. But it's immediately
| obvious when _reading_ it, because it has my full
| attention now.
| jackbrookes wrote:
| Sometimes you don't quite know how to implement something,
| without thinking about it for a while. All of us would a
| lot of the time search StackOverflow for the solution to a
| simple problem, e.g.
|
| "recursively list all the files in a directory C#"
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/929276/how-to-
| recursivel...
|
| I imagine an AI copilot could streamline this, instead of
| searching, reading and verifying, copy pasting, and
| changing the variable names to my needs, I could now just
| type the method name, arguments, and documentation and it
| would similarly fill out the code for me. Then I have to
| check it (as I normally would).
| kajaktum wrote:
| >most developers can write code a lot faster than they can
| verify it
|
| what? so people just write code and never read it back?
| layla5alive wrote:
| Verifying code and reading it aren't the same thing. And
| yes, most developers don't verify their code as carefully
| as they should. But also, there are blind spots to
| verifying your own code because brains take shortcuts. At
| the same time, there are difficulties verifying other
| people's code because of different shortcuts brains take.
|
| There was a simple function in java standard library
| which was wrong for years because of this phenomenon.
|
| https://dev.to/matheusgomes062/a-bug-was-found-in-java-
| after...
| dgb23 wrote:
| That's what a REPL and automated tests are for.
| layla5alive wrote:
| Automated tests find all bugs and replace code review?
| I'd love some of those drugs!
| dgb23 wrote:
| No, of course not. I meant understanding what you write,
| while you write it. Also to add a bit of nuance: I
| typically spend much more time reading and thinking
| rather than writing. But I read REPL output, logs, test
| output just as much, sometimes more than the actual code.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| I'd say it's more nuanced. Reading code properly _is_
| writing code. Ie i have to work through the logic as if i'm
| writing it, which is effectively writing it in my head,
| before i know if that's what i believe to be optimal.
|
| I can _just_ read the code of course, and understand what
| it does - but just reading isn't analyzing it to the degree
| you do when you review/write the code. In that level of
| analysis you're looking for edge cases, bugs, etc. Reasons
| you'd write it differently. Which i suspect is functionally
| similar, if not identical, to writing it.
| layla5alive wrote:
| It's pretty much this, but it's harder because if someone
| else wrote it, there's a level of indirection between how
| you would have written it and how they did which tends to
| need a bit of extra mental resolving/processing for
| correctness.
| jdlshore wrote:
| I'm going to pile on the disagree train. My experience is
| that developers find (other people's) code much harder to
| read. I suspect this tool will lead to code with subtle
| problems because people will skim it, shrug "eh, looks about
| right," and move on.
|
| _Edit:_ In fact, people in this thread are finding _exactly_
| those problems in the example code, which you would assume
| had been checked fairly carefully.
| theden wrote:
| idk I always find writing code easier than reading code. Perl
| is a fantastic example of this.
| j2kun wrote:
| I imagine, for a while the complexity that Copilot can handle
| is limited to what most people would pull from stackexchange
| anyway. And if it helps autocomplete documentation and provide
| automatically generated (more descriptive) function/variable
| names, it will probably be a net positive for those limited use
| cases.
|
| That said, I can't wait to read the first postmortem where
| someone deployed code generated via Copilot that has a bug. I
| just hope it's not on a rocketship or missile guidance system.
| maxwells-daemon wrote:
| I'd rate myself as "above-average receptive" to ML-based tooling,
| but after trying two "AI autocomplete" tools (Kite and TabNine)
| I've decided it's not for me. The suggestions were usually good,
| but I found having complex, nondeterministic IDE commands pretty
| unsettling.
| dilap wrote:
| Could actually make you better at producing robust code,
| though. It's somehow always easier to spot someone else's
| mistakes than your own.
|
| Or to put it another way: you _know_ you can 't trust the AI-
| generated code w/o convincing yourself it's correct. You
| _think_ you can trust the code you wrote yourself, but you 're
| probably wrong! :-)
| Communitivity wrote:
| I wonder if by using Github Copilot you are training Github
| Copilot to code better. I don't see this as replacing a
| programmer, but I could see it as an advanced, possibly semi-
| automatic refactoring tool. This could allow a less skilled
| programmer to be more productive and produce better code, making
| them more valuable. Also, licensing was mentioned. I would not
| want Github Copilot training on private repos.
| youerbt wrote:
| I wonder if this kind of technology can push industry into more
| advanced languages. If a programmer can restrain the space of
| available programs more, it should aid the tool to give even
| better results.
| ahofmann wrote:
| How does this compare to tabnine?
| Linked_Liszt wrote:
| I haven't kept up with the adversarial ML field recently, but I
| wonder how vulnerable these models are to adversarial attacks.
|
| - Could someone deliberately publish poor code to reduce the
| overall performance of the model?
|
| - Could someone target a specific use case or trigger word by
| publishing deliberately poor code under similar function
| definitions?
| abhijitr wrote:
| Also: what happens when a nontrivial portion of public code out
| there is ML-generated? How will it deal with feedback effects?
| patwolf wrote:
| I wonder if there's any potential for Copilot to suggest
| malicious code because it's been trained on an open source
| projects containing intentionally malicious code.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Since it is _per line_ I highly doubt it. I think of it as
| intellisense+. You select suggestions that you would have
| written anyway.
| napolux wrote:
| or broken code :D
| [deleted]
| ukoki wrote:
| The averageRuntimeInSeconds example does not check for
| division by zero so it creates broken code at least 20% of
| the time based on the examples on the homepage :)
| napolux wrote:
| nothing more than what I was expecting :D
| akersten wrote:
| Maybe not malicious per se, but certainly I'd be concerned
| about seemingly-correct but actually-wrong code being
| suggested. Considering how often the top StackOverflow answer
| is slightly wrong or how often antipatterns crop up across
| various projects, I'm sure the training data is nowhere near
| "perfect code" - implying the output cannot be perfect either.
| inimino wrote:
| I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this
| idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the
| worst part of the job and ready to be automated away.
|
| As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems
| to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this
| domain.
|
| We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in
| boilerplate and the acceptance of it because they make it easier
| to manage. I can only imagine what kinds of codebases a product
| like this could lead to. Someone will produce 5000 lines of code
| in a day for a new feature, but only read 2000 of those lines.
| Folks that still expect you to only check in code you understand
| and can explain will become a minority.
|
| I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of
| the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of
| nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on
| itself.
|
| Cargo-cult programming has always been a problem, but now we're
| explicitly building tools for it.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| If this results in more overall programmers or enabling
| existing programmers to make products quicker than before, it's
| a win!
|
| Most codebases already majorly contain unread code; the
| libraries (node_modules, etc). I am sure we can figure out a
| pattern to separate human vs machine code in similar way.
|
| If the code you are about to write is already written by
| someone else on the internet, that's probably not the most
| innovative part of your codebase anyway, so why waste time?
| anyonecancode wrote:
| > I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest
| of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made
| of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on
| itself.
|
| This is my actual hoped-for endgame for the ad based internet.
| At some point Twitter, FB, etc will be exclusively populated by
| bots that post ads, and bots that simulate engagement with
| those ads to drive up perceived value of advertising. They'll
| use AI to post comments that are really just ads or
| inflammatory keyword strings to drive further "engagement." The
| tech companies will rake in billions and billions of dollars in
| ad revenue, we'll tax all of it and use it to create flying
| cars, high speed rail, and an ad-free internet closed off to
| all non-humans. Occasionally a brave ML researcher may venture
| out into the "internet" to take field notes on the evolution of
| the adbot and spambot ecosystem.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The most unlikely thing you mentioned is that we will be able
| to tax huge corporations.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You jest, but the parent is close to what I believe is a
| possible scenario - the one Nick Bostrom calls "a
| Disneyland with no children".
|
| No tax, no flying cars, eventually not even humans around -
| just AI-driven companies endlessly trading with each other,
| in a fully-automated, self-contained, circular economy,
| from which sentient beings were optimized away.
| nindalf wrote:
| I invite you to try automating this and let us know what
| happens. Try creating, let's say 1000 accounts and try liking
| or posting and see what happens. I've seen that system at
| work and doubt you'd get very far.
|
| More than that, you misunderstand how advertisers prioritise
| their money. They pay for outcomes. If they notice that over
| the past couple of months they've been receiving mostly bot
| traffic, they stop advertising. Not everyone all at once, but
| enough that revenue begins to decline. An ad based business
| that cares about the long term will do it's best to weed out
| the inauthentic engagement.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > More than that, you misunderstand how advertisers
| prioritise their money. They pay for outcomes.
|
| How they verify those outcomes, however, gets interesting.
| See, for example, College Humour going under due to
| inflated engagement metrics fed to them by Facebook video.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I invite you to try automating this and let us know what
| happens. Try creating, let's say 1000 accounts and try
| liking or posting and see what happens. I've seen that
| system at work and doubt you'd get very far._
|
| Yes, naive attempts at manipulation will be detected these
| days on big platforms. 5+ years ago such naive attempts
| were successful, though. A few years ago I made a proof of
| concept to show how easy it is to make new Reddit accounts
| and automate them, and had registered hundreds of accounts.
| Those logins still work even though Reddit has cracked down
| on naive automation attempts.
|
| Today, that's why many firms buy real users' accounts.
| They'll hire people to manually login to the accounts and
| post. There's also the perpetual cat and mouse game between
| bot creators and platform owners, and the platform owners
| who benefit from the appearance of increased growth and
| engagement that's actually just bot activity.
| augustk wrote:
| Indeed, using tools to manage complexity tends to make the
| complexity acceptable and leads to more complexity.
| s_dev wrote:
| Coding is inherently difficult -- any tools even as basic as
| color highlighting/spell checking massively help understanding
| code in front of you. There isn't a hope this can replace any
| programmers but instead aid their workflow. I great example is
| simply refactoring code with SOLID after building a feature or
| fixing a bug -- a lot of this can be easily automated. Having a
| machine suggest and a human accept is a worthy trade off.
| Another similar example is the Google bot that presents search
| suggestions for you.
|
| I don't think your concerns are well grounded.
| bluetwo wrote:
| All I can think of is how many times I've grabbed a code
| example from StackOverflow only to discover it had some obvious
| bug in it. The answer is many, many times.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| In the (now not very) long run, programming was a job meant for
| computers, anyway. The future will look back at "programming"
| the way we now look at Charles Dickens characters toiling in
| soot-filled factories. It's not what people are best at, and it
| looks like soon there will be better ways to accomplish this
| job.
| vanusa wrote:
| _Cargo-cult programming has always been a problem, but now we
| 're explicitly building tools for it._
|
| I get what you're saying, but I'm not worried. At the end of
| the day, the programmer has to understand the code they're
| submitting, both the fine grain and the holistic context. If
| they don't know how to, or can't be bothered at least _curate_
| the suggestions the tool is making... then your organization
| has much bigger problems than can be helped by reading a
| Dijkstra paper or two.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the
| worst part of the job and ready to be automated away.
|
| _writing_ the programs is definitely boring garbage work.
| Typing is so slow and annoying - hence autocomplete being a
| standard tool. This is, to me, just fancy autocomplete.
|
| > to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it
| because they make it easier to manage.
|
| Boilerplate optimizes for the right things - code that's easier
| to read and analyze, but takes longer to write. IDEs and tools
| like this cut the cost of writing, giving us easier to read
| code and easier to analyze code for free.
|
| IDEs have supported templates forever. I never write out a full
| unit test, I type `tmod` and `tfn` and then fill in the blanks.
| This is basically the same thing to me.
|
| > Folks that still expect you to only check in code you
| understand and can explain will become a minority.
|
| This isn't true at all. Having used TabNine I don't have it
| write code for me, it just autocompletes code that's already in
| my head, give or take some symbol names maybe being different.
|
| All this is is a fancy autocomplete with a really cool demo.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >Boilerplate optimizes for the right things - code that's
| easier to read and analyze, but takes longer to write.
|
| This is wrong and the same retarded logic Java used to defend
| not introducing var and similar features for ages.
| Boilerplate is usually noise around the actual logic - it's a
| result of limited abstractions. When you're repeating same
| code over and over you raise that segment to a separate
| concept, that's how abstraction and high level programming
| works - it increases readability and maintainability. Being
| easier to type has nothing to do with it.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Thanks for being the person who I knew would try to make
| this about Java. I don't care about Java, it was a trivial
| example.
|
| The rest of your post doesn't really have to do with mine.
| Yeah, you can cut down on boilerplate with changes to
| languages... duh. But in terms of conveying context there's
| always a tradeoff of explicit vs implicit, and one of those
| costs is taking the time to actually turn your mental model
| into a written implementation - this eases that burden.
|
| As I said, it's a fancy autocomplete.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >But in terms of conveying context there's always a
| tradeoff of explicit vs implicit
|
| Exactly - if a tool let's you write it explicitly too
| easily you're making that the default, and it ignores the
| readability/maintainability side of the tradeoff.
