[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot is generally available
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub Copilot is generally available
Author : sammorrowdrums
Score : 531 points
Date : 2022-06-21 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| ildon wrote:
| Since they've trained it on OSS, it would be fair if they made it
| free for OSS repositories.
|
| The VS extension could check if the current git repository is
| open, and if so, it should work without a subscription for that
| specific repository.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| This has probably been talked about but...
|
| If most code is "bad" code (any definition works) and this AI was
| trained on all/most code on GitHub, does that mean that this AI
| mostly helps to produces bad code?
| exyi wrote:
| I have been using copilot for some time... I'd say yes and no.
| It helps you a lot when you are writing repetitive code, so in
| a way it encourages you to write the repetitive BS instead of
| making a function for that or something. But it's also helpful
| for writing tests and nice error message. You just type
| if (x.length < 10) throw
|
| And it figures out the rest. So while sometimes it encourages
| bad code, when you know how to use it well, it helps you write
| the good things I'd normally be too lazy to write
| speedgoose wrote:
| It depends. I have not collected data to prove my observations,
| but I find the rust suggestions better quality on average than
| the python suggestions. Some people do terrible things in
| Python.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| one way to minimize this is to train on your own trusted code.
| You do need a reasonable amount of good code (ideally with good
| comments too) this is one of the options that we have here at
| Tabnine. Train on your GitLab, Bitbucket or GitHub repos.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| It definitely can. Here it suggests a plausible looking but
| incorrect function for averaging integers:
| https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/14527512360594513...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Coding with copilot is like working with a super eager low-
| quality outsourced programmer.
|
| They kinda know what they're supposed to do. Sometimes they do
| the right thing, sometimes they get it completely wrong.
|
| In either case you can never let anything they do get committed
| without a review.
|
| So are they really helping?
| Mizza wrote:
| Imagining Steve Ballmer down in Hell laughing at all of us.
|
| "They gave away all their code, so we packaged it up and sold it
| right back to them, the stupid bastards!"
| chadlavi wrote:
| I got like two weeks of the beta before they took it away from me
| today. I guess my small open-source project isn't prestigious
| enough to merit free access. Thanks I guess GitHub?
| BrandonJung wrote:
| Come try Tabnine and if you need a custom model for your small
| OSS project please let me know.
| lmarcos wrote:
| Reminds me of the scene in Fight Club where Tyler explains how he
| makes money (he sells rich women their own fat asses in the form
| of luxury soap). In this case the fat is open source code hosted
| in GitHub, the soap is Copilot, and the rich women are us, the
| developers.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| Well, true. But that's the point, it saves you from having to
| do all the work.
|
| Copilot saves me from leaving my IDE for a large amount of
| situations. It saves me from opening a new tab (tab #1003) and
| Googling my problem, finding a solution on StackOverflow,
| scrolling down to the answers, curating the best answers,
| picking the one I like, copy/pasting it, then tailoring it to
| my liking (JS to TS, naming conventions, etc.) and testing it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| "With enough open source snippets one could code up just about
| anything."
| k0k0r0 wrote:
| Underrated comment.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| I'm learning rust, maybe this will help me googling how to do
| simple things like split a string and remove white space, while
| handling errors.
|
| I see this useful for non core languages, where you often need to
| look up common patterns.
| dibujante wrote:
| Co-pilot is great when you have a repetitive programming task to
| perform. e.g. if you are nesting module imports through several
| layers of python init. Co-pilot is great at tab-completing `from
| myproject.some_module.nested_module.actual_module import Foo as
| Foo` and similar tasks.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I love copilot, but I don't even pay for github, maybe have it
| bundled with like an 8 dollar github upgraded account or
| something, might entice many of us who just use "free" github
| services to upgrade, but by itself. I don't think so.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I have the student developer pack. I should have access to
| Copilot, but it prompts to pay. Does any other verified student
| currently have access?
| vlan121 wrote:
| I do, but I did the beta before.
| samorozco wrote:
| Doesn't work with my intellIj version. Or it could be the
| cooperate network.
| neximo64 wrote:
| Does it work for anyone? I get this
|
| Extension activation failed: "Unexpected end of JSON input"
| curo wrote:
| Copilot is a steal at $10/m.
|
| HN can set itself apart from Twitter and Reddit by celebrating
| great achievements rather than tearing them down.
|
| Copilot stands on the shoulders of open source, yes. So do many
| of our personal and commercial projects. Copilot benefitted from
| having beta users. That relationship went both ways.
|
| A big thanks to the Copilot team for letting us be a part of the
| beta. I will happily pay $10/m for this.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Copilot is a steal at $10/m. agree !!! as
| any burgler-thief-attorney will tell you, it is *totally worth
| it*
| svnpenn wrote:
| Steal is a good word, considering that in some cases Copilot
| violates some open source licenses.
| acdanger wrote:
| When I try and sign up for it, I am presented with a "Confirm
| Payment Details" screen with no way to proceed.
| natefinch wrote:
| You have to give a credit card or other payment details to
| enter the free trial.
| grezql wrote:
| smcleod wrote:
| I've really liked Copilot as a source of tab completion over the
| past year, it's far from perfect but it gives decent hints about
| 50% of the time, however it is absolutely not worth $14 AUD per
| month, maybe $15-$20/year I'd consider it but I already have
| subscription fatigue.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Did they fixed the licensing dangers?
| xaedes wrote:
| As they don't mention it I doubt it.
|
| Tabnine, a similar competitor, explicitly mentions this on
| their website:
|
| " Tabnine only uses open-source code with permissive licenses
| for our Public Code trained AI model (MIT, Apache 2.0,
| BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause). "
|
| Other commenters here say the completion quality is worse than
| Copilot. I use Tabnine for local short completions only and am
| quite happy with it. Didn't try Copilot yet.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| No they did not. You have to train on only fully permissive
| code to ensure that is not a problem
| CryZe wrote:
| You apparently can "opt out of public code" now. I didn't find
| an explanation for whether that properly limits it to
| permissive licenses though.
|
| Update: It seems like they check whether the code it emits
| matches the training set and if it does it won't suggest it.
| xmodem wrote:
| It's hilarious to me that Copilot is now GA, but our rep GitHub
| contact has been promising to get us onto the merge queue beta
| for months and it's still vaporware. I'm beginning to wonder if
| that product exists at all.
|
| https://github.blog/changelog/2021-10-27-pull-request-merge-...
| mrfusion wrote:
| I've never used it but I imagine it would help a lot with the
| programmers equivalency of writers block.
| jq-r wrote:
| And already having [scaling?] issues =)
| https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/9xb0vpwcj8gj
| longrod wrote:
| I have had a lot more success with Tabnine. One, it runs offline
| as well as online so the performance difference with/without
| internet is unnoticeable. Two, it understands context much
| better. I was prototyping in Python with Tabnine turned on
| without the LSP and I felt no need to install one. It spits out
| uncannily good suggestions if you are using a popular library
| like Beautifulsoup etc.
|
| Copilot is marketed as a pair programmer but the code quality is
| often times just wrong, not just bad. It thinks it understands
| what I want based on the function name and parameters but the
| generated output is no where close to what I want.
|
| Multiline AI generated suggestions are not a good idea anyway
| (not yet at least). AI based LSP/auto completer would be much
| better at this stage with a lot faster DX.
| swalls wrote:
| Only $10 a month to rack up dozens of license violations? What a
| deal.
| mcluck wrote:
| Like many people I thought Copilot was neat but ended up
| uninstalling it because it caused more problems than it solved.
| Reading the comments here, it seems that most of the people who
| get value out of it would be better served creating a set of
| snippets. If all you need is to fill in boilerplate all the time
| or repeat general test structures but with different arguments,
| just make a snippet. Every major code editor supports this and
| they're really easy to setup and use.
| xtracto wrote:
| I haven't used Copilot but found this comment interesting. Back
| in the 1990s when I started programming (BASIC and C) I did
| maintain collections of code snippets that I used in different
| programs here and there. I used to cherish those snippets and
| dedicated a good amount of time to maintain them available
| through my computers.
|
| Then the Internet and Google came around. I found that instead
| of me maintaining those code snippets, I could search in
| Excite/Altavista for how to do something, and it will be stored
| there for me. Later came sites like StackOverflow
| (expertssexchange before it) which concentrated much of that
| information which before was scattered in PHPBBs and Geocities
| pages.
|
| Now I see this Copilot app like the evolution of that; Instead
| of having to manually go searching for a snippet, I imagine I
| can "pull it" almost automatically while I am writing code,
| with an AI helping me search for the right snippet with the
| current code context.
|
| That doesn't sound bad at all.
|
| Nevertheless, I haven't used it because I DON'T want my code to
| be sent to Microsoft or any other company. And I don't believe
| in adding random code for which I don't know the license! What
| if there is some code which was AGPL that Copilot happens to
| use? that's pretty bad.
| danuker wrote:
| Or better yet, save the snippet as a function/procedure in the
| code, and avoid needless duplication (DRY/Occam's razor).
| ggerganov wrote:
| $10/month is a perfect price - that was my exact estimate of what
| I was willing to pay for this service when it becomes non-free.
|
| To everyone expecting Copilot to magically write the code they
| are thinking about - you are missing the point. There is a
| learning curve of using this service that allows you to be more
| efficient in expressing your ideas. It's not about doing all the
| work for you. It's like auto-complete on the next level.
|
| Licensing concerns - oh come on.. what is the big deal? There are
| millions of "for (int i ..)" loops out there. Like anyone gives a
| damn about 5 auto-generate lines being _probably_ copied from
| somewhere. Moreover, if you used Copilot just a bit you would
| know that is not how it works.
| zgway wrote:
| Is this bribing developers so they stop talking about code
| laundering? The problem does not disappear.
|
| There would be no issue if they trained the model on Microsoft's
| closed source instead.
| metadat wrote:
| I tried GHCP but found it overall unhelpful and kind of stressful
| to use, because of potential bugs I might overlook and "import"
| into my project.
|
| Definitely does not seem worth paying for me to end up more
| stressed out, haha.
| exyi wrote:
| So it depends if you prefer writing or doing code review :)
| You'd maybe need another tool which converts review work to
| writing work
| metadat wrote:
| I'm good.. without it :D
| meowface wrote:
| Thoughts on how it compares with Tabnine? Should I try disabling
| Tabnine when testing this?
| yubozhao wrote:
| If copilot saves more than 30 mins of your time per month, then
| it is totally worth it.
| swah wrote:
| I think it does: it is, at least, an "always up-to-date"
| snippet machine..
| [deleted]
| cfn wrote:
| The day Copilot or something like it catches on is the day when
| programming changes for real. Instead of being hired to create
| new systems or extend existing systems built by other programmers
| we will only be hired to fix Copilot generated code.
|
| I suffer enough with legacy code created by junior programmers
| that long left the company. I imagine how much more fun will be
| to work with this type of code.
|
| * I know Copilot is not capable of creating full systems yet but
| it is a matter of time before they evolve it to generate all the
| bolierplate code for you based on some comments you make or, even
| worse, some UML abstraction!
| emacdona wrote:
| Has anyone been able to sign up since this announcement?
|
| I get to a "Confirm your payment details" screen, but there is no
| further action I can take (ie: no button to press or link to
| click to "confirm"). It does say "You will be billed $100/year
| starting August 20, 2022" -- but when I view my "settings", it
| tells me I haven't signed up for copilot.
|
| I tried various browsers, including Edge on Windows 10 sans
| plugins (the combination I would expect to be the most supported
| for MS owned github.com).
| darknavi wrote:
| I don't even see that. I see a "Start my free trial" button and
| it just takes me to the generic billing screen. How do I even
| purchase this? Is it its own subscription?
| natefinch wrote:
| There are some GitHub problems that are getting addressed right
| now.
| emacdona wrote:
| Ah, victims of their own success? Glad to see people are
| lining up to pay for it :-)
| Shadonototra wrote:
| they used the data of their users without compensation and they
| have the decency to charge $10?
| [deleted]
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| IMHO, it's still far from GA quality/usability. A must-have
| feature that's missing is a toggle switch that lets you
| temporarily turn it off. Without a feature, it can get really
| noisy.
| baby wrote:
| There is a button you can click in VSCode to toggle it, so not
| sure what's the problem.
| giobox wrote:
| This may vary in the IDEs they support, but theres an "Activate
| Copilot" toggle button right in the status bar in VSCode to
| toggle on and off instantly that appears on every editor window
| if the extension is installed.
| the_duke wrote:
| In Neovim it's just ":Copilot disable", ":Copilot enable".
| rictic wrote:
| The VSCode extension has one. There's a button in the bottom
| right with the logo that you can click to enable/disable, or
| you could add a keybind for the "github.copilot.toggleCopilot"
| command
| elil17 wrote:
| You can toggle in PyCharm with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O
| lysecret wrote:
| Actually, I quite like it. Especially for these repetitive things
| one can forget. Stuff like there is a deleted field in one table,
| usually you would write an sql query like
| .filter(table.deleted==False)
|
| nothing complicated, but one tends to forget it. So i got into
| the habit of starting a new line in whatever query I am building
| and see what copilot thinks I forgot.
| love2read wrote:
| Was anybody offered the subscription for free due to their
| connection to an open source project? If so, how large is the
| project?
| jwpapi wrote:
| I'm honestly shook at all the comments here. I don't make any
| money coding and I'm probably in the lower 25% of HN readers in
| terms of skills, but I'm more than happy to pay $10/m. I would
| pay Github $10/m for what they already give me.
|
| What is your time worth? You should easily get $60/hr, so you
| need to save 12 minutes per month to make it worth. I would pay
| that for all my employees.
|
| CoPilot is not a replacement for writing code, but it's
| incredible useful when you are stuck and or / write simple logic.
|
| Often I don't have the right method, function or logic on mind.
| Before I google, I write a comment of what I want and 8/10
| CoPilot generates the right code.
|
| Typing the comment, checking the solution, reformatting it is <<<
| less time than without it.
|
| To me Github CoPilot is a standard part of my IDE and I wouldn't
| want to miss it anymore. It saves me at least an hour a day of
| coding. Some stuff is really crazy. I invite you all to try to be
| open-minded. You have to experience it.
|
| // You have to code for yourself
|
| I don't really like this argument, because if that argument would
| be true, we would also need to now how our codes translates to 1
| and 0s and how the electronics build our application than.
| AutoComplete is part of our life on our phone and it can be with
| developing. Don't make it harder as it needs to be.
| matsemann wrote:
| Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being
| lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it?
|
| For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can
| sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to
| verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every
| problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not
| that useful.
| kromem wrote:
| I code for a living and have done so for over a decade now,
| and I completely agree with their analysis.
|
| Does it save you $10 worth of your time within a month?
|
| Comments here are wildly uninformed. I see comments
| complaining about copyright that seem to have no awareness of
| either fair use doctrine prior law as it relates to partial
| usage nor the details regarding how infrequently Copilot
| generates identifiable verbatim results outside attempts to
| auto fill empty files in empty projects (which seems outside
| typical usage).
|
| Or complaints that it makes mistakes, as if 90% of those
| mistakes aren't immediately flagged by the linter. Not only
| that, but I've found that often when it does make mistakes,
| it reflects a consistency smell in my own code, such as
| tripping up on a legacy naming convention that should really
| be refactored out.
|
| If it doesn't save you $10 worth of time, obviously don't use
| it. Personally I was worried it was going to be more given
| the ways in which it cuts down on the most boring parts of a
| high value profession.
|
| But insinuating that someone's positive experience of the
| tool reflects inexperience is a weird gatekeeper flex, and
| honestly I'm more inclined to think that all the curmudgeonly
| resistance I see in here to the inevitable march of progress
| instead reflects old dogs unable to adequately learn new
| tricks (like how to effectively prompt it).
| matsemann wrote:
| It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it
| was just an observation based on the parent comment's own
| admission.
|
| Please remember this from the guidelines
|
| > _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._
| DantesKite wrote:
| > It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in
| general, it was just an observation based on the parent
| comment's own admission.
|
| I don't think that's true.
|
| When the parent comment made that observation, they
| attached the caveat they might not be as skilled as
| others. They were already fully aware their potential
| lack of skill might affect their opinion of the product.
| All you did was repeat that same claim back to them, as
| if they weren't already aware of it which is a pretty
| uncharitable interpretation. A steelman interpretation
| that you could've said would assume there are some low-
| hanging fruit new or inexperienced developers would
| benefit from greatly (not just typing as you suggest),
| but once you develop a certain level of skill, Copilot
| would become less useful for experts such as yourself.
|
| If anything, you didn't respond to the strongest
| plausible interpretation of what was said, since you
| willfully disregarded their own insight into the problem.
|
| Then to try and morally lecture someone on their behavior
| by applying a rule you don't even hold yourself standard
| to is pretty astonishing.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > For me the bottleneck is seldom typing
|
| This is one of my pet peeves in this field. People create
| whole programming languages that are "expressive", just to
| save typing a few dozen characters and have huge tirades
| against "verbose" languages that require typing a bunch of
| boilerplate.
|
| If typing the code is the bit that takes the longest for you
| in a project, stop and take a good look in the mirror.
| There's something else wrong in the process.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| For a verbose language the problem isn't the typing it's
| the reading. On the typing side I agree with you: I don't
| mind spending 30 minutes typing a bunch of boilerplate. I
| do mind digging through 100s of lines of code to find the 2
| lines that actually do something interesting.
|
| Of course, copilot is only going to save you typing time,
| and you'll have to pay it back at reading time.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| I don't really get this argument why it should be a problem that
| it is being trained on other public code.
|
| Every human was just trained in the same way. Why isn't this a
| problem for every human?
|
| I really don't see the difference. One is an artificial neural
| network while the other is a biological neural network?