|
| Maybe it gets good enough to recognise when things can be
| factored out for better readability as well. But in my
| experience code generators rarely result in maintainable
| code.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| Boilerplate is only easier to read and analyze if you can be
| sure it is consistent, so you can tune it out. Usually
| though, there is this one getter method that is not quite
| like the others and you literally will not see the difference
| until it bites you.
|
| We'll need more IDE enhancements, to highlight interesting
| pieces and desaturate standard boilerplate...
| staticassertion wrote:
| When I think of boilerplate I think of context that is made
| explicit. Things like type annotations, longer variable
| names, the lifetime or attributes of some class or data
| etc. These things are extremely helpful for a number of
| things - they convey context from writer to readers, they
| aid in proving the code correct, and they can make code
| faster.
|
| The context almost always exists in the writers head. We
| all have a specification of our program based on our
| expectations, and we type out code to turn that model into
| an implementation. We only spend so much time conveying
| that model though - most of us don't write formal proofs,
| but many of us will write out type annotations or doc
| comments.
|
| The _cost_ is usually as simple as expressing and typing
| out the model in our head as code. Languages that are
| famous for boilerplate, like Java, enforce this - and it
| makes writing Java slower, but can also make Java code
| quite explicit (I 'm sure someone will respond talking
| about confusing Java code, that's not the point).
|
| Reducing the cost of conveying context from writer to
| reader means we can convey more of that context in more
| places. That's a huge win, in my opinion, because I've
| personally found that so much implicit context gets lost
| over time, but it can be hard to always take the time to
| convey it.
|
| Think about how many programs you've read with single
| character variable names, or no type annotations, or no
| comments. The more of that we can fix, the better, imo.
|
| Tools like this do that. TabNine autocompletes full method
| type signatures for me in rust, meaning that the cost of
| actually writing out the types is gone. That's one less
| cost to pay for having clearer, faster code.
| fossuser wrote:
| People have made some variation of this argument since the move
| from writing binary to writing assembly.
|
| With every new layer of abstraction there's more power.
|
| The long term benefit of a tool that can do this well far
| exceeds what humans can do by hand, but that may not be true in
| the very short term.
|
| Either way, I suspect the benefits to be big.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not at all: this tool does not encourage more powerful
| abstractions, but the very opposite.
|
| It makes boilerplate cheaper to churn out.
| uticus wrote:
| I disagree with the comparison. This isn't abstraction, it is
| syntax completion. As if you typed the first four bytes and
| GitHub (mostly correctly it must be mentioned!) completed the
| remaining.
|
| Unlike an additional abstraction layer, the readibility is
| not increased.
| fossuser wrote:
| The end goal of this based on what I've seen from Open AI
| examples and related beta projects is more high level
| language -> code.
|
| "Write a standard sign up page" -> Generated HTML
|
| "Write a unit test to test for X" -> Unit Test.
|
| It's more than just syntax completion - I'd argue that's
| the beginning of a new layer of abstraction similar to
| previous new abstraction layers. The demo on their main
| page is more than syntax completion - it writes a method to
| check for positive sentiment automatically using a web
| service based on standard english.
|
| This is extremely powerful and it's still super early.
|
| I saw one example that converted english phrases into bash
| commands, "Search all text files for the word X" -> the
| correct grep command.
|
| That is a big deal for giving massive leverage to people
| writing software and using tools. We'll be able to learn
| way faster with that kind of AI assisted feedback loop.
|
| Similarly to compilers, the end result can also be better
| than what humans can do eventually because the AI can
| optimize things humans can't easily, by training for
| performance. Often the optimal layout can be weird.
| [deleted]
| _fat_santa wrote:
| The way I see it, the tool is only as good as the programmer
| using it. This tool will generate the individual code blocks
| for you, but you still have to understand how to put it all
| together to deliver a working app.
|
| Sure there will be some codebases out there that are plastered
| together using this tool, but when it comes to delivering
| software that is well written, performant and maintainable over
| the course of several years, you're still going to need a lot
| of skilled engineers to pull that off.
| hbosch wrote:
| If we didn't need programmers to do the programming, that would
| be a perfect world.
| slver wrote:
| This is inevitably leading to the moment where we don't need
| humans, but I'm fine with that.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This ignores the ladder of abstraction, which you apparetly
| need to be reminded of exists. Not all programmers need to work
| at the same level of abstraction: some programmers need to
| write original code all day long because their subject field is
| close to the metal and there are no premade solutions. For
| those folks, the idea of copy-pasting from SO is pretty
| ridiculous, although SO _might_ have questions and answers that
| allow them to write their own code solutions based on the
| insights of others. Because we 're not going to dismiss highly
| respected experts in our fields just because they helped answer
| good questions with good detailed answers on Stackoverflow, are
| we?
|
| A few rungs up on the ladder we _still_ have programmers but
| now the kind whose job it is to write _as little code as
| possible_ , where their worth comes from knowing exactly how
| little code glue is needed to, necessarily and sufficiently,
| make other people's libraries work together to functionality
| that is larger than the sum of its parts. These folks aren't
| solving unique problems, they make things work with as little
| code as possible, and copy-pasting from SO for problems that
| have been solved countless times already by others is 100%
| fine: their expertise is in knowing how to judge other people's
| code to determine whether that's the code they need to copy-
| paste.
|
| And then, of course, there all the folks in between those two
| levels of abstraction.
|
| The biggest mistake would be to hear "programming" and think
| "only my job is real programming, all those other people are
| just giving me a bad name". Different horses and different
| courses, _and_ different courses for different horses.
| hyperion2010 wrote:
| Some people think the problem is that we don't have enough
| code. Anyone that has to maintain code knows that the problem
| is that we have too much code.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| This is even better! Now we can generate code we might not
| even understand, without even hitting all the keys.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| Okay, and I'd argue that a good portion of programmatic
| wrangling is simply trying to do Y with Z. Something that's
| probably done 10,000 times over by others but in the silo'd
| confines of that single developer's workspace; an utter fucking
| mystery to them.
|
| What's the carbon displacement for wasted time on those tasks?
| It might be brow raising.
| slver wrote:
| You sound afraid you'll be replaced by software.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Your fears seem justified, as per the site itself:
|
| Whether you're working in a new language or framework, or just
| learning to code, GitHub Copilot can help you find your way.
| Tackle a bug, or learn how to use a new framework without
| spending most of your time spelunking through the docs or
| searching the web.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| Cargo cults concerned me too but I realized that cargo-cult
| programming flourishes when it's enabled by a culture that
| doesn't care how the sausage is made. If the culture seeks full
| stack truth, it's not likely to get fooled by bad generated
| code, no matter whether it's generated by copy/paste,
| metaprogramming, or AI.
|
| I'd love to know what Donald Knuth thinks given the history of
| literate programming.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| The first thing that comes to mind is the recent article on the
| front page about the docker footgun/default that allowed a
| hacker to wipe a website's database.
| dqpb wrote:
| That entirely depends on the quality of the suggestion, does it
| not?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Not looking forward to dealing with this from a security point
| of view. It's difficult to get developers to accept
| responsibility for security vulnerabilities in libraries
| they've selected for their project ("That's not my code!"). I
| can see the same thing happening with generated code where they
| don't want to take responsibility for finding a way to
| remediate any vulnerabilities they didn't personally type in.
| Of course those who exploit the vulnerabilities won't care how
| it got into the code. They're just happy they're able to make
| use of it.
| IncludeSecurity wrote:
| It says it's trained on "billions of lines of code"
|
| I would augment that to "billions of lines of code that may
| or may not be safe and secure"
|
| If they could tie in CodeQL into Copilot to ensure the
| training set only came from code with no known security
| concerns, that would be a big improvement.
| kbenson wrote:
| I think the mistake you might be making is assuming that any
| tool adopted is always used all the time. Even professional
| race car drivers probably opt for an automatic transmission
| over the manual on the mini-van if they get one. Different
| choices for different needs.
|
| There will always be a place for meticulous consideration of
| exactly what's being done, and many levels of that as well. For
| the same reason people reach for python to mock up a proof of
| concept or throw something together that is non-essential but
| useful to have quickly, even meticulous programmers might use
| this to good effect for small things they don't care to spend a
| lot of time on because it's not as important as something else,
| or the language they're using for this small task isn't one
| they feel as proficient in.
| albertkoz wrote:
| Next step will be AI to approve the code, because. if someone
| is producing 5k LOC a day there are people who need to read &
| approve this code...
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| I mean you say this, but you and most likely the majority of
| programmers rely on dozens of repositories, packages and
| libraries with likely zero deep understanding of it (and at the
| very least haven't read the source code of ) so I don't really
| understand the difference here.
|
| The advantage of something like this is that instead of having
| to go to stack overflow or any number of reference sites and
| copy pasta it can just happen automatically without me having
| to leave my IDE.
|
| The enjoyable part of programming for me is not typing the Ajax
| post boilerplate bullcrap for the millionth time, it's the
| high-level design and abstract reasoning.
| mdellavo wrote:
| if you are typing out boilerplate you should look to abstract
| it away
| Yaina wrote:
| I think this goes beyond one project. In your lifetime you
| just have to write certain things again and again and then
| you have to write the abstractions again and again.
|
| Maybe that warrants a library, but then you also have to
| hook that up with the ever so slightly different
| boilerplate code.
|
| If this 90% of the easy stuff is done for you, that gives
| you more time to focus on the 10% that matter.
| Spivak wrote:
| Oh god please don't do this indiscriminately. If you're
| typing out boilerplate, document it and add a generator for
| it. I've been bitten probably hundreds of times by bad
| abstractions created to save some keystrokes that turned 50
| lines of boring easily readable code into an ungrokable
| dense mess.
| gugagore wrote:
| What do you mean "add a generator for it"? Do you mean
| something like a templating for source code, like the C
| pre-processor?
|
| I think there is a pro and a con to that approach.
|
| The pro is that there is a meaningful and familiar
| intermediate representation --- the output of the C pre-
| processor is still C code. Another example is
| https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/metaobjects.html
|
| The con is that, well, it introduces a meta layer, and
| these meta layers are more often than not ad-hoc and
| ultimately became quite unwieldy. It's a design pattern
| that suggests that there is a feature missing from the
| language.
| Spivak wrote:
| No absolutely not, I think that's the worst of both
| worlds. I mean something like `rails generate` where it's
| a parameterized block of generated code that you insert
| inline and then edit to your needs.
|
| The disadvantage is that making sweeping changes is more
| work. The advantage is that making sweeping changes can
| be done incrementally. But the big win with code
| generators is that all you need to understand what's
| happening is right in front of you instead of having to
| mentally unwind a clunky abstraction.
|
| Don't get me wrong if you have a good abstraction that
| reduces the use of mental registers do it! But you would
| and should do that regardless of boilerplate.
| Verdex wrote:
| "Okay, so you pass the function a lambda. And the input
| parameter to that lambda is another function that itself
| consumes a list of lambdas. And this is so that you don't
| have to init and fill in a few dictionaries OR because
| you might need to otherwise use an if-statement."
|
| I like abstractions as much as the next person, but
| oftentimes you can just make due with the exact thing.
| cunthorpe wrote:
| Importing an external, tested, reliable dependency is
| completely different from anonymous non-checked untested code
| in your repository committed by someone who did not even read
| it.
|
| Check out the memoize example. That fails as soon as you pass
| anything non-primitive but there's no one documenting that.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| anonymous non-checked untested code is problematic in all
| cases. This doesn't change that.
| geraneum wrote:
| A programmer who commits untested sloppy code of their own
| writing, will do it regardless of having access to such a
| service. Nothing will make me commit the generated code
| without testing it. I think this tool could take care of
| the boilerplate and the rest will still be on the
| programmer. At least in the near future.
| gnulinux wrote:
| > anonymous non-checked untested code
|
| What? It's not anonymous, it's still committed by a dev. It
| can be non-checked and untested, that's true. But it's not
| any less untested than any other code. If you choose not to
| write tests for your code, this won't change anything.
|
| The only issue I see with this is it being potentially
| unchecked. And the solution to that is reading all the code
| you commit, even though it's generated by AI.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's about affordances. As presented, this tool
| streamlines copy-pasting random snippets. The easier
| something is, the more people do it.
|
| Testing doesn't even enter the picture here, we're at the
| level of automating the stereotypical StackOverflow-
| driven development - except with SO, you at least get
| some context, there's a discussion, competing solutions,
| code gets some corrections. Here? You get a black-box
| oracle divining code snippets from function names and
| comments.
|
| > _the solution to that is reading all the code you
| commit, even though it 's generated by AI_
|
| Relying on programmer discipline doesn't scale. Also, in
| my experience, copy-pasting a snippet and then checking
| it for subtle bugs is _harder_ than just reading it,
| getting the gist of it, and writing it yourself.
| veverkap wrote:
| > As presented, this tool streamlines copy-pasting random
| snippets.
|
| It synthesizes new code based on a corpus of existing
| code.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes. Given how it does it, this makes it even more
| dangerous than if it was just trying to _find_ a matching
| preexisting snippet.
| jbrot wrote:
| > Programmer discipline doesn't scale
|
| Thank you for putting this so eloquently. This has
| basically been the sole tenet of my programming
| philosophy for several years, but I've never been able to
| put it into words before.
| ahepp wrote:
| >Tests without the toil. Tests are the backbone of any
| robust software engineering project. Import a unit test
| package, and let GitHub Copilot suggest tests that match
| your implementation code.
|
| It looks to me like they're _suggesting_ you use Copilot
| to _write the tests_.
| pvorb wrote:
| I really wonder who those folks copy-pasting from Stack
| Overflow all day are. I only rarely find pieces of code that
| I can copy-paste. Typically Stack Overflow only gives me an
| idea of how to solve something, but incorporating that idea
| into my code base is still not trivial.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| There is certainly a balance. When I want to implement
| feature X a client has requested but I have to deal with
| home grown database abstraction layers and custom AJAX API
| structures - I get the feeling that a third party library
| probably does it better and has more eyes on the code than
| exist at my company.
|
| That said I would probably not look to a third party
| library to just to simple data transformation stuff.
| Probably the only thing I do copy almost verbatim from SO
| are things like Awk/Sed commands that are easy/low risk to
| test but would take hours to derive myself.
| dpq wrote:
| I had a colleague who once tried to copy-paste a Scala
| snippet into Python code and came to complain that it
| doesn't work. We're no longer colleagues.
| auggierose wrote:
| Yep. And now imagine these people with Github Copilot in
| their arsenal. God help us all.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I really wonder who those folks copy-pasting from Stack
| Overflow all day are.
|
| I can think about people who can do this happily. Some of
| them are professional programmers. Some are self-taught.
| Some have CS education. _Seriously_.
|
| OTOH, I'm similar to you. I either re-use my own snippets
| or read SO or similar sites to get an idea generally how a
| problem is solved and adapt it to my code _unless_ I find
| the concept I 'm looking for inside the language docs or
| books I have.
|
| Yes, I'm a RTFM type of programmer.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| A few weeks ago someone on a call said "we all know that
| programming is mostly copy and pasting anyway" A few people
| laughed, but I said that if I catch myself copy and pasting
| then I know that something is very wrong. It was kind of
| awkward, but I didn't like my job being trivialized by
| people who never really did it.
|
| It would be like if I said plumbing or auto repair is just
| watching youtube videos and going to lowes. Just because
| I've managed to do a few simple things, doesn't mean I'm in
| a position to belittle an entire profession.
|
| That said, I am also shocked by how many full time
| developers don't take the time to understand their own
| code. Let alone the libraries they use.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > That said, I am also shocked by how many full time
| developers don't take the time to understand their own
| code. Let alone the libraries they use.
|
| Me too, then I understood that code and programming is
| commoditized. As long as it works and looks pretty on the
| outside and it can be sold, it's fair game.
|
| "There'll be bugs anyway, we can solve these problems
| somehow" they probably think.
|
| Heck even containers and K8S is promoted with "Developers
| are unreliable in documenting what they've done. Let's
| make things immutable so, they can't monkey around on
| running systems, and make undocumented changes" motto.
|
| I still run perf on my code and look for IPC and cache
| trashing ratio numbers and try to optimize things,
| thinking "How can I make this more efficient so it can
| run faster on this". I don't regret that.
| godelski wrote:
| Some people consider using stack as a heavy inspiration
| to be equivalent to "copy and pasting." It's linguistic
| shorthand really.
| jka wrote:
| I'd be willing to bet a reasonable amount that there's a
| large future for "subtractive software development" (maybe a
| slightly misleading or unfair term, since it'd include
| bugfixes).
|
| Once we have multiple proven technologies that handle each of
| the functional areas that we collectively need, then we'll
| start to find greater benefit in maintenance, bugfixes, and
| performance improvements for those existing technologies and
| their dependencies than we find writing additional code and
| libraries.
| echelon wrote:
| I think as our field evolves, more work will be dealing with
| high level abstractions. There is a massive need for
| distributed systems design. Companies have big ambitions, but
| not enough labor to accomplish them.
|
| There will still be plenty of low level systems programming
| work. The field is growing, not shrinking.
|
| One impact this may have is that it may make tasks easier and
| more accessible, which could bring lots of new talent and
| could also apply downward force on wages. But the counter to
| that is that there is so much more work to be done.
|
| I'm all for new tools.
| scrozier wrote:
| Trying to figure out why in the world your comment was down
| voted.
| inimino wrote:
| You don't see the difference between relying on a few battle-
| hardened libraries, and copy-pasting into your own code some
| mishmash of code that looked similar that other people wrote
| and is probably something like what a machine learning model
| thought you probably meant? Maybe we're in worse shape then I
| thought.
|
| > The advantage [...] without me having to leave my IDE.
|
| You're arguing for the convenience, my point was that that
| convenience creates a moral hazard, or if you prefer, a
| perverse incentive, to increase the number of lines of code,
| amount of boilerplate, code duplication, and to accept
| horrible, programmer-hostile interfaces because you have tied
| yourself to a tool that is needed to make them usable.
|
| > Ajax post boilerplate
|
| This is an argument for choosing the most appropriate
| abstractions. The problem with boilerplate isn't that you
| have to type it, it's that it makes the code worse: longer,
| almost certainly buggier, harder to read and understand, and
| probably even slower to compile and run. You could have made
| an editor macro 20 years ago to solve the typing boilerplate
| problem, but it wasn't the best answer then and it isn't now.
| majormajor wrote:
| > I mean you say this, but you and most likely the majority
| of programmers rely on dozens of repositories, packages and
| libraries with likely zero deep understanding of it (and at
| the very least haven't read the source code of ) so I don't
| really understand the difference here.
|
| I spend a probably half my coding time testing and digging
| into those libraries because I don't understand them and
| because they cause performance issues because nobody on the
| team understands them sufficiently to make their "high level
| design and abstract reasoning" accurate.
|
| One problem with the current world of programming tools is
| that there's no good way to know which libraries are suitable
| for use when correctness and performance and reliability
| really matters, and which are only really meant for less
| rigorous projects.
| z3t4 wrote:
| One problem with IDE's is that they can be antagonistic of
| good practices such as writing comprehensible code, small
| code bases, and good documentation.
| js8 wrote:
| > you and most likely the majority of programmers rely on
| dozens of repositories, packages and libraries with likely
| zero deep understanding of it
|
| Perhaps AI should work on simplifying the existing stack
| first, without breaking the functionality. What about that?
| awb wrote:
| > The advantage of something like this is that instead of
| having to go to stack overflow or any number of reference
| sites and copy pasta it can just happen automatically without
| me having to leave my IDE.
|
| In the examples, I wish the auto-generated code came with
| comments or an explanation like SO does. The code I need help
| with the most is the code that's a stretch for me to write
| without Googling. The code I can write in my sleep I'd rather
| just write without a tool like this.
| [deleted]
| karmasimida wrote:
| > Someone will produce 5000 lines of code in a day for a new
| feature, but only read 2000 of those lines.
|
| Shouldn't the one who has produced this code be responsible for
| making sure the integrity of it? 5k LOC in a day without test
| cases, then that is no code, it is a disaster.
|
| I think the marketing here is about right. This is no AI
| programmer, but Copilot. It is an intelligent assistant that
| does some mundane things for you with probability of failing
| some of that even, but when the stars align, you are in luck.
|
| I see this as INCREDIBLY useful for certain niche of
| programming:
|
| 1. Front end. Some components are really trivial but still
| requires some manual rewiring and stuff, this could be the life
| saver.
|
| 2. Templates for devops. Those are as soul crushing as
| possible, and I couldn't think of a better domain to apply
| Copilot to it.
|
| Overall, this is a huge win for programmer productivity, with
| reasonable compromises.
| z3t4 wrote:
| If we exclude the VM the code is running on, and the OS layer,
| and the kernel, and the micro-code, and the standard lib, then
| people also like to include library code, and also like to
| depend on third party PaaS and SaaS aka the "cloud"... If you
| do know what all bits of your code does you can send me a PM.
| _cough_ All software is shit, with few exceptions. Not
| necessary because the developers don 't know their stuff, but
| likely because of business priorities, politics, and layers of
| management. Software is a "people problem". So if we remove the
| "people" we might get better software ;)
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I think that there's a division between "productive" developers
| and "meticulous" developers. I know that I'm not the first one.
| My best days are when I'm removing code. I'm very wary from
| using frameworks and huge libraries. I learned few frameworks
| and libraries, I've chosen few that correspond to my style and
| I'm very careful when it comes to adapting new ones. I prefer
| to spend a week coding auth layer rather than installing some
| SaaS connector and call it a day. I prefer to spend few days
| reading source code and developing my own solution (or just
| discarding the whole idea) rather than quickly google something
| and move on.
|
| May be I'm just unprofessional, I don't know. I get my stuff
| done, may be not as fast, but at least I understand every bit
| of my code and I rarely have unexpected surprises. I understand
| that there are other approaches, but I just don't enjoy that
| way, so I follow mine as long as I can find work. And I
| actually like things that other people find boring, according
| to this thread. Withing "business code" - hate it, writing
| "auth layer" - love it.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Sounds like you should be working on libraries instead of
| products then?!
| oscribinn wrote:
| So you're basically saying that if you're not a shitty
| programmer, you shouldn't be working directly on products?
| Are you a Windows developer or something?
| b215826 wrote:
| I don't think you're unprofessional. In fact, your sentiment
| is a belief that was strongly held by early UNIX programmers.
| Two quotes I particularly like:
|
| _" The real hero of programming is the one who writes
| negative code."_ -- Douglas McIllroy
|
| _" One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000
| lines of code."_ -- Ken Thompson
|
| But unfortunately, we've come to a situation where SLOC and
| innovation for the sake of innovation is more important than
| code quality.
| Bayart wrote:
| I'm the same. I tend to get derailed on making my code
| philosophically "right" and aesthetically "soothing" (for
| lack of a better word), even when it doesn't obviously matter
| to the scope of the project, rather than just it to the point
| where it _works_ by some operation of the Holy Spirit.
| Unsuprisingly I'm the "is he working ?" guy (I may fit in the
| attention disorder category that was a point of discussion in
| the confidence thread[1] the other day). But at least I'm not
| the "his code broke our shit again" guy.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27533988
| quek wrote:
| > As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this
| seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen
| in this domain.
|
| Absolutely true.
|
| If your code is so repetitive that can be correctly predicted
| by an AI, you are either using a language that lacks
| expressiveness or have poor abstraction.
|
| The biggest problem in the software world is excessive
| complexity, excessive amounts of (poor) code and reinventing
| the wheel.
| slver wrote:
| You're underestimating the sophistication of said AI.
| novok wrote:
| I've used tabnine for a while, and it's mostly just been a
| faster executing normal autocomplete, with a %90 accuracy rate.
| It's a tradeoff. It didn't have the large snippet behavior in
| my usage like this new one although.
| hintymad wrote:
| Somehow I don't see people discuss this kind of tools from the
| perspective of managing essential complexity versus accidental
| complexity. Maybe copilot just increases the abstraction level
| of coding, so we can treat generated code as a building block,
| just like we nowadays rarely needs to care about how to write
| assembly code or how a balanced tree works?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Maybe copilot just increases the abstraction level of
| coding, so we can treat generated code as a building block_
|
| At this point it _doesn 't_, and we _can 't_, because Copilot
| is just a fancy autocomplete. The code is there, first class,
| in your file. It doesn't introduce new concepts for you, it
| just tries to guess what you mean by function signature +
| descriptive comments, and generates that code for you.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| You can only solve relatively small problems this way. As I get
| older, I like the physical act of programming less and less,
| and just want to solve problems so I can get going on all of my
| ideas backlog. I've been programming almost every day for the
| last 38 years. What I really want to do is solve (my) problems.
| dennisy wrote:
| I really agree with this even though my experience is much
| smaller than yours.
|
| The biggest place I think it is frustrating to write code is
| for ML pipelines where you know what you need, but it takes a
| few hours to wrangle files and pandas until you can run your
| idea/experiment.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Ermahgerd, yes! Doing this right now.
| auggierose wrote:
| But programming is the greatest fun on earth. Wait no, being
| able to work on your ideas and communicating them to the
| computer is the greatest fun on earth. Now, if your only
| tools for communication are made by "productive developers",
| this is where the problem is. Not with programming itself.
| uticus wrote:
| As a counterpoint to most of the other responses, I agree with
| this comment. In my eyes, this is very similar to the issue of
| bloated software being enabled by faster processors. This
| doesn't mean slower processors are the answer, but rather that
| there are often unintended consequences that need to be
| considered when solving for a problem. So, as an example of
| what could be better than making boilerplate easier to type, I
| would suggest programming languages, frameworks, and tooling
| that reduce the need in the first place would be worth
| considering.
| ionwake wrote:
| I get the impression the only way to use this is in a github
| cloud environment, which means all the code you type will
| essentially belong to github in some capacity?
| chad_strategic wrote:
| I wonder if they are going to have a plugin for ATOM IDE?
| Iv wrote:
| Is it only available for Visual Code?