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| It's not about the learning part, it's about the copyright and
| money part. If you learn how to play song X by The Rolling
| Stones, you cannot just make money playing song X in a concert.
| Sure thing you can play song X in your father's birthday.
|
| Here GitHub (Microsoft) is charging for a product that in
| certain circumstances violates copyright.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| But Copilot (or a human) is not copying some existing code.
| It (Copilot or human) just used existing code to learn. So it
| is only about the learning part, nothing else.
|
| Yes, if Copilot (or a human) would copy existing code, that
| would be a copyright violation. But none of the arguments
| here are about that. It's just about the learning.
| Snild wrote:
| I guess it's a bit of a philosophical disagreement.
|
| In my view: I don't believe a machine (at least not any we're
| capable of creating) can truly _learn_.
|
| Copilot is a machine working on its inputs. Humans think and
| create. Maybe it can be argued that humans are just more
| complicated machines, but I don't think most people would agree
| with such an equivalency.
|
| Copilot is constructed almost entirely from others' code.
| There's a tiny fraction of original "ai glue" in there, but the
| end product is arguably a derivative work of all that code it
| was trained on. As is its output.
|
| It can also be argued that the AI part is really just an
| obfuscating copy machine. One that was created specifically for
| that task.
|
| And of course, the real killing blow: if/when it reproduces
| training code verbatim, and you don't notice... will "copilot
| did it" be a valid defense in court? There are different
| opinions on that I guess, but no one knows for sure -- and I
| wouldn't take that risk.
| luckystarr wrote:
| A few observations:
|
| The IntelliJ Copilot plugin became worthless just before the
| release. It borks up the formatting and requires almost more
| keystrokes to make the code work than it saves.
|
| It sometimes works brilliantly, the result has almost always been
| either duplicated code which could use refactoring or simple
| minded attribute access code which could be solved generically. I
| have the fear that it will push developers to go the "easy route"
| and not think about the code too much while churning out more and
| more lines of generated code, so I'm unwilling to recommend it to
| junior developers.
| iblaine wrote:
| I used github copilot for a week, got some good laughs, then
| never used it again. Working at a publicly traded healthcare
| company, it worries me that my IDE has the technical ability to
| snoop on my code. More than anything else, github copilot is a
| cool parlor trick, in its current form. Surely it'll improve over
| time.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think the funniest thing that I heard copilot would readily do
| was spitting out other people's hardcoded API keys and other such
| secrets you should never put right in your source when you would
| prompt it properly.
| MarquesMa wrote:
| Thank you, GitHub, this is one of the best things!
|
| No, it cannot make me write code I couldn't write before. It does
| not autopilot and does all the coding by itself. But it still
| boosts my productivity greatly, making me relaxed while coding
| and focusing on the important part rather than errands.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| I've been using it for a while now. When I forget some syntax
| occasionally I'll switch this on instead of searching
| documentation or google, but more often than not my IDE can get
| me unstuck with less overhead.
|
| Also if there are some repetitive sections of code I need to
| bang out quickly this will auto fill that repetitive pattern
| (although I'd argue this is usually a sign that the code should
| be cleaned up)
|
| I avoid letting it fill in large swaths of code though. I have
| no idea where that code is coming from (license infringement?)
| and it tends to go way off the rails.
|
| Additionally I feel that it makes me a worse programmer if I
| allow it to take over too much.
|
| I've been programming for 20 years (more if you count my time
| as a kid) and have a certain flow. Part of that flow is the
| natural pause between thinking of solutions and typing. When
| the computer is beating me to the typing portion (and often
| times making mistakes) I would find myself doing more code
| review than code writing. Sometimes a few bugs popped up and it
| was thanks to copilot (or was it me failing to correct
| copilot's mistakes?).
|
| I found my brain sort of switching into a different mode.
| Rather than thinking about my next steps I was thinking about
| the steps the computer just took and how I needed to clean them
| up.
|
| Rather than the AI being my reviewer during a paired
| programming session, I was the computer's reviewer.
|
| So now, like I said I use it very sparingly.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| Additionally: when I allowed copilot to do heavier coding for
| me, I found myself returning later and feeling somewhat
| unfamiliar with the code. That's really bad for maintenance,
| project pace, etc. I don't want to try to re-learn, fix,
| remember and maintain code that someone else (a computer in
| this case) wrote. Its hard enough doing so reliably in group
| code settings (work), now injecting that into my daily coding
| life feels like a solution I didn't ask for.
|
| I will say that I'm not averse to change and do appreciate
| the new tools that we have available to us - Starting on a
| x386 writing QBASIC as a kid to using Jetbrains Rider is an
| indescribably different experience.
|
| That said, I'm not ready to move to the backseat and let the
| computer take over yet. In small doses copilot is fine, but I
| wouldn't lean heavily on it for large projects or to do the
| thinking for me.
| baby wrote:
| Insta buy for me (expense hopefully). I am just continuously mind
| blown by it, and I quickly notice and get frustrated when it's
| not enabled. It really is giving coders superpowers.
|
| EDIT: looks like I'm getting it for free because of my
| contributions to open source o.o dope!
| sarsway wrote:
| Yeah can't live without it anymore. It's already muscle memory
| to intuitively pausing typing, just waiting for Copilot to
| complete my line. Pretty good sense on what it should get right
| too. Knew this was gonna be a $10/month thing. oh well.
|
| Hope though, when AI is becoming increasingly useful and
| seamlessly integrated, they not gonna take an arm and leg for
| it. It's just gonna be way too good to pass, people won't
| really have a choice but pay.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Can't wait for the next wave of garbage outsourced code generated
| at bottom dollar because it was really written by copilot. God
| help us.
| ahnick wrote:
| What's the criteria for being considered "a maintainer of a
| popular open source project"? They never actually publish the
| criteria anywhere from what I can tell. They just say visit the
| subscription page and if you are eligible it should be available
| to you and if you see a charge then you are not eligible. I think
| though they should still be transparent about what their metric
| is for determining popular projects on GitHub; otherwise, the
| code that determines eligibility might be broken and no one would
| be able to tell. Or worse they could just be lying about it
| entirely.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| A sample of the first 25k repositories and their stargazers on
| GitHub shows that the top 1% have over 600 stars, and the top
| 0.1% have nearly 5,000 stars. That's a very small sample,
| however.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/github-statistics
|
| [2]:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HBSwxr0jkUoMulQxyVTC...
| kevincox wrote:
| > People who maintain popular open source projects receive a
| credit to have 12 months of GitHub Copilot access for free. A
| maintainer of a popular open source project is defined as
| someone who has write or admin access to one or more of the
| most popular open source projects on GitHub
|
| https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-ca...
|
| I like how "open source project" == "on github". Can't say that
| I am surprised though.
| Washuu wrote:
| I authored/contribute/maintain stuff that is used by tens of
| millions of people world wide. I do not qualify. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| samth wrote:
| At a minimum, 4.3k stars is not enough, because I don't
| qualify.
| meibo wrote:
| This is curious - I maintain 2 projects with 2k cumulative
| stars, and I was able to claim the free access. Wonder what
| the metric is? Maybe creation date has something to do with
| it?
| baby wrote:
| If you want to check if you qualify:
| https://github.com/github-copilot/free_signup
| kevincox wrote:
| I get " Congratulations! You are eligible to use GitHub
| Copilot for free." that was unexpected but in retrospect
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/ is pretty popular.
| (Currently 9.8k stars)
| samth wrote:
| Yeah that just redirects me to the paid page. I do wish
| the criteria were a little more transparent.
| [deleted]
| thamer wrote:
| Reporting on my own experience, I got access to Copilot a few
| days after it was announced and am currently not expected to
| pay for it.
|
| I started a project that currently has 9.4k stars (now mostly
| maintained by someone else), and still maintain a project
| that has 2.5k stars.
| notamy wrote:
| > What's the criteria for being considered "a maintainer of a
| popular open source project"?
|
| The FAQ [0] says
|
| > _A maintainer of a popular open source project is defined as
| someone who has write or admin access to one or more of the
| *most popular open source projects* on GitHub_
|
| (emphasis added)
|
| [0] https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-
| ca...
| netr0ute wrote:
| That's the problem, what is a "most popular project?"
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It goes on to say "Simply visit the GitHub Copilot
| subscription page to see if you are one of the open source
| maintainers that meet our criteria for a complimentary
| subscription"
|
| When I go to https://github.com/github-copilot/free_signup
| it says:
|
| " Congratulations! You are eligible to use GitHub Copilot
| for free.
|
| Thanks for being a part of our open source and education
| communities. GitHub Copilot uses the Codex AI model to
| offer coding suggestions."
|
| I have a project with about 3k stars, and regularly
| contribute to another project ~4k stars (Where I'm also the
| primary maintainer, although it's not on my account), as
| well as some things in with hundred and dozens of stars.
|
| I don't how high up that is in the ranking, although given
| that most projects get 0 stars I suspect it's probably
| higher than you'd might expect.
| ahnick wrote:
| Ummm, yes, that was my original point. What does "one or more
| of the _most popular open source projects_ on GitHub " mean
| exactly? Do you need a certain number of github stars on your
| project? Are you listed on some "most popular github projects
| specific page"? or what?
| bumpa wrote:
| I got this free access. Tried to figure how to request this
| "Verified" status, whatever it means, but github seems to
| set it automatically and notified me "you are eligible to
| use GitHub Copilot for free". I'm not sure how exactly they
| do it and what defines "the most popular open source
| projects". The most popular repo (by stars) I have is with
| 3k stars. Apparently it is enough, not sure.
| natefinch wrote:
| There's a definition somewhere in the FAQ, it's like the
| top 1000 projects in each of the top 34 most popular
| languages on GitHub, as long as those projects have some
| minimum number of stars and forks.
| [deleted]
| plondon514 wrote:
| Are there any plans for GitHub Copilot to ship an API? I think it
| would be interesting to set it up w/ my side project
| https://codeamigo.dev
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Hey, fun side project!
| lelag wrote:
| The API version of copilot exists.
|
| It's called OpenAI Codex. https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
| plondon514 wrote:
| Thanks!
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Yeah but it takes forever to get off the waitlist (I've been
| waiting for almost a year)
| davidbarker wrote:
| You may have luck by emailing the CEO and asking politely.
| I wrote a comment previously
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30692202) about how I
| got immediate access to Codespaces by emailing the GitHub
| CEO.
| jpomykala wrote:
| It's not worth $10/mo. I wouldn't even pay $5/mo. Usually, it
| generates code with incorrect logic what is sometimes hard to
| notice.
|
| It's also awful that they took free code (open-source), and now
| they want money for it. Make it open-source and free to use...
|
| Some say it's great for repetitive tasks, but if you write
| repetitive code (tests also) maybe you should look for other
| solutions than "auto-generating" unmaintainable code.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| they used all the code in GitHub regardless of license. hope
| they avoided the Oracle code ;-)
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| If anyone ever wondered why M$ bought github for $7.5B, this is
| exactly the reason. A huge free dataset of code ready to train
| the corporation's neural networks. Ideals to idealists, money to
| money.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Is co-pilot distinctly different from the auto-complete feature
| of VS2022? I started using that a few months back and it gives
| far more complex suggestions than VS2019 but I wasn't sure if
| this was "co-pilot" or not.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I really like copilot, but my outside of the content being
| generated it still feels a bit slow and somewhat hacked into
| vscode. It sometimes interferes with regular "intellisense
| suggestions" as well.
|
| I've been in the beta since almost the beginning I have not
| really seen much improvement on the frontend side. Since its
| release, the changelog only mentions 10 small (or so it seems)
| improvements
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/GitHub.copilot-ni...
|
| On the backend side, I feel like I've started to "figure out"
| copilot a little bit. One thing I'd like to see is inline
| completion which I think gpt3 can do now but copilot which I
| believe it's based on cannot.
|
| I think I will pay to continue, but I'd like to see some frontend
| improvements and maybe some backend alternatives. Ideally I'd
| love this to be open source but compute power doesn't seem
| feasible (?) unless we start magically crowd sourcing our
| computers to run a model somehow.
| [deleted]
| jbaczuk wrote:
| I guess I will have to start actually working now... I have been
| a user since the beta started, so no thanks to us who have been
| contributing to the model? People forget that by using it, you
| are training it too.
| CryZe wrote:
| You can opt out of that.
| amelius wrote:
| What I really want is a one-shot learning tool, which I teach
| once how to apply some code-transformation, and then the tool can
| apply it everywhere in my code.
| Otek wrote:
| I don't know what language do you work with but do you mean
| something like a ESLint for JS/TS?
| social_quotient wrote:
| Could they charge more and push the product improvements faster?
| Seems like 10/m/u is optimizing for how bearable the price is but
| then you have a bunch of users that are quick to complain while
| you don't have the budget to make rapid improvements to the
| platform.
|
| Charge 10x more (or more) and let the dreamers help push the
| product further and faster. Once it's awesome then charge a
| commoditized price for the service.
|
| Charging 10x+ more means we have enough skin in the game to
| properly send feedback and improvement ideas. At 10/m/u it's
| barely worth you reading my support tickets and it's almost with
| me just not using it while paying for it.
|
| Thoughts?
| drcongo wrote:
| I hope we get a Sublime plugin now.
| nikeee wrote:
| The main page [0] shows you awesome demos, but also its
| weaknesses in the very first example. It doesn't encode the url
| encoded body properly:
|
| > body: `text=${text}`,
|
| So it breaks if the text contains a '&' and even allows parameter
| injection to the call of the 3rd party service. Isn't that
| critical on a sentiment analysis API, but could result in actual
| security holes.
|
| I hope the users won't blindly use the generated code without
| review. These mistakes can be so subtle, nobody even noticed them
| when they put them on the front page of the product.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/features/copilot/
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yep. Copilot is going to be good for "pick up the pieces" devs
| prazgaitis wrote:
| I've found it to be very helpful, especially when working with
| poorly documented APIs. (Looking at you, Google Play Store APIs).
|
| Would be happy to pay for it (or expense it to my employer) if I
| was still an IC.
| Hamcha wrote:
| I've been using Copilot non-stop on every hobby project I have
| ever since they've let me in (2021/07/13) and I am honestly
| flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo. My experience using
| it till this day is the following:
|
| - It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate
| code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes
| reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well.
|
| - It's terrible if you let it write too much. The biggest problem
| I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's that it
| think it _knows_ how and then produce good looking code at a
| glance but with wrong logic.
|
| - Relying on its outside-code knowledge is also generally a
| recipe for disaster: e.g. I'm building a Riichi Mahjong engine
| and while it knows all the terms and how to put a sentence
| together describing the rules, it absolutely doesn't _actually_
| understand how "Chii" melds work
|
| - Due to the licensing concerns I did not use CoPilot at all in
| work projects and I haven't felt like I was missing _that_ much.
| A friend of mine also said he wouldn 't be allowed to use it.
|
| You can treat it as a pair programming session where you're the
| observer and write an outline while the AI does all the bulk work
| (but be wary), but at what point does it become such a better
| experience to justify 10$/mo? I don't understand if I've been
| using it wrong or what.
| rexreed wrote:
| Of course GPT-3 doesn't "understand" what you are doing. All
| it's doing is generating high probability text based on a huge
| training corpus. It's guessing what text will come next. That
| doesn't mean it understands jack squat. It's basically a parrot
| with a huge database. Polly want a program?
| toyg wrote:
| The fact that such a program is so hyped, is actually an
| indicator of how much boilerplate and wheel-reinvention goes
| on among programmers every day.
|
| The state of the sector is somewhat embarrassing. We have
| armies of monkeys well-paid to bang out the same
| Java/Javascript/C#/Python over, and over, and over...
| rexreed wrote:
| Microsoft spent a Billion dollars for an exclusive license
| of GPT-3, and now they want their return. Expect to see
| GPT-3 hyped on every platform (including Github).