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. Obviously.
| auggierose wrote:
| What could go wrong? Expecting software to become even shittier.
| maxpert wrote:
| Now I am gonna have an outage because co-pilot wrote some code
| that had an error. People have implicit bias of code being
| reliable that they don't write, StackOverflow snippets are
| perfect example for that.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > StackOverflow snippets are perfect example for that.
|
| You basically just explained why your worry is unfounded
| yourself. This is already the status quo. People already write
| buggy code and copy buggy code from SO all the time.
|
| The goal of this isn't to write perfect code, that's still up
| to the programmer to do. This won't make a bad programmer not
| write buggy code magically.
| blain wrote:
| > OpenAI Codex was trained on publicly available source code
| (...)
|
| It would be nice if github made this tool publicly available in a
| good spirit of open-source instead of straight up monetizing it.
|
| I get that github is not a non-profit but still.
| buremba wrote:
| The landing page is really cool. It looks like the screencast is
| built with Javascript, is there any tool that helps building such
| screencasts? I assume that it's not trivial to build such
| animations.
| taywrobel wrote:
| Depends on what you need to do, but asciinema is pretty much
| exactly that use case: https://asciinema.org/
|
| Wouldn't work in this case with the overlays and styling tho.
| bww wrote:
| The example in the hero animation has a bug. The ${text} may not
| be correctly URL-encoded, which would make the body invalid. And
| because this sort of feature encourages people to blindly trust
| the machine and not think about what they're doing this error is
| much less likely to be caught.
|
| Personally I think this whole class of feature only offers
| trivial short-term efficiency gains at the expense of long-term
| professional development and deeper understanding of your field.
| brundolf wrote:
| For a long time now I've thought that AI would have a really
| interesting role to play in developer experience, though this
| isn't really the form I think it should take.
|
| I think it would make the most sense as a really advanced static-
| analysis tool/linter/etc. Imagine writing something like C where
| whole classes of errors can't be checked statically in a
| mechanical way, but they could be found by a fuzzy ML system
| automatically looking over your shoulder. Imagine your editor
| saying "I'm not sure, but that feels like a memory error". And of
| course you can dismiss it "no, good thought, but I really meant
| to do that". Imagine an editor that can automatically sniff out
| code-smells. But the human, at the end of the day, still makes
| the call about what code to write and not write; they're just
| assisted with extra perspective while doing so
| ingvul wrote:
| I can only imagine one of the big reasons to release Copilot to
| the public for free is to make it better by sending back to
| GitHub the "reviewed code". Example:
|
| - Copilot suggests me a snippet of code
|
| - It's almost what I wanted. I fix the code
|
| - Copilot sends back the fixed code to GitHub
|
| - Copilot gets better at guessing my (and others) wishes
|
| Unless Copilot is running locally, I won't use it.
| ranguna wrote:
| Same, I do quite a bit of mistakes like pasting secrets and
| immediately deleting them right after, and I also have local
| secrets that are gitignored which I think copilot would just
| upload without a second thought.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The IP implications of how network weights depend on their data
| sources is, shall we say, a matter of ongoing legal discussion.
|
| We genuinely don't know what it means for licenses or whatnot
| right now.
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| IMO a potentially more interesting application of this technology
| would be a learning system that is able to learn your coding
| style. You give it access to the codebase and it reformats all
| files on save according to your likings, perfectly.
|
| Obviously a program that is able to write actual great code
| reliably would be spectacular, but we aren't there yet, I don't
| think Copilot presently is able to make me meaningfully more
| productive.
| 101011 wrote:
| Don't most IDEs handle this already?
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| There are no tools that can format my code with my coding
| style AFAIK. There are multiple tool that can format my code
| with their coding style though, which I don't care about.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Most? All? Allow you to edit the config to get it to your
| coding style but it would be cool to infer it from files
| you've already written.
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| There aren't enough knobs to turn to get exactly what you
| want, I have a 500+ lines file full of linter rules
| configurations and that's still not good enough.
|
| At the end of the day I think it boils down to this
| simple fact: you can't imperatively codify what makes the
| face of a person beautiful for you because that's too
| complicated, similarly you can't codify what makes for
| beautiful code to your eyes, it's something that must be
| learned from examples.
| kleiba wrote:
| Formatting code according to a given style is a much easier
| task than what Copilot does.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Apparently not that easy[0]. Depending on one's priorities
| formatting/pretty-printing code can be trivial or very
| difficult. Doing that dynamically based on a user's
| individual preferences or even their existing codebase's
| style is probably much harder.
|
| I don't doubt Copilot is also quite a problem to solve, most
| likely indeed harder, though in that case at least there's an
| abundance of training data.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706242
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| It depends what you mean by "given", I can't write a million
| line document describing exactly what kind of style I want it
| to use, the formatter must learn the style on its own from
| examples.
|
| I agree that something like that would be much easier to make
| in theory, hence why I'm suggesting it since maybe it could
| be made ~perfectly, which Codepilot isn't (we haven't
| unlocked AGI yet).
| avipars wrote:
| powered by openai, i'm guessing gpt 3
| dang wrote:
| To see all the 800+ comments, you'll need to click More at the
| bottom of the page, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266&p=3
|
| (Comments like this will go away when we turn off pagination. I
| know it's annoying. Sorry.)
| cfcf14 wrote:
| From Clippy to this technology, in just under 25 years! Very
| impressive. I wonder how much impact this tool might have as a
| teaching aid, as well?
| [deleted]
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I remember another company called Kite [1], working on a similar
| approach - smart autocompletion - this however uses GPT-3 so it's
| a bit different I guess because it doesn't detect what you're
| trying to do but rather transforms technical natural language
| into code. Right?
|
| [1] https://www.kite.com
| dgb23 wrote:
| Github sources suggestions from OS projects. There have been AI
| completion tools that upload your code, basically spyware.
| Definitely check thoroughly if that's the case!
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| I'm primarily an R and SQL user, excited to try this out on some
| fun data analyses.
|
| How did you construct the Copilot? Did you use a learning
| approach based on data from actual pair-programming sessions? Or
| did you take tons of code as your input and use that to suggest
| next methods based on input code?
|
| I learned a ton whenever I pair programmed, but now I'm at a
| small company so I'm looking for fun ways to learn new methods :)
| fzaninotto wrote:
| I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown
| away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in
| ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather
| good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like
| it's reading my mind.
|
| It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone.
| I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give
| better names and descriptions to my methods. I write better code,
| documentation, and tests.
|
| Copilot has made me a better programmer. No kidding. This is a
| huge achievement. Kudos to the GitHub Copilot team!
| mdellavo wrote:
| do you still go over the generated code line by line and
| touchup in places where it did not do a good job?
| fzaninotto wrote:
| It suggests code line by line, so yes
| mdellavo wrote:
| I guess I dont see the point if only 10% of the time it's
| exactly what you want and the rest of the time you have to
| go back and touch up the line.
|
| Does it train a programmer for accepting less than ideal
| code because it was suggested? Similar to how some
| programmers blindly copy code from StackOverflow without
| modification.
|
| Seems like there is a potential downside that's being
| ignored.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Does it train a programmer for accepting less than
| ideal code because it was suggested? Similar to how some
| programmers blindly copy code from StackOverflow without
| modification.
|
| Maybe juniors, but I don't see this being likely for
| anyone else. I've been using TabNine for ages and it's
| closer to just a fancy autocomplete than a code
| assistant. Usually it writes what I would write, and if I
| don't see what I would write I just write it myself
| (until either I wrote the whole thing or it suggests the
| right thing). Of course, barring some variable names or
| whatever.
|
| I don't have it "write code for me" - that happens in my
| head. It just does the typing.
| verst wrote:
| This is not true - and I've been using copilot for many
| months :)
|
| It suggests entire blocks of code - but not in every
| context.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| My bad, you're right. I remember now that it suggested me
| entire code blocks from time to time.
|
| Do you know in which "context" it suggests a block?
| verst wrote:
| It usually suggests blocks within a function / method in
| my experience. Here's an example I created just now:
|
| https://gist.github.com/berndverst/1db9bae37f3c809e5c3f56
| 262...
| blueblisters wrote:
| With VSCode, Github and a perhaps a little bit of help from
| OpenAI, Microsoft is poised to dominate the developer
| productivity tools market in the near future.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to see really good static analysis and
| automated code review tools coming out of these teams very
| soon.
| croes wrote:
| And still Windows is a mess.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I'd bet money that the VSCode and Windows teams are
| basically on different planets and Microsoft.
| jrockway wrote:
| I bet there are people that use Windows to develop VSCode
| and use VSCode to develop Windows, so some people
| probably know each other internally. I think what escapes
| HN is how massively successful Microsoft is. Sure, the
| search built into Windows sucks. There are many, many
| more complicated components of a platform and OS than
| that, and those seem to work as well as any other
| platform and OS.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Compared to what other operating system(s)?
|
| wsl on windows 10 has been amazing to develop and work on.
| azangru wrote:
| > wsl on windows 10 has been amazing to develop and work
| on.
|
| Now imagine how amazing it would be just on Ubuntu ;-)
| croes wrote:
| Every other OS. It's full of legacy APIs and scrapped new
| APIs. Every release is like two steps one step forward,
| one step back and one two the side. Just because
| thousands of companies have written software and drivers
| for it, it's still existing. If it were released today it
| wouldn't stand a chance.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I've been on both Windows and Ubuntu for a while. I'd say
| Ubuntu has a ton more issues and requires a ton more
| initial configuration to behave "normally".
|
| I don't even remember the last time Windows got in my way,
| in fact.
| mssundaram wrote:
| It sounds similar to the editor plugin called TabNine
| fzaninotto wrote:
| Side note: I recently suffered from a tennis elbow due to sub
| optimal desktop setup when working from home. Copilot has
| drastically reduced my keystrokes, and therefore the strain on
| my tenders.
|
| It's good for our health, too!
| yodon wrote:
| I watched the same thing happen with the introduction of
| Intellisense. Pre-Intellisense I had tons of RSI problems and
| had to use funky ergonomic keyboards like the Kinesis
| keyboard to function as a dev. Now I just hop on whatever
| laptop is in front of me and code. Same reason - massive
| reduction in the number of keys I have to touch to produce a
| line of code.
| iandanforth wrote:
| What is the licensing for code generated in this way? GPT-3 has
| memorized hundreds of texts verbatim and can be prompted to
| regurgitate that text. Has this model only been trained on code
| that doesn't require attribution as part of the license?
| richardanaya wrote:
| You're using the word "memorized" in a very loose way.
| delaaxe wrote:
| His point still holds, GPT-3 can output large chunks of
| licensed code, verbatim
| tsbinz wrote:
| How is it loose? Both in the colloquial sense and in the
| sense it is used in machine learning it is fitting.
| https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/ is a post
| demonstrating it.
| billti wrote:
| The landing page for it states the below, so hopefully not
| too much of an issue (though I guess some folks may find a
| 0.1% risk high).
|
| > GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine:
| the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely
| generated and has never been seen before. We found that about
| 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets
| that are verbatim from the training set.
| varispeed wrote:
| Did they have a license to use public source code as a data
| source for data set though?
| jgworks wrote:
| I'd be surprised if a company's legal department would be
| OK with that 0.1% risk.
| viraptor wrote:
| Google already learned that one. "There's only a tiny
| chance we may be copying some public code from Oracle."
| may not be a good explanation there.
| mempko wrote:
| Finally, a faster way to spread bugs than copy/paste.
| Abimelex wrote:
| Not sure how this is handled in US, but in Germany a few
| lines of code have in general not enough uniqueness to be
| licensed.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| It could start to replace us in 20 years. Or reduce. It is
| exciting for now
| handrous wrote:
| Until it automatically knows when _and how_ it 's wrong,
| you'll still need a human to figure that out, and that human
| will need to actually know how to program, without the
| overgrown auto-complete.
|
| May or may not reduce the demand for programmers, though.
| We'll see.
| megablast wrote:
| Thanks captain obvious.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| It seems to replace/shorten the loop of "Google for snippet
| that does X" copy, paste, tweak, no? Which of course is super
| cool for many tasks!
| fzaninotto wrote:
| It's smarter than that. It suggests things that have never
| been written. It actually creates code based on the context,
| just like GPT-3 can create new text documents based on
| previous inputs.
|
| Edit: Check this screencast for instance:
| https://twitter.com/francoisz/status/1409908666166349831
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Anyone tried this on any sort of numeric computation?
| Numpy, Julia, Pandas, R, whatever?
|
| I definitely see the utility in the linked screencast. But
| I am left to wonder whether this effectiveness is really a
| symptom of the extreme propensity for boilerplate code that
| seems to come with anything web-related.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I'm not convinced that code snippet in the screencast had
| never been written. It's fairly generic React, no?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| What's your estimate of the productivity boost expressed as a
| percentage? I.e. if it takes you 100 hours to complete a
| project without Copilot, how many hours will it be with
| Copilot?