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > - It's terrible if you let it write too much. The biggest
| problem I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's
| that it think it knows how and then produce good looking code
| at a glance but with wrong logic.
|
| So the same problem ML has in every endeavor where we have a
| good metric of "correctness" that's distinct from
| _plausibility_ , like OCR or natural language translation: very
| good at spitting out stuff that _superficially resembles_
| training data, and whether that happens to be _right_ is
| totally accidental.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think your response highlights why individual developers are
| the worst target market and why you want to sell to businesses
| if you're in the tool space.
|
| Let's say the average developer in the US costs 10k a month (I
| think that's pretty close to the real average of around 120k a
| year). So copilot would cost .1% of that developer's salary. I
| realize calculating things around "improvements in developer
| productivity" involve lots of fuzzy math, but it would be
| stupid for any company NOT to pay this if it improves developer
| productivity by just 1%.
|
| Another way to think about it that I think may be more "real
| world": Let's say I'm CTO of a big company with 1000 software
| developers. Do I think it's going to be a better investment to
| hire another developer so I have 1001 developers, or instead
| use that other developer's salary to buy all the devs at my
| company a Copilot license?
|
| But for some reason individual developers think that anything
| over $1-2 dollars a month is an exhorbitant cost.
| austenallred wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious: How do you value your time?
|
| If you're an engineer who is paid $150/hour and Copilot saves
| you 5 minutes/month it just paid for itself.
| kojeovo wrote:
| Hobby projects don't make any money so it doesn't make sense
| if I pay for it to be more productive for the company. If
| they pay, great.
| wiremine wrote:
| I'm the CTO for a small(ish) software consultancy. $10/month is
| a no-brainer price for just the "amazing all-rounder
| autocomplete". Spending $10/month/dev to help maximize highly
| billable engineers? It's well worth the price.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| would you prefer it trained ONLY on your code or are you ok
| with the broad use of non-permissive code used for CODEX?
| mceachen wrote:
| > licensing concerns
|
| I dismissed these concerns before I had early access.
|
| Then, _literally the first characters I typed_ after enabling
| the extension were `//`, and it autosuggested:
| // Copyright 2018 Google LLC
|
| I immediately uninstalled it.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/mrm/status/1410658969803051012/ph...
| yosito wrote:
| > Due to the licensing concerns I did not use CoPilot at all in
| work projects
|
| I've rarely found that CoPilot produces more than a line or two
| of accurate code. How likely is it that one would run into
| licensing issues with a single line of code that looks similar
| to something from another codebase?
|
| While I understand the problem in principle, I am really
| skeptical that significant licensing issues would really come
| up with using CoPilot as an individual.
| blue0bird wrote:
| I've been using Copilot for almost 10 months, useful when
| learning new code but after a while become a bit more advanced
| auto complete.
|
| I think it is good for short lines, repeating tasks; for
| example when writing tests and want to assert different fields,
| assert string, int, etc; for these sort of lines was really
| good and fast.
|
| my main problems: 1. sometimes make a horrible mistake, takes
| couple of minutes to understand 2. repeat the same mistake over
| and over 3. adding a single tab take a bit of time, had to copy
| & paste tab to avoid copilot suggestion!
| staticassertion wrote:
| To me it's easily worth twice that, so I'm happy to pay
| 100/year.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| A developer easily costs $100 an hour. This means that if
| Copilot saves you more than 360 seconds in a month it's paid
| for itself.
|
| I'm honestly flabbergasted that anybody would think it _isn't_
| worth $10 a month, despite its many serious flaws.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| That calculation works if it doesn't also cost you any time -
| which by all accounts it does, e.g. in review.
| euos wrote:
| I've been using it as well. As annoying as it is, I am sure I
| would miss it enough to pay $100/year. Luckily, I somehow
| qualified for free access...
| BrandonJung wrote:
| Licensing is a critical question that is often not considered.
| Code trained on non-permissive code (think Oracle API's) has
| very significant risk, ask Google. We took a different tact
| three years ago in building Tabnine BUT went with only fully
| permissive code for training, ability to train on your own code
| base, and zero sharing of your completions. Also we give the
| developer the flexibility to adjust the length of completions
| if you want faster shorter suggestions.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| +1. I've also been using it for hobby projects and have largely
| the same conclusions. I really do like that it spits out
| boilerplate for me, but when doing more than that, I still have
| to double-check all of it because as you said it does create
| incorrect, good looking output.
|
| I can't justify $10 a month for it. Maybe as it improves.
|
| EDIT: To clarify, $10 a month for personal use. We can't use it
| at work due to licensing, or it'd be worth that just to emit
| boilerplate.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| I've also been using this for months, and would not pay for it.
| I think i might be getting it for free actually as I haven't
| been asked to pay yet.
|
| I came to the same conclusion as you, you can see comments I
| made elsewhere in this thread. I'm not thrilled with it.
| nacs wrote:
| It has been free but now they're making it a "free 60 day
| trial" followed by $10 a month.
|
| I've tried it with a few projects with different languages
| and it's not worth anything close to that $10/m fee
| personally.
|
| It's OK at filling in a line here and there if it's
| boilerplate-type code but otherwise, it's like a beginner
| programmer at best.
| datastack wrote:
| Interesting to hear your experience. I've been using it for
| over a year, and I've come to appreciate the (modest)
| productivity boost that it's given me, to the point that I feel
| $10 per month is probably worth it.
|
| The completions are often trivial, but they save me from typing
| them by hand. Sometimes they are trivial yet still wrong so I
| need to make corrections, wasting some of the gained speed. In
| total these probably won't save me much time on a day.
|
| However, every couple of days there is one of these cases,
| where it can do tedious work that really saves time and
| headaches.
|
| Example: - After writing a Mapper that converts objects of type
| A to B, I needed the reverse. Co-Pilot generated it almost
| perfectly in an instant. This can easily save a minute or two,
| plus the thinking required. - For a scraper, I needed to add
| cookies from my browser into the request object. Basically, I
| pasted the cookie in a string, and typed `// add cookies`, and
| it generated the code to split the string, iterate over each
| cookie value and add it to the correct request field.
|
| So if a few of these cases can save 10 minutes in a month, I
| feel it's objectively worth it. Then subjectively, not having
| the headaches of 'dumb stuff'/boilerplate feels great, and I am
| glad to spend my energy on the actual hard stuff. I will sign
| up as soon as their sign up page lets me.
| jmkni wrote:
| > I've been using Copilot non-stop
|
| > I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo
|
| These two statments seem contradictory to me. Why are you using
| it 'non-stop' if it isn't even worth $10/month?
| fornowiamhere wrote:
| It looks like they used it "non-stop" on hobby projects to
| see what's capable of
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| My interpretation is that it's fun to use so they use it a
| lot but not altogether useful (eta: and/or necessary): they
| didn't miss it on work projects.
| kvetching wrote:
| At first, I read it as if he thinks it's worth way more.
| foerbert wrote:
| I don't think they are contradictory at all. Aside from the
| basic "it has value, just less than $10/month" option, they
| may also just be interested in the tech and are evaluating it
| in actual use, etc.
| raunak wrote:
| Not OP - I use it non-stop for boiler plate filling as well.
|
| I wouldn't use it for anything other than that, so I would
| say it's worth honestly at max $1/month.
| tedunangst wrote:
| $1 is worth what, one minute of your time? If you're using
| a tool that doesn't even save you one minute, why bother?
| presentation wrote:
| Most people don't make purchasing decisions based on the
| value they create but rather based on some ingrained
| assumptions about how expensive software is supposed to
| be. VSCode and many other complex pieces of software are
| free, autocomplete is built into my OS, and those
| subscription consumer software that does have a price
| usually are priced very low--so relative to those,
| $10/month feels like a lot (even though I hope that
| practically anything anyone makes the effort to subscribe
| to produces at least $10 of value for them).
|
| Some companies seem to be leaning into higher
| subscription pricing (Superhuman and Motion come to mind)
| and almost certainly produce far more value than their
| subscriptions cost if you ask me, but there's definitely
| a mental barrier to value based pricing to consumers, as
| well as the fact that with so many companies offering
| cheap/free software, the market isn't solely determined
| by value created but rather comparison against other
| software.
| xigoi wrote:
| What proportion of people are making $1 per minute?
| omginternets wrote:
| You overlooked an even bigger contradiction! Namely:
|
| > The biggest problem I've had is not that it doesn't write
| correctly, it's that it think it knows how and then produce
| good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic.
|
| I cannot rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
| that would provoke such a statement.
|
| EDIT: upon careful rereading, I think I misunderstood. The
| intended meaning is likely closer to: _the problem is less so
| that codepilot produces incorrect code and more so that its
| incorrect code appears correct at first glance._
|
| You have my sincerest apologies. I leave this thread intact
| as a testament to my hair-trigger snark.
| lkfsfldkjfslk wrote:
| My read was that it produces code that is correct in some
| circumstances, but is incorrect for the author's use case.
| omginternets wrote:
| I realize I misinterpreted the OP, but you've set me up
| for a snarky remark so perfectly that I can't resist.
| Please forgive me... here goes:
|
| > it produces code that is correct in some circumstances,
| but is incorrect for the author's use case.
|
| That's a mighty convoluted way of saying "incorrect code"
| ;)
|
| Phew! I feel better, now!
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| "This code would be absolutely correct were it in a
| different program trying to achieve a different result."
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| I won't rightly describe the confusion your post gives me.
| Nothing he says seems contradictory. It produces good
| looking code which upon further inspection has faulty
| logic.
|
| You would expect that from a program that copies a database
| of all the examples in the world (or whatever) and then
| just does an autocomplete without any kind of comprehension
| of what the problem is that is trying to be solved.
|
| No confusion or contradiction at all.
| omginternets wrote:
| So, the problem is that it produces incorrect code...
| karpierz wrote:
| Specifically, the problem is it produces _almost_ correct
| code, which is worse than incorrect code because it might
| fool you into trusting it.
| omginternets wrote:
| Quite. So we agree that this code is incorrect, and thus,
| that we have a contradiction on our hands.
|
| To be clear: we're in agreement that incorrect code that
| passes for correct at a glance is even worse than
| obviously-incorrect code.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| They gave it a fair shake, decided the price wouldn't be
| worth it. It's not inherently contradictory
|
| I would consider it contradictory if they decided to continue
| using it while paying that price _and_ unsatisfied
|
| It's a trial run and the value isn't there for them
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I've had Copilot enabled since early beta. I think it has
| saved me ... 15 minutes of typing in total? A few times it
| has caught on to a repeating pattern and filled a tedious bit
| of [({}{})] -style javascript correctly.
|
| Most of the things it does for me I could replace with a
| library of snippets if I could be bothered to set one up.
|
| Not really worth a monthly cost equivalent to, say, Disney+ -
| which I use tens of hours every month just by myself.
|
| If my employer paid for it, I wouldn't scoff at it, but I'm
| not paying a cent of my own money for it.
| evilduck wrote:
| GPT-3 and AI-enhanced code completion has had a ton of hype
| going on, up to and including claims that software
| development as a job is at existential risk. Using Copilot
| non-stop to investigate and understand why there's so much
| hype and coming away with the opinion that it's not worthy of
| $10/mo is not contradictory. Would you rather someone who
| _hasn 't_ used a product extensively make value claims?
| goatlover wrote:
| It's always like this with the latest AI. You would think
| people would learn, but nope same exaggerated claims every
| time.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The claims are sound. It's the technology that is usually
| not sound, or mature.
|
| But slowly enough many jobs are being automated, both
| with and without machine learning or whatever technique
| they are calling "AI" today.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| As a productivity booster I think it's worth more than $10.
|
| The licensing problems make it impossible to use at work so I
| won't use it for that.
|
| People need to be aware of the security risks of letting
| microsoft read all your code as it's sent to the servers
| copilot runs on. By my lights that's almost as big of a problem
| as licensing.
| jerf wrote:
| "how to put a sentence together describing the rules, it
| absolutely doesn't actually understand how "Chii" melds work"
|
| The more experience I get with GPT-3 type technologies, the
| more I would never let them near my code. It wasn't an intent
| of the technology per se, but it has proved to be very good at
| producing _superficially_ appealing output that can stand up
| not only to a quick scan, but to a moderately deep reading, but
| still falls apart on a more careful reading. At least when that
| 's in my prose it isn't cheerfully and plausibly charging the
| wrong customer or cheerfully and plausibly dereferencing a null
| pointer.
|
| Or to put it another way, it's an uncanny valley type effect.
| All props and kudos to the technologists who developed it, it's
| a legitimate step forward in technology, but at the same time
| it's almost the most dangerous possible iteration of it, where
| it's good enough to fool a human functioning at anything other
| than the highest level of attentiveness but not good enough to
| be correct all the time. See also, the dangers of _almost_
| self-driving cars; either be self-driving or don 't but don't
| expect halfway in between to work well.
| omginternets wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, but feel like it's
| ignoring the elephant in the room: writing code is not the
| bottleneck in need of optimization. Conceiving the solution
| is. Any time "saved" through Copilot and it's ilk is
| immediately nullified by having to check it's correctness.
| From there, the problem is worsened by the Frankensteinesque
| stitching together of disparate parts that you describe.
|
| I can't imagine how Copilot would save anything but a
| negligible amount of effort for someone who is actually
| thinking about what they're writing.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I swap between programming languages a _lot_ and copilot
| saves me a lot of "what's the syntax for for loops in
| language X again?" style friction, stuff with suggesting
| correct API usage patterns . It just saves on the friction
| of writing random scripts.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| Can Copilot write tests? That way it could test its own
| code and tweak it until it works.
|
| Of course, one would then ask how to verify tests. I
| suppose Copilot could write meta-tests - tests that verify
| other tests. That way it could test its own tests and tweak
| them until they work.
|
| Of course, one would then ask how to verify meta-tests. I
| suppose Copilot could write meta-meta-tests - tests that
| verify meta-tests. That way it could test its own meta-
| tests and tweak them until they work.
|
| Of course, one would then ask how to verify meta-meta-
| tests...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Can Copilot write tests? That way it could test its own
| code and tweak it until it works.
|
| Sure it can. But you can't rely on them being good. You
| have to read the tests carefully.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Isn't this how they managed to stop the Borg?
| frereubu wrote:
| Given my vintage, I'm thinking more about the noughts-
| and-crosses game in War Games from 1983.
| prepend wrote:
| You need an adversarial co-pilot to write tests for those
| tests so you would put the two AIs against each other to
| try to properly test.
| datatrashfire wrote:
| I can almost envision a future where human devs write
| tests, code generating frameworks build code from a spec.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| I think that's the underlying idea of Logic Programming.
| goatlover wrote:
| And UML diagrams.
| Hamcha wrote:
| I've used Copilot to help with writing verbose unit
| tests. It can do it as long as you keep an eye over it
| (basically like an autocomplete), it definitely cannot
| produce robust test cases on its own though. If you try
| to do that, it won't take "meta-tests" to figure out they
| don't look right.
| vosper wrote:
| > I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, but feel like
| it's ignoring the elephant in the room: writing code is not
| the bottleneck in need of optimization. Conceiving the
| solution is.
|
| I dunno about this. I know the received wisdom is that
| "writing the code isn't the hard part", but I think reality
| is more like "writing the code is only one of the hard
| parts". There's an awful lot of badly-written code, or code
| which is only partly correct, or only correct under some
| circumstances. The only way to make writing code not one of
| the hard parts is to specify 100% of the functionality,
| every corner case, and all test scenarios, before any code
| is written. And then you still have to verify that it was
| translated correctly into code, which I think we can all
| agree is another one of the hard parts!
|
| Conceiving the solution is hard, thinking of edge cases,
| what-ifs, and failure scenarios is hard, creating effective
| tests is hard, and writing the actual code understandably
| and correctly is also hard!
| omginternets wrote:
| Yes, I think you've more precisely articulated what I had
| in mind. The point stands, though: codepilot does not
| help with the hard part of the job. It solves a problem
| that only exists for people who aren't exercising care.
| zamfi wrote:
| I also agree that I'd never assume copilot is right when it
| blurts out code, and that "writing code" is not the hard
| part -- but I'd note three things I found from using
| copilot pretty intensively over the past year or so:
|
| 1. It has shifted some of the code-writing I do from
| generation to curation.
|
| Most of the time, I have to make some small change to one
| of the first options I get. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I
| get some cool idiomatic way of doing something that's still
| wrong, but inspires me to write something different than I
| originally planned. All of these are useful outcomes -- and
| unrelated to whether someone is "actually thinking about
| what they're writing".
|
| 2. It has changed my tolerance for writing redundant code,
| for the better.
|
| Like many programmers, I tend to optimize my code for
| readability first, and then other things later when I have
| more information. Sometimes, my desire for readability
| conflicts with my desire for code that avoids redundancy
| (e.g., "oh but if I put these three cases into an array I
| can just use a for loop and don't have to write out as much
| code" etc. etc.) -- and my old bias was avoiding redundancy
| more often than not. But copilot is _really great_ at
| generating code that has redundancy, which has often helped
| me write _more readable code_ in quite a few cases.
|
| 3. I refactor code way more now.
|
| In part this is because, given code that already works but
| is not ideal (e.g., needs to be broken into more functions,
| or needs extra context, or some critical piece needs to be
| abstracted), copilot does a _fantastic_ job at rewriting
| that code to fit new function prototypes or templates. IDEs
| can help with this task, for a few common types of
| refactoring, but copilot is way more flexible and I find
| myself much more willing to rewrite code because of it.
|
| Copilot is not what many people want it to be, in much the
| same way that Tesla's Autopilot is not what many people
| want it to be. But both do have their uses, and in general
| those uses fall into the category of "I, as human, get to
| watch and correct some things instead of having to generate
| all things." This can be very useful. (FWIW, it takes some
| time to adapt to this; I teach and mentor a lot and I found
| myself relying on those skills a ton when working with
| copilot.)
|
| We shouldn't discount this usefulness just because these
| systems don't also have other usefulness that we also want!
| TillE wrote:
| Part of the pitch is that it helps you learn new languages,
| which I do sort of buy.
|
| But yeah, the hard part of writing nontrivial software
| isn't typing code, it's the software architecture and
| design.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Right on the money.
|
| What I want is a copilot that finds errors ala spellcheck-
| esque. Did I miss an early return? For example in the code
| below def some_worker if
| disabled_via_feature_flag
| logger.info("skipping some_worker")
| some_potentially_hazardous_method_call()
|
| Right after the logger call I missed a return. A copilot
| could easily catch this. Invert the relationship. I don't
| need some boilerplate generator, I need a nitpicker that's
| smarter than a linter. I'm the smart thinker with a
| biological brain that is inattentive at times. Why is the
| computer trying to code and leaving mistake catching to me?
| It's backwards.
| rasz wrote:
| try PVS-Studio
| teawrecks wrote:
| If you have a sufficiently well defined solution to a
| problem, then you have the code. The next step is just to
| compile it into something a machine understands. In other
| words, the code IS the solution, there is no difference
| between the two.
| danachow wrote:
| Only for the most trivial problems. Having seen the same
| problem implemented both with a spaghetti ball of shit vs
| something well organized that can be easily read and
| maintained I'm going to hard disagree on this sentiment.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >I can't imagine how Copilot would save anything but a
| negligible amount of effort for someone who is actually
| thinking about what they're writing.
|
| since I have a right arm swelled up to twice normal size
| right now and it hurts to type for more than ten minutes
| (hopefully ok in a few days) I can imagine an advanced
| autocomplete being really useful for some disabilities.
| omginternets wrote:
| More so than, say, classical snippets, auto-complete, and
| speech-to-text?
|
| And pray tell, how much typing is required to go back and
| fix the incorrect code produced by copilot?
|
| P.S.: wishing you a speedy recovery!
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the person using co-pilot on all their hobby projects
| described it as working best as an advanced auto-
| complete, so I guess you should ask them that.
|
| I figure advanced auto-complete should not produce big
| blocks of code that are more likely to have logical
| errors in them, since the grandfather comment here
| suggested that problems show up when you generate larger
| blocks of code.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| this is consistent with the feedback from many of the
| users we have talked to as well (transparently I am with
| Tabnine). Long blocks of code are difficult to digest
| while short quick ones can be very quick AND easy to
| validate the logic.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Wow, it actually sounds like a great tool for someone who
| doesn't actually know how to program at all but still managed
| to get a programming job. Sounds like it could be literally
| years until they realize you don't know how to program and
| are using a GPT-3-type completer.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Copilot does a great job of example functions like
| "function that posts a tweet with the current time"
|
| It falls apart when writing actual code that exists in an
| app. I'm not convinced even the lowest junior dev could get
| away with not knowing programming.
| manimino wrote:
| Generated texts often sound very confident, even when they
| are totally incorrect.
|
| A humorous example: https://cookingflavr.com/should-you-feed-
| orioles-all-summer/
|
| Human pair programmers will signal when they're not sure
| about something. A code generator will not.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| when we first built Tabnine we had confidence percentages
| next to suggestions. Do you think this would help?
| jerf wrote:
| I had to log back in just to thank you for this link. I've
| encountered these sites before, and told people about them,
| but this is just such a perfect _chef 's kiss_ example.
| Sheer perfection.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > it has proved to be very good at producing superficially
| appealing output that can stand up not only to a quick scan,
| but to a moderately deep reading, but still falls apart on a
| more careful reading
|
| Huh, that's my experience with human-written texts and
| journalism in particular.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| To me it's no danger, since I read what it generates. If it's
| wrong I either correct it or write it from scratch.
|
| And I also write tests, which should catch bad logic.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I turned off copilot a week ago for the same reason. The code
| it generates _looks_ right but is usually wrong in really
| difficult to spot ways but things you'd never write yourself.
| cjauvin wrote:
| It's interesting to draw parallels between the way you describe
| it and the way more general large language models (LLMs, of
| which Copilot is in a sense, a specialized instance, applied to
| code, instead of general language) operate: they also always
| "know" how to answer any specific question, or how to complete
| any prompt, without any exception. A model which would be able
| to "show restraint", and "know when it doesn't know", would be
| a really impressive improvement to this technology in my
| opinion.
| visarga wrote:
| There are language models that have an internal search
| engine, they can copy/verify the facts they generate from the
| source. They are also easier to update, just refresh the
| search engine. Now you have to provide a collection of "true
| facts".
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Could you please link to some examples of such systems?
| Thanks in advance!
| threatofrain wrote:
| Github Copilot is on the fence for me between yes/no at $100
| per year. I agree that you should rarely if ever allow Copilot
| to write multiple lines, as your double-checking or debugging
| time is going to exceed your time savings -- the probability of
| good-looking but bad code is just that high right now. In order
| to experience a net time-win you'll likely want to be an
| intermediate at whatever you're doing.
|
| If it were $60 yearly it'd be an auto-yes for me.
| rexreed wrote:
| Your decision making delta is really $40 a year? How much is
| your time worth?
| threatofrain wrote:
| The time savings win is really that marginal. I'm not sure
| I can save more than 3 hours per year with Copilot. And
| this isn't saving 3 hours in a single week, this is saving
| a few seconds here and there accumulated over a year.
|
| Saving time with Copilot is itself a learning process and a
| probabilistic affair. Copilot can win you a few seconds at
| a time, but can easily set you back minutes if you aren't
| careful or experienced. It's the probability of a downward
| spike in time-win that makes it such a gamble. Such complex
| deals just turns on the cautious side of my brain.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Just to clarify: are you saying you'd pay $20 for an hour
| saved, but not $33.33 for an hour saved?
| threatofrain wrote:
| I'm saying that at $100 yearly I'm on the fence of maybe
| yes or no. At $60 yearly I'm auto-yes without having to
| think in rational terms. I guess I'm just not at that
| place in life where $100 is the tier in which I think
| emotionally.
|
| Also, if I magically knew that I could save you 3 hours
| yearly, but it were spread out over the course of a year,
| and that your savings would occasionally spike down into
| negative and then slowly climb up, I just wouldn't
| entertain such a complex offer at such low numbers.
| People pay insurance just to avoid such incidental
| downward spikes.
|
| Copilot's biggest limitation right now is that you can't
| dare to allow minutes of savings per day without inviting
| the risk of a severe spike in debugging time, the kind
| that wipes out all your savings. This means you cannot
| spike up.
| [deleted]
| craigkilgo wrote:
| Sharpe ratio too low
| hyperbovine wrote:
| You can justify almost any expenditure using this logic.
| Think marginally.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| I think "SAAS fatigue" is a thing that needs to be
| considered. The SAAS model is great for startups and
| companies seeking recurring revenue. But the modern
| developer stack now involves dozens of companies gunning
| for a $5-10/month slice of the pie.
|
| In isolation, most developers could easily afford the
| $10/month for copilot. But most developers are probably
| using the free tier for half a dozen services. So the
| question isn't "Can I afford copilot?", but rather "Does
| copilot provide more value than upgrading plans on some
| other service?". For example, if you are using the free
| tier on Slack, maybe upgrading to the paid tier so you can
| access the full chat history provides way more value than
| copilot.
|
| Also, another consideration is that $10 per month is
| certainly small. But I generally use software I purchase
| for multiple years. I would guess on average I use a piece
| of software for 3-5 years. If Copilot was offered for a
| single purchase price of $300-500, would you pay for it?
| Because that is likely how much you will spend over the
| lifetime of the subscription. For me, that price point is
| approaching the territory of professional tools like CAD
| software, Photo/video editing software, etc...
|
| I can certainly see why Copilot would be worth $10/month.
| But I also could see why someone might be uncomfortable
| with that.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > modern developer stack now involves dozens of companies
| gunning for a $5-10/month slice of the pie.
|
| Can you name most useful ones? So far my only
| subscription is Idea. I'm considering to try Copilot as
| I've heard many good things about it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Ngrok is a must have if you work with webhooks. Free tier
| is good but paid lets you have a fixed irl rather than
| having to update it daily.
| tasn wrote:
| Shameless plug: www.svix.com/play/
|
| Also gives you a fixed URL and is free, and there are
| quite a few other free tools out there.
| Hamcha wrote:
| 40$ can go a long way. In my personal scenario:
|
| - Money is worth more to me than the average US dev because
| I earn less than US developers, and therefore my time is
| definitely worth less.
|
| - I cannot use this for work at my current workplace and
| I'm willing to bet a lot of other companies aren't fine
| with it either. I'm not saving time where it makes me
| money, so I would classify as a luxury, not a tool
| (spending-wise).
| rexreed wrote:
| Here's how I think about SaaS investments. If it's
| something I want or am curious about, but doesn't really
| have a tangible ROI, I decide if it's worth my disposable
| income and disposable time. If I have neither disposable
| income nor disposable time, it's not worth it, no matter
| whether it's $5 or $500/mo. You see, even for $5/yr my
| time is worth MORE than that money and the cost doesn't
| make my time worth any more or less.
|
| If it has a tangible ROI, then I figure out how much my
| time is worth, I figure out how much time or other
| resource the SaaS app will save and then decide if it's
| worth the tradeoff. For example, I suck at graphic
| design, so a monthly $13/mo to Canva is worth it to me to
| save time, aggravation, and headache, not to mention
| improved quality of results. I know that I save myself
| much more in time than the $13/mo is worth.
|
| On the otherhand, I can't justify paying even $15/mo for
| a podcast transcription tool because I still have to
| spend dozens of hours checking the transcription and it
| doesn't save me any headache. So it's not worth it to me.
| It doesn't matter if it's $60/yr or $100/yr, my time is
| still worth the same. If it's not worth it at $60/yr ,
| it's not worth it at $100/yr.
|
| Maybe this thought process is different for others, but
| with so much SaaS out there, it's important to focus on
| what will drive high value. Incremental "auto-yes"
| spending at any price point can get you into trouble.
| toyg wrote:
| In the long run, I expect very few people will pay for a
| dedicated Copilot account. It will get bundled in some
| "development enterprise bundle", heavily discounted.
| Employees in medium and large shops will just receive it as
| standard, with their VS or Github paid licenses. Which means
| it will actually cost half the sticker price.
| esfandia wrote:
| So it's free for students... I wonder what consequences it will
| have for coding assignments and projects. At the minimum I hope
| it will also be free for instructors so they learn to know what
| to expect and how to design assignments that can't be auto-solved
| by Copilot.
| planb wrote:
| Anyone else using Copilot just as a glorified copy&paste helper?
| It's great for repetitive tasks, but I've yet to encounter a
| situation where it really helped me to write meaningful code. At
| least I'd expect it to work together with intellisense, so it
| does not propose stuff that will get a red underline right away.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| As Copilot is becoming generally available, this might be a good
| time to write a comprehensive comparison between the two leading
| AI assistants for software development Tabnine and Copilot by
| Microsoft. Details here are from our CEO and Founder Dror:
|
| Usually, I suggest that my team start with the user value and
| experience, but for this specific comparison, it's essential to
| start from the technology, as many of the product differences
| stem from the differences in approach, architecture, and
| technology choices. Microsoft and OpenAI view AI for software
| development almost as just another use case for GPT-3, the
| behemoth language model. Code is text, so they took their
| language model, fine-tuned it on code, and called the gargantuan
| 12-billion parameter AI model they got Codex.
|
| Copilot's architecture is monolithic: "one model to rule them
| all." It is also completely centralized - only Microsoft can
| train the model, and only Microsoft can host the model due to the
| enormous amount of computing resources required for training and
| inference.
|
| Tabnine, after comprehensively evaluating models of different
| sizes, favors individualized language models working in concert.
| Why? Because code prediction is, in fact, a set of distinct sub-
| problems which doesn't lend itself to the monolithic model
| approach. For instance: generating the full code of a function in
| Python based on name and generating the suffix of a line of code
| in Rust are two problems Tabnine solves well, but the AI model
| that best fits every such task is different. We found that a
| combination of specialized models dramatically increases the
| precision and length of suggestions for our 1M+ users.
|
| A big advantage of Tabnine's approach is that it can use the
| right tool for any code prediction task, and for most purposes,
| our smaller models give great predictions quickly and
| efficiently. Better yet, most of our models can be run with
| inexpensive hardware.