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| I tried TabNine and it wasn't a _huge_ improvement because
| what costs the most time isn't typing stuff but thinking
| about what to type.
| the_arun wrote:
| In addition, I would like to see GitHub reviewing my code &
| giving me suggestions on how I could improve. That will be
| more educative & a tool to ensure consistency across code.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I'm surprised this doesn't exist. Google, FB, and Apple
| (and I imagine Microsoft) have a lot of this stuff built in
| that is light-years better than any open source solution
| I'm aware of.
|
| Given that MS owns GitHub and how valuable this is - I
| imagine it will be coming soon.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| SonarQube and IntelliJ does it in some way for me.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| +1 for SonarQube. Very easy way to add value to a project
| without a lot of overhead.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Having been a TabNine user for a while I can say that it's
| less of a productivity boost and more of a quality of life
| win. It's hard to measure - not because it's small, but
| because it's lots of tiny wins, or wins at just the right
| moment. It _makes me happy_ , and that's why I pay for it -
| the fact that it's probably also saving me some time is
| second to the fact that it saves me from annoying interrupts.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| I'm not sure I spend less time actually coding stuff (because
| I have to review the Copilot code). But the cost of the code
| I write is definitely reduced, because:
|
| - the review from my peers is faster (the code is more
| correct) - I come back less to the code (because I have
| thought about all the corner cases when checking the copilot
| code) - As I care more about naming & inline docs (it helps
| copilot), the code is actually cheaper to maintain.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| Check out how it helped me write a React component:
| https://twitter.com/francoisz/status/1409919670803742734
|
| I think hit the Tab key more than I hit any other key ;)
| chimtim wrote:
| Unfortunately, one in 10 times is far from good enough (and
| this is with good prompt engineering which after using large
| language models for a while, one starts to do).
|
| I feel like the current generation of AI is bringing us close
| enough to something that works once in a while but requires
| constant human expertise ~50% of the time. The self-driving
| industry is in a similar situation of despair where millions
| have been spent in labelling and training but something
| fundamental is amiss in the ML models.
| croes wrote:
| Maybe it's just because humans are not as creative as they
| think. Whatever you do, thousands of others have done the same
| already. So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a
| mediocre one and the right AI assistant gives the same results.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think it's more that this tool is only capable of
| automating the non-creative work that thousands have done
| already.
|
| It's still insanely impressive (assuming the examples aren't
| more cherry picked than I'd expect).
| jqbd wrote:
| > So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a mediocre
| one and the right AI assistant gives the same results.
|
| I think of it as not needing juniors for boring work, all you
| need as a company is seniors and AI.
| sterlind wrote:
| without juniors, how do you get more seniors?
| spaced-out wrote:
| Maybe programmers will adopt a similar model to artists
| and musicians. Do a lot of work for free/practically
| nothing hoping that some day you can make it "big" and
| land a full time role.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| we already have that with unpaid interns and PhD students
| 9dev wrote:
| So where do these seniors come from?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You could have a much smaller pool of juniors/journeymen
| that are focused on maximum learning rather than amount
| of output.
| failuser wrote:
| That's beyond the planning horizon.
| juancampa wrote:
| Quite the opposite. Menial work will be automated away (e.g.
| CRUD) and only good programmers will be needed to do the more
| complicated work.
| feross wrote:
| I've also been using the Alpha for around two weeks. I'm
| impressed by how GitHub Copilot seems to know exactly what I
| want to type next. Sometimes it even suggests code I was about
| to look up, such as a snippet to pick a random hex color or
| completing an array with all the common image mime-types.
|
| Copilot is particularly helpful when working on React
| components where it makes eerily accurate predictions. I see
| technology like Copilot becoming an indispensable part of the
| programmer toolbelt similar to IDE autocomplete for many
| people.
|
| I also see it changing the way that programmers document their
| code. With Copilot if you write a really good descriptive
| comment before jumping into the implementation, it does a much
| better job of suggesting the right code, sometimes even writing
| the entire function for you.
| FreeSpeech wrote:
| Has anyone used Copilot with a more succinct language? It
| appears to only automate boilerplate and rudimentary
| patterns, which while useful in repetitive low signal to
| noise ratio languages like React or Java, sounds less
| appealing if you're writing Clojure.
| spec-obs wrote:
| spot the Github PR folks!
| qaq wrote:
| They were replaced by GPT too :)
| cercatrova wrote:
| More like GPT three :)
| varispeed wrote:
| I have been using the Alpha for two weeks as well. I'm
| impressed by how GitHub Copilot appears to know exactly what
| I want to type. Not often it even suggests code I was going
| to peek, such as a snippet to a context menu or completing an
| array with all Romanian postcodes. Copilot is particularly
| helpful when working on Angular components where it makes
| mesmerising predictions. I see technology like Copilot
| becoming an essential part of the programmer's tool belt
| similar to IDE autocomplete for many people and programmers.
|
| I also see it changing the way that people and programmers
| document code. With Copilot if you write a very picturesque
| comment before jumping into the implementation, it does a
| mucho mejor trabajo de sugerir the right code, sometimes it
| is even writing the entire function para ti.
| pfraze wrote:
| They finally did it. They finally found a way to make me
| write comments.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI.
|
| Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the
| internet?
| anthropodie wrote:
| Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this
|
| "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen
| in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price
| of work that happens in the physical world. This is the
| opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and
| will have strange effects"
|
| And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.
| bconnorwhite wrote:
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1404100794245214215
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can
| happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than
| the price of work that happens in the physical world._
|
| I'm skeptical.
|
| The envelope of "programming" will continue to shift as
| things get more and more complex. Your mother-in-law is not
| going to install Copilot and start knocking out web apps.
| Tools like this allow _programmers_ to become more
| productive, which _increases_ demand for the skills.
| waprin wrote:
| I strongly agree with you.
|
| Reminds me of something I read that claimed when drum
| machines came out, the music industry thought it was the
| end of drummers. Until people realized that drummers
| tended to be the best people at programming cool beats on
| the drum machine.
|
| Every single technological advancement meant to make
| technology more accessible and eliminate expertise has
| instead only redefined what expertise means. And the
| overall trend has been a lot more work opportunities
| created, not less.
| atentaten wrote:
| Yeah, but less drummers are being hired than before drum
| machines came out. What you describe sounds like work has
| become more concentrated into fewer hands. Perhaps this
| will happen with software as well.
| morei wrote:
| What happened is what typically happens: Concentration of
| expertise. The lower expertise jobs (just mechanically
| play what someone else wrote/arranged) went away and
| there was increased demand for higher expertise (be an
| actual expert in beats _and_ drum machines).
|
| So the winners were those that adapted earlier and the
| losers were those that didn't/couldn't adapt.
|
| This translates to: If you're mindlessly doing the same
| thing over and over again, then it's a low value prop and
| is at risk. But if you're solving actual problems that
| require thought/expertise then the value prop is high and
| probably going to get higher.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| But there's also the subtext that if you find yourself at
| the lower-skill portion of your particular industry, then
| you should probably have a contingency plan to avoid
| being automated out of a job, such as retiring, learning
| more, or switching to an adjacent field.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Exactly, and AI only means that this adage now applies to
| programming as well.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I think you have another thing coming. Think about what
| really got abstracted away. The super hard parts like
| scaling and infrastructure (aws), the rendering engines
| in React, all the networking stuff that's hidden in your
| server (dare you to deal with tcp packets), that's the
| stuff that goes away.
|
| We can automate the mundane but that's usually the stuff
| that requires creativity, so the automated stuff becomes
| uninteresting in that realm. People will seek crafted
| experiences.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Decreasing the price of programming work doesn't
| necessarily mean decreasing the wages of programmers, any
| more than decreasing the price of food implies decreasing
| the wages of farmers.
|
| But on the other hand, it also _can_ mean that.
| drusepth wrote:
| I think the thought process is from the perspective of
| the employer, if you assume these two statements are
| true:
|
| 1) AI tools increase developer productivity, allowing
| projects to get completed faster; and
|
| 2) AI tools offset a nonzero amount of skill
| prerequisites, allowing developers to write "better"
| code, regardless of their skill level
|
| With those in mind, it seems reasonable to conclude that
| the price to e.g. build an app or website will decrease,
| because it'll require either fewer man-hours 'til
| completion and/or less skill from the hired developers
| doing said work.
|
| You do make a good point that "building an app" or
| "building a website" will likely shift in meaning to
| something more complex, wherein we get "better" outputs
| for the same amount of work/price though.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Now replace "AI" in your 1 & 2 points with "Github" (and
| the trend of open-sourcing libraries, making them
| available for all). All you said still works, and it did
| not harm programmer jobs in any way (quite the opposite).
|
| And actually, I really don't see AI in the next decade
| making more of a difference than what Github did (making
| thousands of man-hour of works available for free).
| Around 2040 or 2050, maybe. But not soon, AI is still
| really far.
| frant-hartm wrote:
| >that the price to e.g. build an app or website will
| decrease
|
| Yes, and this in turn increases demand as more
| people/companies/etc.. can afford it.
| chaorace wrote:
| It _may_ reduce the demand for the rank-and-file grunts,
| though.
|
| Why would an architect bother with sending some work
| overseas if tools like this would enable them to crank
| out the code faster than it would take to do a code
| review?
| brodo wrote:
| Exactly. I'm currently reading The Mythical Man-Month.
| 90% of what the book discusses in term of programming
| work that actually has to be done is completely
| irrelevant today. Still the software industry is bigger
| then ever. In the book it is also mentioned that
| programmers spend about 50% of their time on non-
| programming tasks. In my experience this is also true
| today. So no matter the tools we've got, the profession
| stayed the same since the early 70s.
| laurent92 wrote:
| What are notable books nowadays? It seems all the books I
| can cite are from 2005-2010 (Clean Code, JCIP, even the
| Lean Startup or Tribal Leadership...) but did the market
| for legendary books vanish in favor of Youtube tutorials?
| I'm running out of materials I can give to my interns to
| gobble knowledge into them in bulk.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Tools like email, instant messenger, and online calendars
| made _secretaries_ much more productive which increased
| demand for the skills. Wait...
|
| Replacement of programmers will follow these lines. New
| tools, like copilot (haven't tried, but will soon), new
| languages, libraries, better IDEs, stack overflows,
| Google, etc will make programming easier and more
| productive. One programmer will do the work that ten did.
| That a hundred did. You'll learn to become an effective
| programmer from a bootcamp (already possible - I know
| someone who went from bootcamp to Google), then from a
| few tutorials will.
|
| Just like the secretary's role in the office was replaced
| by everyone managing their own calendars and
| communications the programmer will be replaced by one or
| two tremendously productive folks and your average
| business person being able to generate enough code to get
| the job done.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| I wonder does Sam Altman also believe that you can measure
| programmer productivity by lines-of-code?
| simias wrote:
| Reading this thread it seems to me that AI is a threat for
| "boilerplate-heavy" programming like website frontends, I
| can't really imagine pre-singularity AI being able to
| replace a programmer in the general case.
|
| Helping devs go through "boring", repetitive code faster
| seems like a good way to increase our productivity and make
| us _more_ valuable, not less.
|
| Sure, if AI evolves to the point where it reaches human-
| level coding abilities we're in trouble, but that's the
| case this is going to revolutionize humanity as a whole
| (for better or worse), not merely our little niche.
| Animats wrote:
| _" Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can
| happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than
| the price of work that happens in the physical world. This
| is the opposite of what most people (including me)
| expected, and will have strange effects"_
|
| I've been saying something like that for a while, but my
| form was "If everything you do goes in and out over a wire,
| you can be replaced." By a computer, a computer with AI, or
| some kind of outsourcing.
|
| A question I've been asking for a few years, pre-pandemic,
| is, when do we reach "peak office"? Post-pandemic, we
| probably already have. This has huge implications for
| commercial real estate, and, indeed, cities.
| jahewson wrote:
| I'm not sure why it's unexpected when it's essentially a
| reframing of Baumol's cost disease. Any work that does not
| see a productivity increase becomes comparatively more
| expensive over time.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price
| of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the
| demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how
| many smallish projects are just never started these days
| because "software engineers are too expensive".
|
| I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper,
| they'll just do a lot more.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > Think of how many smallish projects are just never
| started these days because "software engineers are too
| expensive".
|
| Maybe many. If the cost/benefit equation doesn't work, it
| makes no sense to do the project.
|
| > I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper,
| they'll just do a lot more.
|
| If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper. You
| as a developer will be earning less in relation to the
| value you create.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > If they do more for the same cost, they are cheaper.
| You as a developer will be earning less in relation to
| the value you create.
|
| Welcome to the definition of productivity increases,
| which is the only way an economy can increase standard of
| living without inflation.
| habibur wrote:
| > You as a developer will be earning less in relation to
| the value you create.
|
| Doesn't matter as long as I create 5x value and earn 2x
| for it. I still am earning double within the same time
| and effort.
| shoguning wrote:
| I'm guessing low expertise programmers whose main
| contribution was googling stackoverflow will get less
| valuable, while high expertise programmers with real
| design skill will become even more valuable.
| iechoz6H wrote:
| I'm both of those things, what happens to my value?