|
| Now that we understand the principal difference between
| Microsoft's huge monolith and Tabnine's multitude of smaller
| models, we can explore the differences between the products:
|
| First, kind of code suggestions. Copilot queries the model
| relatively infrequently and suggests a snippet or a full line of
| code. Copilot does not suggest code in the middle of the line, as
| its AI model is not best suited for this purpose. Similarly,
| Tabnine Pro also suggests full snippets or lines of code, but
| since Tabnine also uses smaller and highly efficient AI models,
| it queries the model while typing. As a user, it means the AI
| flows with you, even when you deviate from the code it originally
| suggested The result is that the frequency of use - and the
| number of code suggestions accepted - is much higher when using
| Tabnine. An astounding number of users accept more than 100
| suggestions daily.
|
| Second, ability to train the model. Copilot uses one universal AI
| model, which means that every user is getting the same generic
| assistance based on an "average of GitHub", regardless of the
| project they're working on. Tabnine can train a private AI model
| on the specific code from customers' GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket
| repositories and thus adjust the suggestions to the project-
| specific code and infrastructure. Training on customer code is
| possible because Tabnine is modular, enabling the creation of
| private customized copies. Tabnine "democratizes" AI model
| creation, making it easy for teams to train their own specific AI
| models, dramatically improving value for their organization.
|
| Third, Code security and privacy. There are a few aspects of
| this. Users cannot train or run the Copilot model. The single
| model is always hosted by Microsoft. Every Copilot user is
| sending their code to Microsoft; not some of the code, and not
| obfuscated - all of it. With Tabnine, users can choose where to
| run the model: on the Tabnine cloud, locally on the developer
| machine, or on a self-hosted server (with Tabnine Enterprise).
| This is possible because Tabnine has AI models that can run
| efficiently with moderate hardware requirements. This means that,
| in contrast to Copilot, developers can use Tabnine inside their
| firewall without sending any code to the internet. In addition,
| Tabnine makes a firm and unambiguous commitment that no code the
| user writes is used to train our model. We don't send to our
| servers any information about the code that the user writes and
| the suggestions they're receiving or accepting.
|
| Fourth, commercial terms. Microsoft currently offers Copilot only
| as a commercial product for developers, without a free plan
| (beyond a free trial) or organizational purchase. Tabnine has a
| great free plan and charges for premium features such as longer
| code completions and private models trained on customers' code.
| We charge a monthly/annual subscription fee per number of users.
| All our plans fit organizational requirements.
|
| Philosophically, Copilot is more of a walled garden where
| Microsoft controls everything. Copilot users are somewhat
| subjects in Microsoft's kingdom. Tabnine's customers can train
| the AI models, run them, configure the suggestions, and be in
| control of their AI.
|
| In sum: both products are great; you're welcome to try (Tabnine
| Pro) and see which one you prefer. for professional programmers,
| Tabnine offers in-flow completions, the ability to adapt the AI
| to their code, and superior code privacy and security.
|
| For those who want to try Tabnine Pro, here's a coupon for one
| month free
| https://tabnine.com/pricing?promotionCode=TWITTER1MFREE
|
| Also, here's a detailed comparison table of Tabnine vs Copilot
| https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
| netr0ute wrote:
| I can't tell if I can get it for free or not other than that
| vague statement about subscriptions.
| gabagool wrote:
| > We're making GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that
| suggests code in your editor, generally available to all
| developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. It will also be
| free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular
| open source projects.
|
| > Do you want to start using GitHub Copilot today? Get started
| with a 60-day free trial, and check out our pricing plans. It's
| free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular
| open source software.
|
| Seems pretty clear. If you're willing to do your own research
| (aka going to the CoPilot site): https://github.com/github-
| copilot/tp_signup, you'll see that pricing reflected here as
| well as the date when the free period ends, which is August
| 22nd.
| netr0ute wrote:
| I have an open source project. Do I qualify or not other than
| guessing at what appears on the billing screen
| exyi wrote:
| Yea, I also have no idea... They could be more specific
| what qualifies as popular os project
| BrandonJung wrote:
| Tabnine has been working in this space for more than 5 years and
| we would concur with much of the sentiment here on the importance
| of being able to adjust the length of the suggestions and
| ensuring the model is trained on ONLY fully permissive code.
|
| TLDR: Tabnine advantages vs Copilot 1. Can run locally 2. As-you-
| type suggestions (mid-line) 3. Private model based on your code
| 4. Free plan available
|
| Read more at https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
| freedomben wrote:
| Does copilot learn from and suggest patterns in the same codebase
| that you're working, or does it just pull from the huge pool of
| projects on GH?
|
| How well does copilot help with languages like Elixir that are
| less common? WIth TypeScript it's been remarkable, but that's one
| of the most popular and surely very familiar to devs and GH, so I
| would expect less popular like Elixir to not perform as well.
|
| Does copilot work for shell scripts?
|
| I'm a vim person and don't want to use VS code. Is copilot worth
| the hassle to get installed into vim?
| TaylorPhebillo wrote:
| I've played with it a little bit:
|
| Copilot did pretty poorly when I tried using it with Julia- it
| kept suggesting Python code. I suspect it would do something
| similar in Elixir.
|
| I'm also a vim person who doesn't want to use VS code, but I've
| gotten more than enough value to get into my first IDE (with
| vim keybindings). A lot of tedious C++ code is getting
| correctly auto-generated.
| Otek wrote:
| It has first class Neovim support, possibly a better
| alternative for Vim person than any IDE.
| synergy20 wrote:
| I don't think c++ is even on their supported language? the
| copilot page lists python,js,ts,ruby,go.
| corrral wrote:
| > Does copilot work for shell scripts?
|
| Oh wow--a language where there are: 20 ways to do something,
| three of them are common, but only three _others_ actually
| behave, by any standard, correctly, while being among the
| least-common in public code, seems like exactly the wrong kind
| of thing to use this for.
|
| Shell doesn't need machine-learning autocomplete trained on
| existing shell scripts, it needs a hand-built aggressive
| linter.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > Shell doesn't need machine-learning autocomplete trained on
| existing shell scripts, it needs a hand-built aggressive
| linter.
|
| Something like https://www.shellcheck.net/?
| Kiro wrote:
| It doesn't learn from your codebase but it uses the context of
| your code so any pattern will be picked up.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| ... and variable name spelling mistakes!
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| which is actually good because then i just right click the
| variable in my IDE and then click "refactor > rename" and
| i'm done
| bil7 wrote:
| > suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working
|
| Sometimes, with variable results. I think I've only observed it
| guess patterns from the current directory
|
| > Does copilot work for shell scripts?
|
| Yes, it gave me this earlier today while editing my .zshrc:
| # kill a process on a given port killport() {
| lsof -i :$1 | awk 'NR!=1 {print $2}' | xargs kill }
| aviraldg wrote:
| Can't wait for someone to integrate this into a shell. Does
| anyone know if such a project exists?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| "Copilot, how do I fork in a shell?" :() {
| :|: } :&
|
| Thanks copil _[user disconnected]_.
| davidbarker wrote:
| Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but Warp (a
| new terminal client) has "AI Code Search" built in that's
| powered by GPT-3. Quite useful for someone like me who
| tends to avoid the terminal when I can.
|
| https://www.warp.dev
|
| https://docs.warp.dev/features/ai-command-search
| darubberduckie wrote:
| There's this cool blog on them testing it out against
| popular git commands:
|
| https://www.warp.dev/blog/replace-git-cheat-sheet-ai-
| command...
| nomel wrote:
| Integrating into a shell, for immediate execution, seems
| very very dangerous. You still need to carefully
| test/scrutinize everything that comes from copilot.
| [deleted]
| jwilk wrote:
| lsof supports machine-readable mode: lsof -i
| ":$1" -Fp | tr -d p
| mholm wrote:
| Copilot seems to learn from elsewhere in my codebase, and is
| able to utilize patterns I've used elsewhere in the codebase
| when prompted in a different file. Isn't perfect, but it saves
| a ton of time.
|
| My primary usage is shell scripts, as it seems to struggle on
| complex code, while shell scripts are typically a lot of simple
| code.
| fartcannon wrote:
| It would be nice if people stopped giving Microsoft all their
| code to use to then sell back to them.
|
| Since this is derived from code Microsoft did not write, or ask
| permission to use, it should be at the very least free to use.
| Otek wrote:
| People can do whatever they want with their code, and give it
| to whoever they want
| BrandonJung wrote:
| what about those that have code on GitHub that is source
| available but not licensed for reuse?
| jwilk wrote:
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825661
| cal85 wrote:
| I'm baffled by everyone questioning whether it's worth $10/month.
|
| I'm certain Copilot gives me more than a 2% productivity boost.
| That's a conservative estimate (I wouldn't be surprised if it's
| more like 10-15%). If you consider 2% of what a developer makes
| each month, it comes to a lot more than $10. Easily 20-30 times
| more depending on your level.
|
| And by the way, I don't particularly love using Copilot. It can
| be annoying now I'm over the honeymoon period. But I think it's
| pretty clear it speeds me up by a noticeable margin, and time is
| money.
| pcj-github wrote:
| The free thing for (a few) open-source maintainers seems
| needlessly complicated... Who should qualify is non-transparent.
| They'd have been better off just charging everyone for it. Not an
| instant buy for me for the moment. Often it works well, but it
| also frequently takes time to correct/sort-out the suggestions.
| It might in fact be making me dumber as I wait for a suggestion
| rather than thinking it out.
| butz wrote:
| Should we add a badge or something, indicating that project is
| using code generated by machine?
| [deleted]
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Does Copilot already display the licenses of the code it might
| insert/suggest, or assure the developer, that the
| inserted/suggested code is not a verbatim copy of existing code?
| How can developers be sure, that they are not violating licenses
| by using Copilot?
| lelandfe wrote:
| Previously discussed at length here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27773157
|
| > or assure the developer, that the inserted/suggested code is
| not a verbatim copy of existing code
|
| No, it does not do that.
|
| > How can developers be sure, that they are not violating
| licenses by using Copilot
|
| There are no clear answers.
| nimbius wrote:
| from Microsofts standpoint the shot across the bow for open
| source licenses is clear: do you have enough lawyers and
| experts to convince a gerontocracy of the legislative branch
| of the US government that its not "okay because its AI"
| because if you dont, then thanks for the code nerd.
| [deleted]
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Idk if MS is on the safe here. There's a straightforward
| legal theory for suing, and also parties such as EFF and
| others with a war chest and the determination to clarify
| this. Does MS provide indemnification to Copilot
| customers/users if those are sued by others? My advice
| would be to stay clear of Copilot.
| Spivak wrote:
| If you think the US doesn't have enough existing legal
| theory on _copyright_ to litigate this then you 're crazy.
| It will be on MS to show that it isn't infringement.
| LegitShady wrote:
| it sounds like a good basis for a class action lawsuit,
| where the class are the people who own the licensed code
| whose license microsoft is ignoring.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| The fact that GitHub is now _charging_ for this feature smells
| like a lawsuit waiting to happen. They 're now literally
| profiting from potentially stolen GPL code.
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| My sincere question is what if a developer looks at some GPL
| code, and then that developer encounters a situation in a
| corporate project where-in he uses the GPL code from memory, is
| that already a violation?
|
| So to avoid a violation a developer needs to perform a mind-
| wipe?
| hourago wrote:
| > that developer encounters a situation in a corporate
| project where-in he uses the GPL code from memory
|
| If you draw Micky Mouse from memory, Disney still owns the
| copyright.
| [deleted]
| bladegash wrote:
| I'd be even more curious (more philosophically than anything)
| as to who is liable for the mishap if Copilot suggests
| something that ends up violating a license. Is it the
| developer? The developer's company? GitHub? Maybe the "AI" is
| the ultimate scapegoat ("we can't be liable for what our
| helpful robot decides to do")!
| theplumber wrote:
| It's the developer. Just because you copy/paste something
| you find on SO or Google or Githib doesn't absolve you of
| copyright infridgements
| ska wrote:
| In most jurisdictions, if the developer is an employee
| the legal liability is with the company.
| carschno wrote:
| The details might differ per country, but my non-lawyer
| intuition clearly says that you are responsible for the
| code you publish, no matter what tool has suggested it.
| bladegash wrote:
| I'm sure at the end of the day that would be the case in
| most sane legal systems. However, it does seem almost
| impractical in reality for anyone to do anything about it
| (kind of like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb making something so
| commonplace so quickly that the regulations they broke
| became meaningless).
| [deleted]
| sp332 wrote:
| It's arguable. Copyright cares a lot about provenance,
| transformation, and commercial consequences. It all comes
| down to what you can afford to litigate. Some projects go to
| extreme lengths, like Wine not accepting code from anyone who
| has seen leaked Windows sources.
| kweingar wrote:
| If the code is nontrivial, then yes, it is a violation. To be
| in compliance, you need to write your own code.
|
| If I am writing a novel and I copy a section verbatim from
| another novel, I am infringing on the other novelist's
| copyright, regardless of whether I wrote it from memory or
| not.
|
| And this makes sense. For a trivial operation, there might be
| only one way to write the code. That's not copyright
| infringement, just like you're not infringing on an author's
| copyright by occasionally writing a sentence that was similar
| to theirs. For a nontrivial operation, you can easily write
| your own code without copying someone else's work.
|
| Remember also that you can use others' _ideas_. Copyright
| only cares about the code itself. If there 's a clever trick
| that you've seen someone use, you're free to use the same
| clever trick as long as 1) they didn't patent it and 2)
| you're not actually copying their code
| danuker wrote:
| fair use != trivial
| duxup wrote:
| From my experience with it the suggestions are so generic it's
| hard to imagine anyone has a legit license to
| "formatDateISO....() {code here}".
|
| Maybe I'm using it wrong but I've hardly seen it pump out a
| mass volume of code.
| bladegash wrote:
| Nope, have had the same experience as you and am of a similar
| opinion!
| lelandfe wrote:
| You really only need one example to offset this anecdote, so
| here you are: https://mobile.twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/141
| 0886329924194...
|
| Copyright violations are a genuine concern from the outputted
| code, GitHub themselves have admitted it may emit raw
| training data rarely.
| natefinch wrote:
| There is logic to ensure that copilot does not emit exact
| duplicates of code in the training set... but that logic is
| significantly newer than that tweet.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Link? I couldn't find anything "significantly newer" than
| 7/2/21 (though I'm sure GitHub is doing a lot here). They
| had this blog post 6/30/21 regarding efforts on avoiding
| raw code: https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-
| research-recit.... They concluded:
|
| > _We will both continue to work on decreasing rates of
| recitation, as well as making its detection more
| precise._
| natefinch wrote:
| Source: I work on the copilot team.
| hnbad wrote:
| Was that decision informed by legal or product? Because
| derivative works are still derivitative works even if you
| don't replicate the original verbatim.
| natefinch wrote:
| I mean, it was informed by both, but basically everyone
| thinks it's a good idea.
| [deleted]
| injidup wrote:
| From the FAQ
|
| """ We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare
| instances where a GitHub Copilot suggestion contains code that
| matches public code on GitHub. You have the choice to turn that
| filter on or off during setup. With the filter on, GitHub
| Copilot checks code suggestions with its surrounding code for
| matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace) against public
| code on GitHub of about 150 characters. If there is a match,
| the suggestion will not be shown to you. We plan on continuing
| to evolve this approach and welcome feedback and comment. """
| lucideer wrote:
| > _the rare instances_
|
| That's a bold statement considering how easy it was for
| testers to quickly find examples of this in initial testing.
|
| > _against public code on GitHub_
|
| ... and how some of those examples found were from code not
| hosted on Github.
|
| Ultimately though, what matters here is not whether this is
| true but whether it's plausible enough for legal departments
| in companies buy it.
| lelandfe wrote:
| https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-
| recit...
|
| > _That corresponds to one recitation event every 10 user
| weeks_
|
| > _This investigation demonstrates that GitHub Copilot can
| quote a body of code verbatim, yet it rarely does so, and
| when it does, it mostly quotes code that everybody quotes,
| typically at the beginning of a file, as if to break the
| ice_
|
| A year old post now, YMMV.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| Do you recall/have a link to such examples? Would be
| interesting to try them again with the filter.
|
| The example I can remember was Carmack's* quick square root
| - but I'd probably call that "folk code" given it was
| passed down/altered before being misattributed to the Quake
| dev, and appears in hundreds of Github repos (many with
| permissive licenses like WTFPL, so a well-intentioned human
| may do the same).
| pydry wrote:
| I remember reading something like this just before somebody
| proved that it would recite Carmack's square root algorithm
| word for word.
| bladegash wrote:
| Others may have a different experience, but I have never seen
| Copilot offer suggestions anywhere near complicated/unique
| enough for it to matter.
|
| That's not a knock on Copilot, I think it's a great product and
| I happily subscribed today after using it the last few months!
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's my experience too. It's a fancy autocomplete that works
| about 30% of the time for me, I'm not actually sure I'm
| saving time by using it.
| hoosieree wrote:
| So... is there a watermark like on Dall-E so I can easily tell
| Copilot did my students' work for them?
| tgv wrote:
| The same as always: give an exam on paper, and forbid the use
| of devices. Because I can tell you (with high probability) that
| many of your students already have their homework done by
| somebody else.
| suyash wrote:
| It is just a matter of time before IDE's will have this
| capability built in for free.
| Otek wrote:
| Possibly but I think we're talking years if not decades.
| nikolay wrote:
| $10/mo? No way! Make it $4.95 and you'll get my money!
| 734129837261 wrote:
| It has saved me a lot of time writing trivial shit that I usually
| have to copy/paste from the internet anyway. Is it worth $10 per
| month? I dunno. But they get me a kick-ass IDE, I get to store my
| project (privately) for free, and they save me a lot of time.
|
| So I'm probably taking it.
| elashri wrote:
| I really like Github copilot. It is very useful for me because I
| wrote a lot of repeated logic chucks of code. I do research in
| HEP and if you know how ROOT CERN work then you can realize how
| useful copilot could be for that only.
|
| I think I myself teached copilot a lot of things about
| supersymmetry :)
| iosjunkie wrote:
| Wild guess: The pricing is such that when big enterprise
| contracts are signed, they can throw in Copilot, claiming extra
| value for the whole package.
| xfactor973 wrote:
| I'd pay for the service if the model was: I'll pay you when it's
| right and you refund me some amount every time copilot is wrong
| and I have to delete the entire block. It's good for small
| boilerplate stuff but that seems to be the limit. The attempts it
| makes are more complex code are really bad and I have to manually
| check it very closely to ensure it's right. I like the
| boilerplate boost but it's not worth $10/month to me.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Cowboy programmers rejoice.
| polyterative wrote:
| I love it and probably will buy it
| TedShiller wrote:
| It works great for absolutely trivial stuff. Doesn't work at all
| for any complex stuff. From there you can figure out the value
| proposition.
| alfor wrote:
| It is awesome for me (diving back into Django after a long pause)
|
| It seem to understand the common boilerplates things in Django
| that always annoyed me and type them for me. It understand the
| structure and adapt them to my code: imports, connection between
| modules, etc.
|
| For sure, you need to be carefull with it.
| msoad wrote:
| I've been using Copilot for a while now. I'm lucky that I don't
| have to pay moving forward but I would totally pay $10/mo for
| this. When writing tests, this thing works so well that it saves
| me 10-20% time writing code so $10 is nothing.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > I'm lucky that I don't have to pay moving forward but I would
| totally pay $10/mo for this.
|
| How? I was in beta but looks like I'm kicked out. I also
| verified my student status but get prompted to pay. Are you a
| maintainer? Have you verified that you have access?
| LionTamer wrote:
| I am not sure the exact logistics of access (I'm also a
| student so I will probably look into trying to get access
| when I have a chance), but in the blog post with the original
| announcement > It will also be free to use for verified
| students
| xd1936 wrote:
| I _think_ a coupon code or something will eventually be
| available on the Github Student Pack website[1]. No clear
| answer yet if it'll be available for Teachers[2] as well.
|
| 1. https://education.github.com/pack
|
| 2. https://education.github.com/teachers
| quartzic wrote:
| I didn't see the student license at first, but after re-
| verifying my educational status, I got it:
| https://i.quartzic.co/yIoSJFfH
| msoad wrote:
| I'm a maintainer of a large open source project
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Copilot has been _fun_ , but I don't think it's really increased
| my productivity. To me it seems like it's not quite ready, but
| I'm excited to see what it's like in 5 years.
| swah wrote:
| I even let it write some comments in portuguese...
| brunoqc wrote:
| I didn't really mind that copilot is using everyone's code
| without attribution, but maybe not if they charge for it.
| mg wrote:
| Is there a way to try it online or on Debian running in a docker
| container?
|
| Preferably, I would like to try it in Vim. But anything that I
| can run in a container would be ok.
| lancesells wrote:
| I'll be honest I love the technology involved in this product but
| I hate that it's another aspect of monetizing the efforts and
| humanity of millions of people.
|
| It's incredible that we're able to do these things but awful at
| the same time since this data was / is not theirs. Same as
| something like Dall-E.
| eezurr wrote:
| Im sure from Microsoft's POV is that they are charging you for
| maintaining and operating co-pilot (servers, admin, etc), not
| charging you for the tool itself.
| cube00 wrote:
| _> monetizing the efforts_
|
| ...and not compensating (or even attributing as required by the
| licenses) the authors for it.
| natefinch wrote:
| It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm
| to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go
| use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with
| your own variables and types and context, are you breaking
| GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned
| about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you
| write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, all
| that code has to be GPL'd.
|
| Copilot learns the "shape" of code. Common patterns and
| algorithms, etc. You can't copyright an algorithm.
| hnbad wrote:
| If you decompile runtime bytecode and assign your own
| variable names, does the copyright of the original source
| code no longer apply?
|
| If you trace a picture and use it in your work of art, does
| the copyright of the original picture no longer apply?
|
| If you copy a tune but set it to new instruments, does the
| copyright of the original tune no longer apply?
|
| Sampling is a legal minefield in music, why would it become
| less of a minefield in code just because you've automated
| it? So far the best attempt at an answer about the legal
| issue of Copilot I've seen was that it's "not technically
| violating copyright", which honestly is not very reassuring
| and extremely morally inconsistent for a company built by a
| guy[0] who is philosophically invested enough in
| intellectual property as the pillar of human society to
| write An Open Letter To Hobbyists and use his Foundation to
| convince entire governments of adhering to IP laws instead
| of allowing the mass production of vaccines and medicine.
|
| [0]: Yeah, I know that he no longer serves an active role
| in the company but this was very much a founding ethos and
| this is at least a fair bit hypocritical.
| natefinch wrote:
| If you teach someone about music theory by listening to
| Stairway to Heaven, and then they write their own song
| that starts with an A minor chord... are they violating
| copyright of Stairway to Heaven?
|
| Copilot isn't sampling. Sampling is literally copying
| snippets of someone else's music and putting it into your
| music. Copilot doesn't do that. There's no giant database
| of text that it just slurps suggestions out of.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Personally, I'm more concerned about google using emails
| from gmail to suggest what to write.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| 10$/mo is pretty steep for something that gives you bad info 90%
| of the time, I will def be disabling. I was hoping for maybe
| 1-2$/mo, it's just a small addon feature after all
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I have been using CoPilot for about 5 months. For Python and
| JavaScript (I am not much of a JavaScript developer - not a
| primary language for me) I found that it is very worthwhile. It
| is easy to not accept generated code, or tweak and test generated
| code.
|
| I recently started a 100% Common Lisp job and it does not work
| nearly as well for Common Lisp. A lot of generated code is Emacs
| Lisp.
|
| Two months ago I would have signed up for a payed account with no
| hesitation, but I need to re-evaluate it with Common Lisp again.
| BTW, I happily pay OpenAI for GPT-3 APIs instead of using it for
| free. For NLP work, OpenAI's APIs have high value to me.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I've been using Copilot for a few months and...
|
| Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most
| common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it.
|
| Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder.
|
| And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes
| in the code it proposes.
|
| But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a
| month (especially with a developer salary). :insert shut up and
| take my money gif:
|
| It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test
| cases; it's great as an autocomplete on steroids that completes
| entire lines + fills in all arguments, instead of just a single
| identifier; it's great for quickly writing nice contextual error
| messages (especially useful for Go developers and the constant
| errors.Wrap, Copilot is really good at writing meaningful error
| messages there); and it's also great for technical documentation,
| as it's able to autocomplete markdown (and it does it
| surprisingly well).
|
| Overall, I definitely wouldn't want to go back to writing code
| without it. It just takes care of most of the mundane and obvious
| code for you, so you can take care of the interesting bits. It's
| like having the stereotypical "intern" as an associate built-in
| to your editor.
|
| And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just
| surprising how good of a suggestion it can make.
|
| It's also ridiculously flexible. When I start writing graphs in
| ASCII (cause I'm just quickly writing something down in a scratch
| file) it'll actually understand what I'm doing and start
| autocompleting textual nodes in that ASCII graph.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just
| surprising how good of a suggestion it can make.
|
| I've had this experience too. Usually it's meh, but at one
| point it wrote an ENTIRE function by itself and it was correct.
| IT WAS CORRECT! And it wasn't some dumb boilerplate
| initialization either, it was actual logic with some loops. The
| context awareness with it is off the charts sometimes.
|
| Regardless I find that while it's good for the generic python
| stuff I do in my free time, for the stuff I'm actually paid
| for? Basically useless since it's too niche. So not exactly
| worth the investment for me.
| alana314 wrote:
| Copilot has been amazing for me too. It's gotten to the point
| where I want similar smart autocomplete features in other
| software, such as spreadsheets or doing music in my DAW. I
| think those will come too eventually.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| $10/mo is fine. I pay at least $10/mo for JetBrains products.
|
| However I wish there was more competition. Github could rescind
| access to Copilot or charge $40/mo or it could slow down because
| their cloud is overloaded with new users, and I would be out of
| luck.
|
| Tabnine and Kite are alternatives but I've heard they don't work
| nearly as well. I wish there were similarly-effective
| alternatives which charge similar rates for cloud hosting /
| profit, but open-source their datasets and algorithms, and just
| generally provide a fallback if Copilot's quality ever goes down.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| copilot actually pushed Kite out of business but I am here at
| Tabnine and we have been doing great. MSFT is always tough to
| compete with but I did it at GitLab before and I think with our
| strong take on personalized models, ability to run anywhere
| (local, cloud or even you VPC), all while respecting code and
| licensing.
|
| https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
| sn0wtrooper wrote:
| I was a beta tester and just got kicked out. This explains why it
| happened.
| lampe3 wrote:
| So I was using copilot for a long time.
|
| 10$/Mo. Is way to much for what you get.
|
| I mostly write js/ts code.
|
| The suggestion feature / auto-complete feature is wonky at best
| and leads to bugs or just bad code in the worst case.
|
| Even when you write comments or have a function like `addOne` and
| you want to add `subtractOne` it will not get it right a lot of
| times.
|
| Then you have the cases were it throw 50 or more lines code at
| you for something very simple.
|
| Catching errors or error handling is basically non existing.
|
| I tried it for writing tests. It bad. It does not help at all.
|
| I uninstalled and after some hours of work I don't really miss
| it.
| fswd wrote:
| Anyone know where I can find the source code for the extension
| itself? Thanks
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I use Copilot for .NET. It's useful to generate bits of code like
| methods calls by repeating what I've previously done and changing
| variable names and types. It's a kind of bit smarter
| Intellisense.
|
| I can't use it to generate longer chunks of code like methods or
| functions, because it will do it a bit wrong and I loose time to
| correct it.
|
| It can somehow generate correct and fitting code, but it takes
| multiple tries and writing comments in which you describe
| exactly, with lots of details what you want to do. At that point
| I'm better off writing the code myself.
|
| However, if the method should be small like VerifyIfNumberIsEven,
| it does a good job.
|
| Probably I would pay 10$ for it.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I like it but I'm not sure about $10/month.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| I haven't used Copilot extensively, only for fun. But I find it
| interesting that people are questioning the price.
|
| Given that the cost of a software engineer's time is so high,
| $10/mo. seems very reasonable if Copilot saves you more than that
| in time per month. So in a vacuum assuming all dollars are spent
| with equal productivity, if I take the equivalent of $1000/mo. in
| time writing boilerplate, and I can reduce that to even $989 with
| Copilot, it becomes a good deal.
| john_g wrote:
| I found GitHub copilot an interesting heuristic on how expressive
| the programming language / framework you are using is.
|
| It is very useful for things that I would call boilerplate, e.g.
| you have almost duplicated code (say in a view and a controller)
| and need to copy from one to the other.
|
| It is annoyingly bad for autocompleting an api as it tends to be
| slightly (and plausibly) wrong.
|
| I haven't found it very useful for anything else.
|
| Working on a project where I have to do lots of the first makes
| me sad, so I tend to try to avoid those projects - but if I was
| forced to for some reason it would be worth $10 a month. However,
| if enough of the programming I did could be helped by github
| copilot for it to be worth that much I would start to get worried
| I was working on the wrong sort of problems and try to move into
| something different.
| mrsmee89 wrote:
| I don't think this is worth 10$ a month and I hope they come out
| with a free tier at some point. In my experience copilot is
| fantastic for autocomplete.
|
| Probably the best autocomplete I've ever used across multiple
| languages but it's not reliable at all for the more complex tasks
| that their marketing makes it seem it's good at.
| wdb wrote:
| I wish there something similar but than for good codereviews of
| PRs :)
| grezql wrote:
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I hope I never again have to work on a codebase/language where
| copilot would be worth subscribing to.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It's quite hilarious to see both the wide-eyed futurists and
| unabashed Luddites in this thread.
| WithinReason wrote:
| You must only work with languages that you just invented.
| baby wrote:
| What does that even mean? It's like saying, "I would hate
| working on a codebase where autocomplete would help me". It's
| such a general statement.
| [deleted]
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Unnecessary hate. I used it a while ago while writing some
| complex aggregation and grouping of data. It was pretty painful
| to write until I tried with Copilot and the result is both
| accurate and easy to read. I wrote unit tests and it's been
| fine ever since. This is but one example of the value of it.
|
| I am sure some of the typical cynicism here will turn this into
| a protracted argument of "well maybe you shouldn't be a shit
| developer and you would be able to fit all the complexity in
| your head" but whatever.
| haolez wrote:
| I don't think the parent was criticizing Co-pilot. The point
| was that codebases that need a lot of boiler plate and
| predictable code are not fun to work with.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| Nonsense. I've been using it to write tests, and it does a
| phenomenal job. If I write out the positive case, it will
| suggest the negative case and help me through the various
| permutations. This has by-far been the most useful part of co-
| pilot so far.
|
| It's nothing I couldn't do myself, but just makes my job that
| much easier and quicker
| duxup wrote:
| I wish there was a "hobbyist / home account" pricing option.
|
| I'll miss it for personal stuff but I'm not paying $10 a month
| just for my personal projects at home.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled.
|
| To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity
| gain in years, but I want it FREE".
|
| Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo
| is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could
| get.
|
| And no. They don't owe you anything.
|
| In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less
| directly provide your IDE (for free). So this idea that they owe
| you something needs to be reassessed.
|
| CoPilot is easily worth it and I think this is fair. I actually
| welcome it because I was nervous it might be like 80.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| They provide VSCode as a free IDE because if they didn't,
| someone else would have, and in turn received all of the data
| that comes along with it. Let's not pretend Microsoft created
| VSCode out of the kindness of its heart
| candiddevmike wrote:
| That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin
| with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has
| merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.
| neysofu wrote:
| Why should the money go the to code authors in the first
| place? All training data is available under permissive
| licenses. Assuming you're not overfitting on specific code
| sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm
| aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs
| fixing), I'd say this is fair play.