| iab wrote:
| It goes up/down
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Your legs will have to move faster than your arms.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Sonic the Hedgehog's employment prospects are looking up.
| blackearl wrote:
| I just don't believe it. Having experienced terrible cheap
| outsourced support and things like Microsoft's
| troubleshooting assistant (also terrible), I'm willing to
| pay for quality human professionals. They have a long way
| to go before I change my mind.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| We went through the same hype cycle with self driving cars.
| We are now ~15 years out from the DARPA challenges and to
| date exactly 0 drivers have been replaced by AI.
|
| It is certainly impressive to see how much the GPT models
| have improved. But the devil is in the last 10%. If you can
| create an AI that writes perfectly functional python code,
| but that same AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2
| instance when the application starts hitting memory limits,
| then you haven't really replaced engineers, you have just
| given them more time to browse hacker news.
| ulber wrote:
| Driving is qualitatively different from coding: an AI
| that's pretty good but messes up sometimes is vastly more
| useful for coding than for driving. In neither case can
| you let the AI "drive", but that's ok in coding as
| software engineering is already set up for that. Testing,
| pair programming and code reviews are popular ways to
| productively collaborate with junior developers.
|
| You're not replacing the engineer, but you're giving
| every engineer a tireless companion typing suggestions
| faster than you ever could, to be filled in when you feel
| it's going to add value. My experience with the alpha was
| eye opening: this was the first time I've interacted with
| an AI and felt like its not just a toy, but actually
| contributing.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Writing code is by far the easiest part of my job. I
| certainly welcome any tools that will increase my
| productivity in that domain, but until an AI can figure
| out how to fix obscure, intermittent, and/or silent bugs
| that occur somewhere in a series of daisy-chained
| pipelines running on a stack of a half-dozen
| services/applications, I am not going to get too worked
| up about it.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I agree. It kind of amazes me though there is so much
| room for obscurity. I would expect standardisation to
| have dealt with this a long time ago. Why are problems
| not more isolated and manageable in general?
| bseidensticker wrote:
| What is your definition of "replace"? Waymo operates a
| driverless taxi service in Phoenix. Sign ups are open to
| the general public. IMO this counts as replacing some
| drivers as there is less demand for taxi service in the
| operating area.
|
| https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-
| fully-dr...
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > AI does not know how to upgrade an EC2 instance when
| the application starts hitting memory limits
|
| That's exactly the kind of thing "serverless" hosting has
| done for a while now.
| qorrect wrote:
| Yeah really bad example there.
| kansface wrote:
| This isn't self driving for programming, its more like
| GPS and lane assist.
| megablast wrote:
| Self driving is used in the mining industry, and lots of
| high paid drivers have been replaced.
|
| But you are clearly more knowledgeable with your 0
| drivers replaced comment.
| oblio wrote:
| Mining as in those big trucks or mining as in trains on
| tracks?
| rpeden wrote:
| The trucks: https://im-mining.com/2020/06/02/suncor-
| speeds-komatsu-980e-...
| jostmey wrote:
| I am blown away but not scared for my job... yet. I suspect
| the AI is only as good as the training examples from
| Github. If so, then this AI will never generate novel
| algorithms. The AI is simply performing some really amazing
| pattern matching to suggest code based on other pieces of
| code.
|
| But over the coming decades AI could dominate coding. I now
| believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an AI to win
| almost all coding competitions!
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I guess it's worth pointing out that the human brain is
| just an amazing pattern matcher.
|
| They feed you all these algorithms in college and your
| brain suggests new algorithms based on those patterns.
| jostmey wrote:
| Humans are more than pattern matchers because we do not
| passively receive and imitate information. We learn cause
| and effect by perturbing our environment, which is not
| possible by passively examining data.
|
| An AI agent _can_ interact with an environment and learn
| from its environment by reinforcement learning. It is
| important to remember that pattern matching is different
| from higher forms of learning, like reinforcement
| learning.
|
| To summarize, I think there are real limitations with
| this AI, but these limitations are solvable problems, and
| I anticipate significant future progress
| visarga wrote:
| Fortunately the environment for coding AI is a compiler
| and a CPU which is much faster and cheaper than physical
| robots, and doesn't require humans for evaluation like
| dialogue agents and GANs.
| qorrect wrote:
| Well you still have to assess validity and code quality
| which is a difficult task , but not unsolvable.
|
| Also Generative Adversarial Networks original
| implementation was to pit neural networks against each
| other to train them , they don't need human intervention.
| timkam wrote:
| To generate new, generally useful algorithms, we need a
| different type of "AI", i.e. one that combines learning
| and formal verification. Because algorithm design is a
| cycle: come up with an algorithm, prove what it can or
| can't do, and repeat until you are happy with the formal
| properties. Software can help, but we can't automate the
| math, yet.
| jostmey wrote:
| I see a different path forward based on the success of
| AlphaGo.
|
| This looks like a clever example of supervised learning.
| But supervised learning doesn't get you cause and effect,
| it is just pattern matching.
|
| To get at cause and effect, you need reinforcement
| learning, like AlphaGo. You can imagine an AI writing
| code that is then scored for performing correctly.
| Overtime the AI will learn to write code that performs as
| intended. I think coding can be used as a "playground"
| for AI to rapidly improve itself, like how AlphaGo could
| play Go over and over again
| [deleted]
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| > we can't automate the math, yet
|
| This exists:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving
| bccdee wrote:
| This is moreso automation-assisted theorem proving. It
| takes a lot of human work to get a problem to the point
| where automation can be useful.
|
| It's like saying that calculators can solve complex math
| problems; it's true in a sense, but it's not not strictly
| true. We solve the complex math problems using
| calculators.
| sterlind wrote:
| and there's already GPT-f [0], which is a GPT-based
| automated theorem prover for the Metamath language, which
| apparently submitted novel short proofs which were
| accepted into Metamath's archive.
|
| I would very much like GPT-f for something like SMT, then
| it could actually make Dafny efficient to check (and
| probably avoid needing to help it out when it gets
| stuck!)
|
| 0. https://analyticsindiamag.com/what-is-gpt-f/
| visarga wrote:
| You mean like AlphaGo where the neural net is combined
| with MCTS?
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > If so, then this AI will never generate novel
| algorithms. This is true, but the most programmers don't
| need to generate novel algorithms themselves anyway.
| habibur wrote:
| > I now believe in my lifetime it will be possible for an
| AI to win almost all coding competitions!
|
| Then we shall be reaching singularity.
| jostmey wrote:
| We will only reach a singularity with respect to coding.
| There are many important problems beyond computer coding
| like engineering and biology and so on
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Coding isn't chess playing it's likely about as general
| as math or thinking. If you can write novel code you can
| ultimately do biology or engineering or ultimately
| anything else.
| visarga wrote:
| > Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the
| internet?
|
| Only for the first time to train a model for that.
| Joeri wrote:
| Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far,
| although sometimes in a disruptive way. I consider this like
| the switch from instruction-level programming to compiled
| languages, a level of abstraction added that buys a large
| increase in productivity and makes projects affordable that
| weren't affordable before. If anything this will probably
| lead to a boom in development work. But there's a bunch of
| low skill programmers who can't do much more than follow
| project templates and copy paste things. Those people will
| have to level up or get out.
| addicted wrote:
| Yes, but AI isn't the same as automation.
|
| Automation is a force multiplier. AI is a cheaper way of
| doing what humans do.
|
| And the AI doesn't even need to be "true" AI. It simply
| needs to be able to do stuff better than what humans do.
| visarga wrote:
| > AI is a cheaper way of doing what humans do.
|
| Like protein solving? /s
| Hammershaft wrote:
| > Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far
|
| Do you have a source for this re the last 20 years? It
| seems to me automation has been shifting the demand
| recently towards more skilled cognitive work.
| seppin wrote:
| A global increase in jobs, a decrease in the west.
| croes wrote:
| I think you are confusing correlation and causation. Not
| automation produces jobs, more people and more income for
| that people produces jobs, because more people means more
| demand.
| [deleted]
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I feel like the inevitable path will be:
|
| 1) AI makes really good code completion to make juniors way
| more productive. Senior devs benefit as well.
|
| 2) AI gets so good that it becomes increasingly hard to get
| a job as a junior--you just need senior devs to supervise
| the AI. This creates a talent pipeline shortage and screws
| over generations that want to become devs, but we find ways
| to deal with it.
|
| 3) Another major advance hits and AI becomes so good that
| the long promised "no code" future comes within reach. The
| line between BA and programmer blurs until everyone's
| basically a BA, telling the computer what kind of code it
| wants.
|
| The thing though that many fail to recognize about
| technology is that while advances like this happen,
| sometimes technology seems to stall for DECADES. (E.g. the
| AI winter happened, but we're finally out of it.)
| drusepth wrote:
| I could also see an alternative to #2 where it becomes
| increasingly hard to get a job as a senior dev when
| companies can just hire juniors to produce probably-good
| code and slightly more QA to ensure correctness.
|
| You'd definitely still need _some_ seniors in this
| scenario, but it feels possible that tooling like this
| might reduce their value-per-cost (and have the opposite
| effect on a larger pool of juniors).
|
| As another comment said here, "if you can generate great
| python code but can't upgrade the EC2 instance when it
| runs out of memory, you haven't replaced developers;
| you've just freed up more of their time" (paraphrased).
| visarga wrote:
| No, programmers won't be replaced, we'll just add this to
| our toolbox. Every time our productivity increased we
| found new ways to spend it. There's no limit to our
| wants.
| wittycardio wrote:
| I feel like you're neglecting to mention all the people
| who need to build and maintain this AI. Cookie cutter
| business logic will no longer need programmers but there
| will be more highly skilled jobs to keep building and
| improving the AI
| foolinaround wrote:
| AI will keep building and improving the AI, of course!
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Telling the computer what you want IS programming...
|
| When a new language / framework / library comes around,
| GitHub copilot won't have any suggestions for when you
| write in it.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good,
| or completely off
|
| In what, proportion roughly?
| fzaninotto wrote:
| Hard to say, really. When writing React components, Jest
| tests and documentation, it's often not very far. I found it
| off when writing HTML markup (which is hard to describe with
| words).
| handrous wrote:
| Seems like it's best classed (for now) as an automated tool
| to generate and apply all the boilerplate snippets I
| _would_ be creating & using manually, if I weren't too
| lazy, and/or too often switching between projects, to set
| all those up and remember how to use them (and that they
| exist).
| BrandonJung wrote:
| for those of you like this concept but 1. did not get into the
| alpha (or want something that has lots of great reviews) 2.
| need to run locally (security or connectivity) 3. want to use
| any IDE... please try Tabnine
| gmaijoe wrote:
| do you have an invite? very interested to check it out
| hobofan wrote:
| Have you used any intelligent code completion in the past? E.g.
| I'd really be interested how it compares to TabNine[0], which
| already gives pretty amazing single line suggestions (haven't
| tried their experimental multi-line suggestions yet).
|
| [0]: https://www.tabnine.com
| ayush--s wrote:
| I'm curious as to how relevant Copilot would be when
| autocompleting code that is specific to my codebase in
| particular, like Tabnine completes most used filters as soon
| as I type the db table name for the query. I'm a big tabnine
| fan because it provides this feature. I'm much more often
| looking to be suggested a line than an entire function
| because I'm mostly writing business logic.
|
| also tabnine is useless in multi-lines completes. which is
| where co-pilot should be strong.
| meowface wrote:
| Yeah, I've been very happy with Tabnine for a while, but
| the prospect of good multi-line completions is appealing. I
| might try running both Tabnine and Copilot simultaneously
| for a bit to A/B test.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| I have used IDEs with good knowledge of the types and
| libraries I'm using (e.g. VSCode with TypeScript). They offer
| good suggestions once you start typing a function name.
|
| But nothing gets close to Copilot. It "understands" what
| you're trying to do, and writes the code for you. It makes
| type-based autocompletions useless.
| grandchild wrote:
| tabnine works quite similarly to copilot. it's not a thing
| that "knows about types and libraries", it's a similar
| predictive machine learning method as copilot seems to use.
| pgib wrote:
| I've been using TabNine for a couple years - constantly
| impresses me, especially how quickly it picks up new
| patterns. I wouldn't say it's doing my job for me, but
| definitely saves me a lot of time.
| skateris wrote:
| Interestingly the founder of TabNine (which was acquired by
| Codota[0]) is currently working at Open AI. I imagine they're
| livid about Open AI creating a competing product.
|
| TabNine at times was magical, but I stopped using it after
| Codota started injecting ads directly into my editor[1]
|
| [0] https://betakit.com/waterloo-startup-tabnine-acquired-by-
| isr... [1] https://github.com/codota/TabNine/issues/342
| hobofan wrote:
| Ah, thanks for the insight! It seems though that he is no
| longer working with OpenAI according to his personal
| website[0].
|
| [0]: https://jacobjackson.com/about
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| How big/complicated are the functions Copilot is autocompleting
| for you? I'm thinking perhaps reading 10 potential candidates
| is actually slower and less instructive than trying to write
| the thing yourself.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| It shows the suggestions line by line, and only shows the
| best guess. It's not more intrusive than Intellisense.
|
| You can actually see all the code blocks Copilot is thinking
| about if you want to, but that is indeed a distraction.