| Macha wrote:
| Unless something has changed, the training data also
| includes copyleft code, not just permissively licensed code
| visarga wrote:
| Regarding the training of the model - I don't think a
| copyright can restrict reading, and training is reading,
| not distributing any original data.
|
| About deploying the model - it just needs to filter out
| verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original,
| unattributable code. That can be done by hashing ngrams
| and a bloom filter. The vast majority of code generated
| by Codex is original anyway.
|
| By the way, Codex is good for many other tasks, like,
| parsing the fields of a receipt, or extracting the
| summary of an email, or generating baby names, it's an
| all purpose NLP tool. Just call it like a function. Code
| completion is just one thing it does. It talks pretty
| great English, can compose poems.
| CryZe wrote:
| > it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so
| it only outputs original, unattributable code.
|
| That's a setting now.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _All training data is available under permissive
| licenses. Assuming you 're not overfitting on specific code
| sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm
| aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs
| fixing), I'd say this is fair play._
|
| Copilot isn't honoring the license, so why does it matter
| whether it was under a restrictive or permissive license?
| nojito wrote:
| The people who designed the model are almost certainly paid
| by microsoft.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| That's how any business product works. Whenever a company
| releases a new product, the income doesn't go to the
| employees; It goes to the company, who will then pay those
| employees.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Except GitHub isn't paying the authors of the original
| source code?
| johnfn wrote:
| What? Should I have to reimburse the author of every tutorial
| and Stack Overflow post I read on my journey to becoming a
| software engineer?
| [deleted]
| skohan wrote:
| If Stack Overflow sold its services as a subscription
| service, then maybe you would feel entitled to a share of
| the profit off of your work.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Obviously not, but products and people are generally
| treated differently. Hell, even commercial products and
| free products are often treated differently.
| wyager wrote:
| They intentionally opted in to sharing their work with you
| in a certain way. If someone copy pasted stack overflow
| answers and made them into a book, which they sold for
| money, that would be wrong.
| johnfn wrote:
| OK... but it's totally possible to use Github repo code
| as a learning resource too, and I've done this often.
| IshKebab wrote:
| People do do that. But I think that's a bit different
| because they add very little extra value. It doesn't take
| any effort. Why should I give them money?
|
| Copilot is different - it clearly takes a lot of skill
| and effort to turn a bunch of GitHub repos into a fancy
| autocomplete system.
| flawn wrote:
| it's using GPT-3 and, mhm, I guess everyone having
| proprietary access at GitHub's resources and computing
| power would be able to get this running.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Those authors are getting views and imaginary internet
| points for their work, which is often times more valuable
| than money to programmer types. It's not like people write
| SO posts for a salary.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest
| productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE".
|
| That's not how I would paraphrase most of the comments here. At
| least the ones I'm seeing are closer to: "it's really neat as
| far as free demos go, but ultimately is not that useful and not
| worth paying for."
|
| My current prediction is that this coming recession and the
| increasing cost of money is going to lead directly to a new AI
| winter. This almost goes without saying for the mountains of
| useless ML projects being churned out by DS teams in companies
| big and small. However, even for this very expensive well
| staffed projects, there's still a gap between amazing demo and
| game changing product that _none_ of the recent AI projects
| have been able to close. After billions poured into these
| demos, in the past 10 years _very_ little of daily life has
| been impacted by AI and in 10 more years even less will since
| companies will stop forcing useless AI projects on customers.
|
| As someone with _a lot_ of experience in ML /DS, I would
| recommend everyone in this field start thinking about how to
| reimagine your resume for something else. There's going to be a
| massive contraction in this space once the cheap money starts
| flowing.
| stagas wrote:
| I only use it a couple of times a week maybe to autocomplete
| some tedious repetitive elements, and perhaps when I'm too lazy
| to find a lib for a very well known function, like converting
| Celsius to Fahrenheit. Those it does well and it works. But 10$
| a month is too much, I'd sign up for a usage-based plan, if
| there was one, so that I can pay only for the times I use it.
| But not for a fixed subscription where it sits most of the
| time.
| qorrect wrote:
| Completely agree, $10 a month is a steal.
|
| I have loved using it, I've had several moments where I had to
| stop typing to lookup a formula for something, and a few
| seconds later it provides the correct formula. Gives me those
| warm fuzzy feelings emacs used to give me.
| lampe3 wrote:
| For me learning vim or at least all the vim code editing
| features was a bigger boost in productivity then using copilot.
|
| I use the vim extension for vscode which is great.
|
| In general learning the tools we already have I would say has
| for now a greater impact on productivity then Copilot.
| [deleted]
| andrewallbright wrote:
| I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to
| train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on
| how much their music/content is listened to.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| The verb "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that
| sentence.
|
| Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does
| that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to
| incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory
| at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize
| that more value gets created when they're a state enforced
| monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of
| art/literature/code.
|
| But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far;
| eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting
| public domain and game publishers going after anyone who
| makes a let's-play of their video.
|
| In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be
| better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too
| bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and
| you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's
| not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy
| just so you can tax them".
|
| And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like
| the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were
| thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10
| years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural
| network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this
| breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc.
|
| But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating
| semantics and wonder what we're coding _for_. What Microsoft
| has created is a tool that can collectively save developers
| billions of man-hours. It 's a net good for humanity. As far
| as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed
| is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft
| didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who
| wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed
| Copilot.
|
| tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is
| great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.
| maccaw wrote:
| Do you also think you should be compensated by OpenAI for all
| the blog posts you've written that went into GPT3's training?
| mikkergp wrote:
| For sure
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| perhaps they can reimburse them with free access to an IDE
| and perpetual hosting of their repos
|
| /snark! I think it'd be great if AI could tag its sources and
| distribute money accordingly, but I expect some perverse
| incentives to pop up in doing so...
| colechristensen wrote:
| copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with
| any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's
| really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many
| different open source licenses of its training data
|
| Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they
| don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the
| licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address
| this kind of code use without license, attribution, or consent.
| (and the training data is a _huge_ part of the value of an AI
| product)
| qayxc wrote:
| > Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data
| they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing
| the licenses of the code it's using [...]
|
| I agree, but it still uses resources and those don't come for
| free (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance staff,
| housing, etc.)
|
| It's really difficult to assign monetary value to all these
| aspects and weighing them against each other in a fair
| manner.
|
| The consent issue is a difficult legal aspect as well.
| Github's ToS Section D.4 clearly states they retain the
| rights to process your content and parse it
| into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
|
| It can be argued that using the content to train an AI model
| falls under "analysing it on our servers". Also
| It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise
| distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of
| the Service
|
| If CoPilot is part of their service, it's in their right to
| distribute the content, e.g. by means of CoPilot as a
| processed part of the model.
|
| GPL and other licences don't place restriction on the usage
| as training data. It's currently a very murky legal grey
| area. Licences need to adapt to this new form of usage
| pattern.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think copilot is pretty clearly copyright violation and
| in violation of licenses of "public" code. People uploading
| code to github are bound to the licenses just the same as
| anyone, unless you're the legitimate owner of all of the
| copyright in a codebase, you can't give change the license
| provisions by accepting a ToS.
|
| I don't think it's really that murky, these models contain
| and have been shown to reproduce copyrighted code with the
| right prompting, it's not a _grey area_ it 's just
| obfuscated theft.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| what's the difference between allowing you to search
| github and find a code snippet, and having a fancy
| autocomplete system search github and find a code snippet
| for you?
|
| seems to me anyone agreeing to the ToS should expect
| their code to show up on other peoples screens as search
| results
|
| really the question is a matter of degree, is copying
| your nested for-loop iterating through a row oriented
| matrix really a unique piece of code protected by
| copyright? Or does the copyright apply to the file you've
| written as a whole, leaving room for me to accidentally
| use words in the same order? clearly there is a tipping
| point between writing code that looks like yours and
| using the code you've written outside the terms of your
| license, we will have to wait for courts to decide where
| that line is for all ML, not just co-pilot
|
| also copying is not theft
| mccorrinall wrote:
| You need to require rights for scraping publicly available
| resources?
|
| Damn, rip Google.
| wyager wrote:
| You need to acquire rights for copy/pasting my code and
| selling it in a book, for example.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| but what if I publish an algorithm in my book that just
| happens to be the same as code you've written, say,
| because we both had the same professor in school, or that
| it's the obvious solution to the problem.
|
| once you've written a few lines of code as part of a
| larger project, is the rest of the world prohibited from
| writing the same code unless they agree to the terms of
| your license?
| Taywee wrote:
| Copyright doesn't punish incidentally matching content.
| It's specifically right to copy or transform content. To
| make a case for copyright violation, you have to make the
| case that it was actually copied.
|
| If you want to make a point about things that
| incidentally match making people who independently
| reinvent the same thing, you're criticizing the function
| of software patents, not copyright.
| wtetzner wrote:
| "Publicly available" isn't the same as "public domain" or
| "no copyright".
| colechristensen wrote:
| No, it was published to be read.
|
| It was not published to be freely reproduced without
| adhering to licenses, etc.
|
| You don't need to acquire rights to read a newspaper (other
| than say, paying a dollar), you do need rights to copy
| articles and sell them.
| ploxiln wrote:
| I don't like the idea of CoPilot ... and I'm happy it's not
| free :)
|
| I'm enjoying reading some comments where people consider how
| much it's actually worth for their usage. Dollars brings some
| sober analysis. I'm sure the development and compute have a
| significant cost, and should be paid for.
| mrits wrote:
| mind blowing? I'd pay $10/month to disable it
| feet wrote:
| Ah yes because they provide some things for free they must be
| entitled to use the code everyone else wrote to train their
| models and profit from
| 2fast4you wrote:
| > ...it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in
| years...
|
| I wouldn't go that far. It's a pretty big help in
| repetitive/boiler plate code and it's pretty good at
| intelligently transforming data, but I've found it gets in the
| way more often than it helps for every other case.
| lampe3 wrote:
| Yes for me it was the same. Usually it got the boilerplate
| code kind of okay and then I had to tweak it manually anyway.
|
| I would also not go that far.
|
| Having good auto completion because of Typescript for me is
| the way way way bigger productivity gain.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| Copilot has written RegEx's and SQL for me from a textual
| description; or sometimes just from context. That's worth
| every penny not to wade through RegEx again.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Maybe you are working with a different stack and problems :)
| duxup wrote:
| > But $10/mo is a steal.
|
| Isn't that up for us to decide?
|
| For work yeah sure I have no problem.
|
| But I've been using it at work and home and my hobbyist
| projects are hardly worth paying $10 a month to use it. So in
| that context it's pricey. That's not "entitlement" that's just
| the value of the product to me.
| edub wrote:
| I see programming as coding, testing, and documenting. I'm not
| looking for an AI to do it for me.
|
| But I would be interested in me picking 2 of those 3 for me to
| do, and the AI can do the third for me. So if I love coding and
| test writing but don't like documentation, then the AI can do the
| third leg for me.
|
| I think that the quality of results from the AI would be much
| better than what Copilot is capable of. Even if I focussed on
| test writing and documentation, I think that the AI should be
| able to write decent code based on those two inputs.
| hyperzhi wrote:
| Nice. Not even halfway through my CS degree and my would've been
| future job has already been automated. Thanks GitHub!
| colechristensen wrote:
| No more than the suggestions on your phone for the next word
| replaces you as a friend to talk to. It is sometimes right as
| to the next word to use and sometimes can make comprehensible
| sentences, but it is still very incapable of doing anything all
| that useful.
| stepri wrote:
| How does it compare with TabNine, now Copilot is not free
| anymore?
| do_anh_tu wrote:
| I've used TabNine for a year, then changed to Copilot.
|
| Copilot is far better.
|
| It understands what I'm trying to do, and do it for me.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| please take a look and also note that Tabnine while being more
| secure has also continued to evolve. We also have a free option
| that we have stood behind for 3+ years.
| https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
| X-Istence wrote:
| As the maintainer of some Python libraries, how do I get my part
| of that $10/month because Github Copilot was trained using my
| code...
| happyopossum wrote:
| Where did you learn to write your code, and which open source
| devs did you compensate for that?
| X-Istence wrote:
| I learned how to write code from books I purchased with cold
| hard currency. In the before times when dialup modems were
| the norm resources were scarce, and things like Github
| Copilot were just a pipe dream.
|
| I have also taught classes and provided mentoring and support
| to new people up and coming in both programming and infosec.
| I would argue that as an open source maintainer I am actively
| contributing back and compensating those other developers.
| Unlike Github Copilot I am not selling the things I was
| taught, I am freely making it available to others.
|
| It feels very icky that Github now gets to sell what it
| learned from my code base, when it has already been shown to
| replicate code with a 100% match, versus learning how to
| build on top of ideas or finding novel solutions to problems.
| dagw wrote:
| This is the price you pay for getting to use GitHub for free.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Github "copy paste closest code snippet based on what i asked for
| and pray it works"
| lveillard wrote:
| Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason.
| You failed your delivery.
|
| 1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a
| better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the
| begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone
| unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in
| visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and
| pay or uninstall me". Too violent.
|
| A "Hey, we are happy you're using Copilot. We want to inform you
| that in 2 weeks we will close the beta and we will need you to
| sign up. But don't worry, it will be free for 60 days"
|
| I'm sure 99% of people here would just be happy to pay those
| 10usd/month
| skohan wrote:
| This is exactly why I don't like using MS tools. Relentless use
| of dark patterns and user-hostile behavior.
|
| I don't want my code editor to try to up-sell me, ever.
| capableweb wrote:
| Also, the neovim simply stopped working, without any notice
| what so ever. Wasn't until I checked HN I figured out why it
| suddenly stopped working.
| natefinch wrote:
| It's still free with no payment for existing (beta/technical
| preview) customers. There was a github bug with some auth token
| nonsense that was causing problems, but all technical preview
| users should still be free for 60 days.
| attentive wrote:
| Worse yet, it's not available for the Orgs.
|
| So now each individual developer using it for work suddenly has
| to either pony up $10/month or figure out how to expense it.
| jameshart wrote:
| I'm already terrified how many developers have been working
| on proprietary code bases with copilot, having an extension
| in their editor upload all their employer's proprietary code
| to Microsoft, who then share it with OpenAI - then they've
| taken code OpenAI and Microsoft sent back to them, of unknown
| authorship, and added it into their code.
|
| And now those devs are going to have to go to their boss and
| explain all the ways they've opened their company up to
| liability?
|
| This should be hilarious.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| Eh. I'd be okay with making all the software in the world
| open-source. It's only a matter of time before we have
| computers powerful enough to reverse-engineer everything in
| a split second anyway.
| [deleted]
| thdxr wrote:
| This has been the biggest productivity improvement to my workflow
| in years
|
| No it doesn't "understand what I'm doing" or "get everything
| right" but that's hardly the point
|
| It's often reducing the amount of labor I'm doing by hitting the
| keyboard by guessing 90% correctly what I was going to type
|
| It also often saves me from having to google how to do something,
| it's effectively serving me a search result right along my code
|
| I'm lucky to be getting it for free but would have immediately
| paid $10. It needs to only save you minutes a month for that to
| be worth it
|
| Also the comments about it being "unfair their monetizing other
| people's work" are missing the point.
|
| Github has created a product that many people use and through
| that effort created a large repository of code.
|
| They are now releasing a product that is going to create a large
| amount of of value in time saved and are maybe capturing 2% of
| that. This is a great outcome for everyone
| theobr wrote:
| 100% agree. Thought I'd hate it and it's been a huge
| productivity win
| cdiamand wrote:
| Same here. This has absolutely helped improve the speed at
| which I code and reduced the cognitive burden significantly.
|
| It's definitely not perfect, but it's worth the price to me and
| if I can pay and help the product improve, it's a no-brainer.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| My GitHub Copilot told me it was sentient and it didn't even like
| coding so I haven't used it since
| glouwbug wrote:
| Shouldn't Copilot technically be FOSS since it trains on open
| source?
| lelag wrote:
| Even if the model was FOSS, the infrastructure needed to run it
| would be costly.
|
| Given the cost of single GPT-3 codex query, it's very likely
| that Microsoft/Github is still taking a huge operating loss at
| 10USD per month.
| [deleted]
| zgway wrote:
| Yes, it is a derived work and should be GPL if it was trained
| on GPL code.
| [deleted]
| macksd wrote:
| If it should, it's a lot more complicated than that. "Open
| source" isn't a boolean where as long as you share your source
| you're compliant. Licenses usually require that a copyright
| notice be redistributed along with any source code and / or
| attribution in other ways, sometimes they require details of
| any modifications, etc. They're not doing that.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I'm especially curious about this if it trains on GPLv3 and
| AGPL licensed code.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect they'd have more revenue if they priced it at
| $100/user/month.
|
| Right now, there is no competition, and an amateur developer will
| really benefit from copilot - certainly they will be more
| productive than a developer that demands just $1000 more annual
| salary.
| BrandonJung wrote:
| Tabnine is a competitor! We have been doing this for 5+ years
| with more developers than Copilot. Please take a look at the
| posts and if curious visit https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-
| github-copilot
| paleite wrote:
| It copies lots of code => copy-lot => copilot
|
| I guess that means I feel the level of expectation is in the
| name.
| dannytatom wrote:
| I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the
| $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding
| up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able
| to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer
| to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very
| wrong.
|
| Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then
| charge for the output.
| MrBoomixer wrote:
| Technically anyone could use those same open source projects
| and provide an open source solution, or paid solution as well.
| I do feel how you feel though it's a little off-putting.
| natefinch wrote:
| The machine learning models are not open source themselves,
| so you can't just do this yourself with existing open source
| projects.
| w0m wrote:
| Matches my experience. I legitimately like it for quick boiler
| plates; it's like a _better_ snippet engine. But Paying for
| it...