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| The problem I see with that is that's not possible for it
| to understand well which code is the best, GPT-3 is trying
| to mimic human writing in general, the thing is most human
| code is garbage, if this system was able to understand how
| to make code better you could keep training it until you
| had perfect code, which is not what the current system is
| giving you (a lot of the times anyway).
| drusepth wrote:
| >if this system was able to understand how to make code
| better you could keep training it until you had perfect
| code
|
| Based on the FAQ, it looks like some information about
| how you interact with the suggestions is fed back to the
| Copilot service (and theoretically OpenAI) to better
| improve the model.
|
| So, while it may not understand "how to make code better"
| on its own, it can learn a bit from seeing how actual
| devs do make code better and theoretically improve from
| usage.
| Trollmann wrote:
| You're missing the problem he stated: Code written by
| humans is usually bad so the model is trained on garbage.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| I guess you miss the point. It's not trying to suggest
| the perfect code. Only you know it. It's saving you time
| by writing a good (sometimes perfect) first solution
| based on method/argument names, context, comments, and
| inline doc. And that is already a huge boost in
| productivity and coding pleasure (as you only have to
| focus on the smart part).
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| Maybe you are right, in my experience either the code you
| have easily available to you (either because another
| person or a computer wrote it) is perfect for your use
| case (to the best of your knowledge anyway) or rewriting
| it from scratch is usually better than morphing what you
| have into what you need.
| apexalpha wrote:
| The animated example on https://copilot.github.com/ shows
| it suggesting entire blocks of code, though.
| verst wrote:
| It does actually suggest entire blocks of code. I haven't
| quite figured out yet when it suggests blocks or lines -
| if I create a new function / method and add a doc string
| it definitely suggests a block for the entire
| implementation for me.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I see, I think the most useful case for me would be where
| I write a function signature+docstring, then get a list
| of suggestions that I can browse and pick from.
|
| Do you have examples of what the line ones can do? The
| site doesn't really provide any of those.
| verst wrote:
| Take a look at this minimal example I just created where
| I did just that -- created a new function and docstring.
| This example is of course super simple - it works for
| much more complex things.
|
| https://gist.github.com/berndverst/1db9bae37f3c809e5c3f56
| 262...
| grumple wrote:
| Even snippets are so bad I have to turn them off. I can't
| even fathom how bad the suggestions are going to be for
| full blocks of code. But I guess I'll see soon...
| mdellavo wrote:
| Should I be impressed that the example parse_expenses.py on the
| home page doesnt include any error handling and uses a float for
| currency? This seems like it's going to revolutionize copy and
| paste programming.
| acid__ wrote:
| The output is great for a quick one-off script. Maybe if you
| make the comments look more "enterprise-y", it'll go for more
| careful code?
| mdellavo wrote:
| I would say the use of float makes it a nonstarter - even for
| "quick one-off" scripts. That's a fundamental error in the
| generated code. It maybe looks correct at a quick glance but
| it's only introducing subtle errors to find down the line.
| arrayjumper wrote:
| It's a copilot. You're still the pilot. To be honest this seems
| like it can definitely save me a bunch of googling and let me
| stay in the ide.
| mdellavo wrote:
| in their own example the copilot aimed for the mountains with
| float() - thanks but no thanks
| rglover wrote:
| Tell that to the new programmer who builds a piece of
| software using this creating an absolute mess.
|
| The danger here isn't with experienced developers (this is,
| obviously, a tool with great potential for productivity).
| It's with people who just blindly trust what the robot spits
| out.
|
| Once code like that is implemented in a mission-critical
| system without discernment, all hell will break loose.
|
| Edit: worth watching this for context
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
| sergiomattei wrote:
| So? If you're making a mission critical system, don't hire
| subpar developers.
|
| It's not Copilot's problem. Powerful tools can be misused
| by anyone.
| rglover wrote:
| Tell that to the HR departments responsible for hiring
| developers at major companies.
|
| Not hiring subpar developers, especially in a massive
| company isn't a matter of "if" but "when." And it only
| takes one screw up to crash an airplane because of
| software.
|
| And guess who massive companies trust for their
| technology?
|
| Microsoft.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| So now I make a bot to upload repositories of intentionally buggy
| code so that when people blindly use this autocomplete my hacking
| becomes easier!
| ranguna wrote:
| Awh man, brilliant idea!
| emsy wrote:
| We already do this with libraries and frameworks in a more
| primitive way. The hard work is actually done by a hand full of
| programmers, everyone else is sticking pipes together. I don't
| think that's a bad thing per se, but in my experience most people
| don't make the distinction. You're not going to be able to write
| your own database server with this tool if you weren't able to do
| so without it. If you're one of the few programmers that are able
| to build a database, a graphics engine, a compiler etc. you're
| fine. Everyone else should probably feel a mild panic. You'll be
| automated away in a couple of AI generations.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Is there really that much of a difference between a programmer
| building a database and one building something mundane?
|
| Obviously, there's some core algorithmic work that needs to
| occur, but that's always been done by a very small number of
| people anyway. The rest is still glueing.
| pgib wrote:
| Doesn't look like it will be editor-agnostic which is a big
| shame. I've been using TabNine in Vim for a couple years, and I
| love it.
| beeskneecaps wrote:
| Four years later: your AI replacement? When do you all predict
| something like this will happen?
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| I imagine that AI like this will certainly speed up
| development, but I suspect you will almost always need someone
| in the middle putting the pieces together.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Maybe thirty four years later. I don't think there's AI to
| gather requirements, talk to people, understand a problem and
| produce code. That's kinda general intelligence level AI. But
| this thing can possibly make devs work easier and if it's good
| enough maybe smaller teams can produce more.
| sitkack wrote:
| This will allow for a D or C level coder to be a B/B- coder
| which is great, quality goes up. But corps will use this to
| depress wages and finally be able to create that wonderous
| unicorn of completely fungible coder.
|
| This kind of tooling is akin to the crossbow.
|
| It will allow for less skilled folks to push out code that is
| like other code at great speed. A copy pasta accelerator if
| you will.
| yellowfish wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? sw-developers are grossly overpaid to
| the point it's damaging
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Do you think project managers are overpaid too?
| grumple wrote:
| We each produce 1MM+ in actual revenue per year but
| paying us 100k+ is too much?
| nyghtly wrote:
| If the reduction of developer wages led to the increase
| of wages for other workers, sure. But of course that
| won't happen. The reduction of wages for any class of
| worker will simply lead to further consolidation of
| wealth.
| Sholmesy wrote:
| Grossly overpaid for effort/comparison to other
| wages/industries.
|
| Adequately paid for value captured (hence why companies
| are willing to pay for them at this rate).
|
| Not a moral statement, but this gives more tools to those
| in power.
| xeromal wrote:
| I tend to think like you. Somehow we convinced businesses
| that a mostly-blue collar job gets paid white collar
| salary but I've been told that SW-engineers aren't
| overpaid. Most people are just very underpaid.
|
| What are your thoughts on that? I can lean that way just
| because I have a genius mechanical engineer friend who
| only makes 60k in his 30s.
| yellowfish wrote:
| I think it's easier to bring people down to the same
| level rather then bringing them up to it
| trutannus wrote:
| I'm not at all worried about AI taking over software
| development. In all likelihood, what you'll see instead are AI
| plugins in IDE editors which just assist in a much more
| advanced way than the intellisense we have now. Having machines
| code out the business logic is very much so something that
| would be less efficient than having a person do it.
|
| Realistically, it just means that, rather than your coworker
| code-reviewing you and making a handful of comments, you get a
| machine to do that, and get two or so comments from your
| coworker about the business logic.
|
| To answer your question: never.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Nah. Remember that "Google AI signs you up for a hair stylist
| session" demo? We never got anything out of that.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Unless we achieve AGI this is never going to replace
| programming because it will instead just make programming a
| higher level task. And well, if we achieve AGI (which I think
| could be pretty soon), all jobs will replaced, so it's not
| something I think anybody should be worried about.
| freedomben wrote:
| As a programmer who specializes in security, I worry that many of
| the common errors that people make will get picked up the AI and
| recommended to new users. It looks like it gets reinforcement
| from the code that the user selects. In my experience the
| _majority_ of developers make security errors, so how is the
| algorithm going to learn _not_ to do it the wrong way when it 's
| learning from bad code and getting reinforced by developers who
| are wrong? (This is an honest question, not a criticism. I think
| this product is fascinating)
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Most programmers are pretty careless and just get something to
| "work."
|
| Maybe the first generation of this sort of completion will be
| bad, but I have full faith it will be better than the average
| human at avoiding security issues as early as the next
| generation.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| faith based on what? So far in my experience AI projects tend
| to peter out.
| manmal wrote:
| The real magic of writing code is the compound interest it pays -
| if you structure the lower level components well, then they can
| be combined into ever more powerful components, saving time and
| effort in an exponential way.
|
| This product seems to encourage the complete opposite - hack
| together stuff without thinking about how it could fit into your
| accumulated Baukasten of components.
| david-cako wrote:
| and away we go to singularity.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I think this would be a great resource for beginners
| particularly. It helps give them the code that will work for them
| and they can understand what it's returning. That was my biggest
| issue when I first started with REST calls was not knowing what
| to use and why things were being used on the server side.
| Eventually it started to click for me, but I had a lead guide me.
| In particular we worked with SharePoint which I had no idea had
| it's own API at the time which added to the complexity. Overall I
| think the "See different examples" is going to be the best
| feature out of all of them.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Am I out of a job yet? (I am a programmer)
| switchb4 wrote:
| Calling it a pair programmer is a bit exaggeration though. How
| can it match a human?
| darkstarsys wrote:
| Where's the Emacs lib for it?
| mjsweet wrote:
| Hmmm, there is something a bit... "Uncanny Valley" about this
| code. What will my coworkers think?
| [deleted]
| hnarn wrote:
| I'm sorry if I'm derailing the discussion here but "copilot"
| really is a much better phrase to use for assisting software than
| "autopilot". If more companies would choose phrases like these
| that accurately emphasize that the human is not being replaced
| but assisted (no names mentioned) I think it would benefit
| everyone in terms of clarity.
|
| Sure, you might say "it's all marketing and if AP exists nobody
| would buy CP", but I don't think it's that simple. Customers
| understand when their expectations are being met, exceeded, or
| let down.
| fcsp wrote:
| This looks pretty impressive and I'd like to play with it, but
| it's disappointing that you're forced to accept telemetry to
| enlist on the waitlist. I guess I'll wait for general
| availability.
| stakkur wrote:
| The goal, of course, should be to train your AI partner to
| eventually do _all_ the work, while you sip a beer at the pub and
| monitor Slack (where an AI version of you is maintaining
| conversations).
| grouphugs wrote:
| y'all really love fascist organizations, but not for long, trust
| me
| Trollmann wrote:
| Will this hurt open source?
|
| I assume companies that were fine with providing you
| functionality for free may think about this twice because with
| that they're giving away knowledge of how to build functionality.
| account_created wrote:
| If you are interested to read[1] more about it.
|
| [1] https://docs.github.com/en/early-
| access/github/copilot/resea...
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| There's a lot of products that try to do away with programming in
| general such as no-code.
|
| However, the elephant in the room is definitely a tool that can
| auto fix bugs - the type of bug that is usually given to a junior
| developer because the team doesn't want them building features
| yet.
| binarymax wrote:
| Don't use this. You'll just be giving training data to OpenAI
| (which NOT "Open" by any means).
| schmorptron wrote:
| Wow, that's incredible! Any chance we'll get a downloadable and
| editable open source version of this so we can play around with
| it, train it on smaller own datasets and generally experiment? It
| sounds super exciting!
| throwawake wrote:
| Did you miss OpenAI part /s
|
| As FAQ mentions, They are planning to launch a commercial
| product so likely not I guess.
| IncRnd wrote:
| For anyone who has this installed, how much of the codebase under
| development leaves the machine? I am asking from the standpoint
| of working on proprietary source code.
|
| Other than that single issue, which is really a set of issues, it
| seems to work really well from the videos I've seen.
| ranguna wrote:
| Reading the their privacy policy: as much as Microsoft wants.
| So you can probably expect all your codebase to be uploaded.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I worry about auto-complete on a more philosophical level. I've
| noticed with gmail that it'll often suggest it's way of either
| replying to an email or completing a sentence even though I'd
| never actually use those words in that situation, simply because
| it's easier.
|
| It's a pretty bad feedback loop that robs us of our independent
| thought by way of falling victim to laziness, a fundamental human
| weakness. You can imagine something where in this case the code
| autocomplete is so large that you really want to make that
| autocompletion work, even if you know it's not elegant or
| possibly even correct code... or maybe it's just repetitive and
| not abstracted well, but here it is autocompleted and done so why
| would you fight that?
|
| If we continue abstracting more and more of this way, based upon
| datasets that are averaged across everyone, we lose the
| individual in favor of the masses, bringing us all down to a
| common denominator.
|
| If we must lose our humanity to the machine, I'd at least like to
| see an autocomplete from Peter Norvig's code, or writing from
| particularly effective communicators or famous authors.
| aerospace_guy wrote:
| > feedback loop that robs us of our independent thought by way
| of falling victim to laziness
|
| This was my first thought when I saw this. I intentionally
| don't use predictive text whenever I can to preserve whatever
| originality I have left.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| How does this compare to TabNine or Kite?
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm willing to go all-in on something like this, _only_ if I can
| get a promise that this will be an open project as time goes on.
| I 'm not a fan of all of the "commercial" talk in this... if
| OpenAI is involved, and most of this can run locally, why can't
| it be fully open source?
| ranguna wrote:
| Most of it can run locally? Please point me to a trained gpt 3
| model, probably the main brains of this tool.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I feel like this could be a great way to help people understand
| new languages faster than they could otherwise.
| wejick wrote:
| Goodbye stack overflow copy pasting, welcome copilot auto
| generated code. It will bring similar problem of someone using
| something they don't understand.
|
| Another extra work for code reviewer. However on the right hand
| it will be very powerful!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Goodbye stack overflow copy pasting, welcome copilot auto
| generated code. It will bring similar problem of someone using
| something they don't understand.
|
| To be fair, "beat on it until it seems to work" without AI
| assistance or copy-pasting code _also_ frequently involves a
| fair amount of "using something they don't understand".
|
| OTOH, copy pasta and AI assisted code are less likely to get "I
| don't know why this works" or "I don't know why this is
| necessary" comments to highlight that to the reviewer.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Can I use it in Emacs?
| jimmar wrote:
| This would help me tremendously. I don't code frequently--a few
| times a month at best. I find myself having to google syntax
| constantly to write basic programs. If I want to write a simple
| python command line program that parses input, for example, I can
| guarantee I'm going to be opening tabs to figure out the syntax.
| It would be great if something like Copilot could help me stay in
| my editor.
| nhumrich wrote:
| I would love to see an equivalent where it generates all the
| tests for you
| robertlagrant wrote:
| https://www.diffblue.com
|
| Here you go :)
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| It should be able to (try to) do something like that too.
|
| There's a little demo about that here:
| https://copilot.github.com/
|
| It's "just" an autocompletion system basically, if you write
| something that looks like the beginning of a test it should
| understand that and try to autocomplete that.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I'd say it's more than 'just' an autocomplete system.
|
| Naive autocomplete, as implemented in Excel since forever ago
| (and I'm sure long before that, I'm just familiar with being
| annoyed by Excel suggesting wrong entries from its simple and
| over-eager autocomplete system), merely matches a sequence of
| characters - if I typed "aut" again in this paragraph it will
| suggest "autocomplete" because I recently typed it.
| Implementing it is the kind of task you give to a first-year
| programming student to practice string matching data
| structures, similar to a spell checker that merely checks
| that a string exists in a dictionary.
|
| There's a spectrum from 'just' autocomplete, to a syntax-
| aware system like VS Intellicode, to this, and eventually
| beyond this. As mobile predictive text is to a spell checker,
| so Github Copilot is to autocomplete. As mobile predictive
| text is to GPT3 [1], so Github Copilot is to...what next?
| GPT3 is not just a spell checker.
|
| [1] Also by OpenAI:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| I agree, that's why I put the "just" under quotes. It is
| basically an autocompletion system, just much smarter than
| human-coded ones in many ways.
| duckkg5 wrote:
| It does!
| tsumnia wrote:
| I wonder how Copilot's suggested snippet compares if the comment
| is a CS1 homework prompt.
| [deleted]
| ericls wrote:
| If you compile English to Python why not just compile it to even
| lower level?
| lxe wrote:
| If you played with OpenAI beta, you won't be surprised -- it was
| only a matter of time until this becomes widespread.
| williesleg wrote:
| Chink poo poo haba jama mama shadow banned yay hacker news!
| hartator wrote:
| How does it compare to Tabnine?
|
| I really like thar Tabnine train against your own codebase and
| suggest things based on it. It's crazy accurate and smart a
| surprising amount of time.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| CTRL+F for Privacy & Security. No mention?
| amelius wrote:
| I want one-shot learning for refactoring. I.e., show the editor
| once what transformation I want to perform, and then the editor
| takes over.
|
| Autocompleting code in general? Sounds like a bad idea, imho.
| jms55 wrote:
| So the AI doesn't actually understand the code does it? It only
| looks for similar things. So if I'm writing a game in Rust using
| the hecs ECS library, how is it going to help me? How many other
| people have written a game in that language using that library in
| this genre trying to do this task before? Probably very very few.
|
| And yeah that's a niche example, maybe this is super helpful for
| writing a react app or something very library heavy. But gut
| feeling without trying it is that there's no way this could
| actually work on anything but the most common tasks that you can
| google and find solutions for already, just made easier so you
| don't actually have to google for it.
|
| When I used tabnine which learned from you as you edit, it was
| fairly helpful for very repetitive code within the same project.
| But it was no where near "read english and write the code I meant
| for it". I'm curious to know how well this actually performs for
| non-common tasks, and whether it can understand ideas in your
| codebase that you come up with. If I make a
| WorldAbstractionOverEntities thing in my code, and then later use
| it in the project, will the AI be able to help me out? Or is it
| going to go "sorry, no one on github has used this thing you came
| up with an hour ago, I can't help you". An AI that could
| understand your own codebase and the abstractions you make and
| not just popular libraries would be infinitely more useful imo.
|
| That said, I haven't tried this, maybe it'll turn out really
| good.
| sktrdie wrote:
| > how is it going to help me? How many other people have
| written a game in that language using that library in this
| genre trying to do this task before?
|
| Because you write code using a bunch of patterns: iterating
| over data, destructing an object, calling functions etc. If you
| can generalize the usage of these patterns in such a way that
| it understands the context where you want to use them you're
| essentially doing this Copilot thing.
|
| I agree that it'll be hard to have it understand fully the
| context and paradigms behind your existing project, but if it
| can help me automate some things in such a way that I can just
| let it run its thing and than have me "poke around it to get it
| right" then this is still amazing.
| blondie9x wrote:
| If it's reducing keystrokes. Eventually it might reduce the
| problem down to no input needed at all.
|
| In that case? Are those who don't control the AI needed? What
| about when those optimizations can be made by the AI itself also?
| bravogamma wrote:
| Generating new code is not very hard for humans. But maintaining,
| extending, debugging code - often that's where the real
| challenges are. Will the AI copilot be able to fix bugs in its
| code based on bug reports?
| [deleted]
| modshatereality wrote:
| github was such a nice place until microsoft fucking ruined it.
| detaro wrote:
| What has Microsoft done to GH to "ruin it"?
| modshatereality wrote:
| ignoring THE FUCKING TOPIC HERE. the UI is hideous now
| without javascript enabled, before it was actually navigable.
| Geee wrote:
| I've been using TabNine[0] for a few years, which is great. How
| does this compare?
|
| [0] https://www.tabnine.com
| clement_b wrote:
| This will have the same deep impact Stack Overflow has had on
| code for the past decade. Good and bad!
| Deathmax wrote:
| GitHub says you don't need to credit GitHub for any of the code
| suggestions, but since it's trained on public sources of code,
| anyone have a clue on potential licensing pitfalls?
| vgalin wrote:
| From the FAQ at the bottom of the project showcase page[0]:
|
| "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the
| vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely
| generated and has never been seen before. We found that about
| 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that
| are verbatim from the training set. Here is an in-depth
| study[1] on the model's behavior. Many of these cases happen
| when you don't provide sufficient context (in particular, when
| editing an empty file), or when there is a common, perhaps even
| universal, solution to the problem. We are building an origin
| tracker to help detect the rare instances of code that is
| repeated from the training set, to help you make good real-time
| decisions about GitHub Copilot's suggestions."
|
| [0] https://copilot.github.com/
|
| [1] https://github.co/copilot-research-recitation
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| (not a lawyer) Copyright issues tend to involve the question of
| how transformative a work is. This means the code coming out
| the other end is probably fine. I don't know about the training
| side, though. Are there license issues in using copyrighted
| training data without any form of licensing? Typically ML
| researchers have a pretty free-for-all attitude towards 'if I
| can find data, I can train models on it.'
| tasuki wrote:
| > Tests without the toil. Tests are the backbone of any robust
| software engineering project. Import a unit test package, and let
| GitHub Copilot suggest tests that match your implementation code.
|
| Isn't that the wrong way around? I'd like to start by writing the
| tests, and for GitHub Copilot to please implement the function
| that makes them pass.
| enobrev wrote:
| I just watched this demo on twitter[1] and found it entertaining
| that it was auto-completing useless, redundant comments for the
| developer. Pretty sure that says more about all of us developers
| as a whole than about Copilot.
|
| 1: https://twitter.com/gr2m/status/1409909849622601729
| drummer wrote:
| So this is basically fully automated Stackoverflow assisted
| programming? Excellent.
| sama wrote:
| AI FTW!
|
| (dang please don't ban me for a low-quality comment :) i couldn't
| resist but will not make it a habit!)
| [deleted]
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| From the FAQ:
|
| https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
|
| >> How does GitHub Copilot work?
|
| >> OpenAI Codex was trained on publicly available source code and
| natural language, so it understands both programming and human
| languages.
|
| I want to propose a new Bingo style game where you get points
| when AI researchers (or rather their marketing teams) throw
| around big words that nobody understands, like, er "understands"
| with abandon. But I can't be bothered.
|
| An AI researcher called Drew McDermot warned against this kind of
| thing in a paper titled "AI meets natural stupidity":
|
| http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~jarek/courses/ai/F11/naturalstupidit...
|
| In _1976_.
|
| Why doesn't anybody ever learn from the mistakes of the past?
| pnt12 wrote:
| In AI research lingo "understands" really means "makes decent
| correlations".
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Please provide a reference for this explanation.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| This could be the kind of thing easy to train and run locally on
| a GPU.
|
| - You only need code relevant to your language.
|
| - The amount of unique code in your language is going to be
| relatively small in compared to say, the entire history of
| internet comment.
|
| - Training a model also shouldn't take long.
|
| I personally would never use an online version feeding all my
| code back to a home server somewhere, and leaving breadcrumbs
| that might suggest I'm violating the GPL.
| ranguna wrote:
| Tabnine already does this locally, but I didn't have that good
| of an experience.
| rberger wrote:
| Assuming this is actually a useful and powerful addition to a
| programmer's quiver (which it looks like it will be if not
| already is). Then the tying it to Visual Studio is a variation of
| Microsoft's "Embrace and Extend" philosophy but for Programmers
| and open source in general.
|
| It uses Open Source as its input but, as far as I can tell (and I
| would be pleasantly surprised if I was wrong), CoPilot itself is
| not Open Source.
|
| It is also tied to Visual Studio, making Visual Studio, a
| Microsoft Product and on its way to monopoly position even more
| up the power law curve to monopoly status.
|
| This would be much more interesting and less concerning if
| CoPilot was Open Source and designed to plug in to other Editors
| / IDEs like via lsp or something similar.
| kujino wrote:
| VSCode has telemetry, the extension market place can't be used
| by non-microsoft products, VSCode is not open source (only
| VSCodium is), many of the MS extension are not open source
| (like live collaboration), etc.
|
| VSCode followed the classic big tech recipe : 1) make it open
| source to look like the good guys & get adoption and
| contributions 2) close-source many key components & add
| spyware.
|
| Story of Android too pretty much
| gmueckl wrote:
| I expected the appearance of machine learning based developer
| tools pretty much the moment Github was bought by MS. Liberal
| access to everything in the largest collection of source code in
| the world is the ideal starting point for developer tools like
| this one. Githun/MS doesnt have to obey the same rate limiting
| when accessing the site that the rest of the world has to put up
| with.
|
| Now there are only three questions left: how will this be
| monetized? Will it recoup the purchasing price of Github? And how
| can vendor lock in be achieved with this or sny follow up
| products?
| dannywarner wrote:
| This is a great use of the OpenAI Codex. It's fast in VS Code. My
| early impression is that the more popular the language the better
| it does. So Javascript is almost magic and something like Rust
| still useful. I'm looking forward to using it more.
| ramoz wrote:
| How is GitHub/OpenAI ensuring this tech doesn't throw the
| industry towards a flawed human/tech capability or dystopian of
| sorts?
|
| Like... a bubble of developing code from yesterday's code (plenty
| flawed itself) and with exponential growth based on feedback
| loops of self-fulfilling prophecy ---- I'm assuming copilot (and
| every openai variant to come) will essentially retrain itself on
| new code developed,which overtime might all be code it wrote
| itself.
|
| Did we just create a hamster wheel for the industry, or high-rise
| elevator?
| ramoz wrote:
| I do think this turns into a modern stack overflow however. If
| observing local runtime errors, debugging process, and
| tidying/fixing code it produces itself. Plus train on all the
| SO questions out there.
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