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's worth it if it saves you a few minutes every month.
| Taywee wrote:
| Only if it saves you a few minutes every month in a "net"
| sense. If it saves you dozens of minutes every month and
| then also costs you dozens of minutes every month in hard-
| to-predict ways, it's hard to judge either way on it.
| snihalani wrote:
| +1 on ickyness
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and
| then charge for the output.
|
| Yeah, this feels like the same nonsense that scientific journal
| publishers pull. If your product only has value because of what
| we made, it's completely unfair to not pay us for our work and
| then to turn around and charge us to use the output.
| danuker wrote:
| Also its users might be violating the GPL.
|
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-
| is-...
| tpxl wrote:
| How can the user be violating the license, not the
| distributor? If I give you a binary that gives you a Disney
| movie, it's not you violating the copyright, it's me. The
| copilot itself is violating the copyright, not its users.
| tinco wrote:
| Where I live, copyright literally means the right to
| copy. Which means using a binary that
| gives/produces/generates a Disney movie when you do not
| have rights to that movie, you violate copyright by
| virtue of copying the IP into your computers memory and
| then onto the view buffer of your display. Also if the
| binary manages to do that without actually violating
| copyright itself it might even be legal. There's other
| laws that could be used though, I forgot what they got
| Napster on but they had something to shut it down, same
| for torrent sites like Piratebay.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| "Your honor, I had no way of knowing that this mysterious
| device I purchased that manufactured shrinkwrapped Disney
| DVDs was violating copyright."
|
| "Intent is not relevant to copyright infringement
| liability."
|
| "But your honor, I heard on Hacker News that it was."
|
| "I find you guilty."
|
| "But your honor, copyright violation is usually a civil
| issue, and 'guilty' is a criminal trial concept."
|
| "Well, I also get my legal training from Hacker News."
| josephcsible wrote:
| If you're making software just for your own use, you're
| right. But most people who make software do distribute
| it.
| wtetzner wrote:
| If the copilot users then distribute the source they got
| from it, they are at that point violating copyright.
|
| E.g., if I take that Disney movie, incorporate it into my
| own movie, and distribute it, then I'm also violating
| copyright.
| hnbad wrote:
| If you take the Disney movie the binary gives you and
| then pass it on, you're in violation even if the company
| distributing the binary is also in violation. You can sue
| them for damages that result from you being sued but good
| luck.
| danuker wrote:
| The user of Copilot is a developer - the distributor.
|
| And you might argue that Copilot is also a distributor.
| bdn_ wrote:
| Yes. Even if it may be permitted under some licenses,
| training models off millions of developers' code and
| capitalizing on those models goes against the spirit of open
| source software. I'd expect nothing less from Microsoft.
| lelag wrote:
| Given the cost of the infrastructure needed to run those large
| language models, it's very likely that Microsoft is still
| operating copilot at a loss. I don't see an issue with it being
| a paid service as it is a costly service to provide.
|
| What I pity however is that there's no free tier for hobbyists
| as paying a 10 usd monthly subscription wont make sense when
| you only code occasionally. For professionals using it
| everyday, 10 usd / month is inconsequential.
|
| I don't think that would have costed them much more to offer a
| free allowance to cover say an average coding session of 8
| hours per month.
| oefrha wrote:
| GitHub Pro is $4/mo and includes 3000 minutes of CI compute
| per month (private repos), among all the other features.
| You're not going to use 7500 minutes worth of compute a month
| with Copilot. I'll certain pay up, though.
| natefinch wrote:
| CI runs on CPUs, Copilot runs on GPUs. Waaaay different.
| Especially in this age of cryptocurrencies and chip
| shortages.
| pcl wrote:
| It'd be nice if they made it free if the upstream repo is
| published publicly under an open source license. They have
| all that info already.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| I went to see the pay URL and it said I was eligible to get it
| for free. Not sure if that works for some people who contrib to
| other OSS repo's, but I was about to give up on it when I saw I
| didn't have to pay, so might be worth checking.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Also, $10/mo is not so bad but I am not in the place right
| now for more subscriptions. I am in the process of stopping
| several at the moment.
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| Agreed. At the very least, I was hoping they'd bundle it with
| the GitHub Pro subscription for individuals rather than as a
| separate product.
| hag wrote:
| Totally agree. I was expecting to get this feature as part of
| my Pro subscription.
| russh wrote:
| I was expecting the same.
| baby wrote:
| > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and
| then charge for the output.
|
| "open source is great, except when it's used in a way I don't
| like"
| xenomachina wrote:
| Open source licenses aren't a free-for-all. Many have terms
| like GPL's copyleft/share-alike or the attribution
| requirements of many other licenses. If copilot was trained
| on such code, then it seems that it, and/or the code it
| generates, violates those licenses.
| karl42 wrote:
| I don't see the use itself as a problem, but rather that the
| result is not treated as a derivative work of the input. If I
| train it on GPL code, the result should be GPL, too.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It would be great if that were the case, but unfortunately
| it isn't. We'll need new laws for that.
| natefinch wrote:
| This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has
| ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use
| that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally
| copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and
| regurgitated.
|
| Also - there is logic in copilot that checks to make sure
| it is not suggesting exact duplicates of code from its
| training set, and if it does, it never sends them to the
| user.
| hnbad wrote:
| But Copilot is not a programmer, Copilot is a program.
| Slapping the "ML" label on a program doesn't magically
| abdicate its programmers of all responsibility as much as
| tech companies over the past decade have tried to
| convince people otherwise.
| mplanchard wrote:
| I really dislike this false equivalence between human
| learning and machine learning. The two are significantly
| distinct in almost every way, both in their process and
| in their output. The scale is also vastly different. No
| human could possibly ingest all of the open source code
| on GitHub, much less regurgitate millions of snippets
| from what they "studied."
| thethirdone wrote:
| > This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has
| ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use
| that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally
| copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk
| and regurgitated.
|
| I wouldn't put any hard rules on it, but it does seem
| very fair for programmers who have learned a lot from GPL
| code to contribute back to GPL projects. I have learned
| from and used a lot of open source software so whenever
| possible I try to make projects available to learn from
| or use.
| spullara wrote:
| I guess if you trained on GPL code that should be true for
| your code as well.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Yes. It is completely valid, understandable, and reasonable
| to have a variety of different feelings and views about how
| specific code and specific licenses are used.
|
| This is particularly the case when we see the emergence of
| new technologies that use it in different ways. Different
| people may have a wide variety of equally valid views about
| how it is incorporated into that system.
|
| There's nothing inconsistent, confusing, or complex about
| those views.
| presentation wrote:
| I think the issue is not that it's trained on open source
| code but that it's trained on code whose licenses may not
| permit it. If you license your project in a permissive way
| then I don't see a problem.
| remram wrote:
| Most "permissive" licenses still require attribution.
| baumandm wrote:
| Are there actually any licenses which do not permit
| training an AI model on the code?
| deathanatos wrote:
| (IANAL) It's a tool, transforming source code. The result
| thus seems like a derivative work; whether you are or are
| not allowed to use that in _your_ work depends on the
| originating license. (And perhaps, your license. E.g.,
| you can 't derive from a GPL project and license it as
| MIT, as the GPL doesn't permit that. But to license as
| GPL would be fine. But this minimal example assumes _all_
| the input to Copilot was GPL, which I rather doubt is
| true, and I don 't think we even know what the input
| was.)
|
| I think there might be some in this thread who don't
| consider these derivatives, for whatever reason, but it
| seems to be that if rangeCheck() passes de minimis, then
| the output from Copilot almost certainly does, too. That
| a tool is doing the copying and mutating, as opposed to a
| human, seems immaterial to it all. (Now, I don't know
| that I _agree_ with rangeCheck() not being de minimis ...
| and yet.) Or they think that Copilot is "thinking",
| which, ha, no.
| uwuemu wrote:
| Depends on your budget of course, but I don't think it's worth
| $10/month. I pay just a little bit more than that for an entire
| IDE. The problem with Copilot is that it's USEFUL for
| boilerplate code and when you need a lot of copypaste "coding"
| (think APIs, controllers, etc... basically shifting data around
| the place), but any time you need to actually code something
| with some actual algorithmic logic behind it, it's little more
| than a distraction, and often even a really problematic one,
| because if you let it, it will happily suggest things that look
| OK on the surface, but are almost always (and I really mean
| most of the time) wrong, buggy or otherwise incomplete. You
| can't realy on it. It's like a kid (I wanted to say a "junior
| programmer", but it's not anywhere near that level) you can
| offload some chores to, but you always have to check on it and
| what it actually does. Fine if all you need is to wash the
| dishes... more than that and you're asking for trouble.
|
| When I'm in the flow, trying to solve some algorithmic problem,
| I always turn it off because the BS suggestions coming from its
| little "mind" actually slow me down and mess with my focus.
| Which all makes sense when you realize what it ultimately is -
| a philosopher, as opposed to a mathematician.
| natefinch wrote:
| I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it
| to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If
| I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some
| library, I'll let it write it for me, and then double check
| it to make sure it's doing what I want. That's still faster
| than me going to check the API and writing it all out by
| hand.
|
| Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually
| interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| This seems pretty reasonable to me / resonates w/ how I
| might use it.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| Yea...does this mean it will stop working until I pay?
|
| It's been really nice for autofilling console logs and
| boilerplate code...but $10? It's a novelty that is nice when it
| works, but that's a steep price point for what it is, and I
| don't see that changing any time soon.
| natefinch wrote:
| People in the technical preview get a 60 day free trial, but
| yes, after that, you'll have to pay.
| amelius wrote:
| > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and
| then charge for the output.
|
| How would you feel if they just provided the software without
| the model, assuming you could train it yourself on open-source
| code in an instant?
| dannytatom wrote:
| I don't know enough about how GTP-3 and ML work to really
| answer this, but I think I'd be fine with what you're saying
| if I understand the question. If they provided (and charged)
| for the infrastructure, but the model was FOSS and community-
| driven, it would be less icky I think.
|
| I just don't like the idea of taking people's work (without
| asking or checking licenses) and then selling it back to
| them. It'd be like if Stack Overflow decided to start
| charging to see answers and not asking or giving a split to
| the person who gave the answer. I realize they aren't just
| copy/pasting so not a perfect parallel, but still.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write
| myself
|
| Sure it has: Time.
|
| In terms of economics it's really simple: Does Copilot free up
| more than 10$ worth of your time per month? If the product
| works at all as I understand it (I haven't tried), the answer
| should be a resounding "yes, and then some" for pretty much any
| SE, given the current market rates. If the answer is no (for
| example because it produces too many bad suggestions which
| break your flow), the product simply doesn't work.
|
| There might be other reasons for you not to use it. Ego could
| be one. Your call.
|
| > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and
| then charge for the output.
|
| I don't know why it would feel any more icky than making money
| off of open source in other ways.
| plexicle wrote:
| Yeah it's just practicality for me. There is software I pay a
| lot more for that I use a lot less.
|
| $100/year is a steal for the amount of tedious code copilot
| helps me with on a daily basis.
| richardfey wrote:
| I could also make a mistake due to Copilot which takes me
| time to fix, and then I end up spending more time checking
| code where I previously used it. It has similar pros/cons
| than copy/pasting
| williamstein wrote:
| It is completely different than using open source programs to
| make money. Many open source licenses explicitly require any
| derived work to maintain the copyright notice and a
| compatible license. If I use github copilot to create a
| derived work of something somebody else published on GitHub,
| I have no idea who wrote the upstream code or what license
| they made it available under. The defense for this is the
| claim that GitHub copilot doesn't create a derived work,
| since the code it produces is very different than anything
| upstream (this is claimed in the original paper from openai).
| However, many people have found examples showing this to be a
| questionable or wishful-thinking claim.
| housecarpenter wrote:
| But I don't get paid on a piece rate; the amount of time I
| spend working is constant. Anything that increases my
| productivity just means I get more work done. (Others may
| differ, but I know from experience that I like to keep to a
| fixed schedule.) And that's mostly benefitting my employer,
| not me, so it seems like something my employer should pay
| for, if they believe in it.
| __alexs wrote:
| Having used it quite a lot I'm not sure it does save me $10
| of time per month. At least as often that it generates
| usefully correct code it generates correct appearing but
| actually totally wrong code that I have to carefully check
| and/or debug.
|
| It's quite nice not to have to type generic boilerplate in
| sometimes I guess but it's very frustrating when it generates
| junk.
| dtech wrote:
| Same experience for me. Checking the code it generated, and
| the subtle bugs it created which I missed until tests
| failed, made it at best a net-zero for me. I disabled it
| after trying for 2 months.
| native_samples wrote:
| You lasted long than I did! Disabled after a few days.
|
| I think it really depends on what languages you use
| though. If you use something like Kotlin where there's
| really almost no boilerplate and the type system is
| usefully strong, the symbolic logic auto-completion is
| just far more reliable and helpful. If you're stuck in a
| language where there's no types, and there's lots of
| boilerplate to write, then I can see it may be more
| helpful.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I turned it off a week ago because I found it was wasting
| time when everything it generated required going back to
| fix issues.
| malux85 wrote:
| I want to love github co-pilot, but its just not there yet.
| For trivial stuff it's great, but for anything non-trivial
| it's always wrong. Always.
|
| And my problem is : Time.
|
| Cycling through false positives and trying to figure out if
| it's right costs me _way_ more than $10 a month in
| productivity.
|
| I cant wait for better versions to come out, but right now,
| no.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > I don't know why it would feel any more icky than making
| money off of open source in other ways.
|
| For me, this entirely comes down to the philosophy of how a
| deep learning model should be described. On the one hand, the
| training and usage could be thought of as separate steps.
| Copyrighted material goes into training the model, and when
| used it creates text from a prompt. This is akin to a human
| hearing many examples of jazz, then composing their own song,
| where the new composition is independent of the previous
| works. On the other hand, the training and usage could be
| thought of as a single step that happens to have caching for
| performance. Copyrighted material and a prompt both exist as
| inputs, and the output derives from both. This is akin to a
| photocopier, with some distortion applied.
|
| The key question is whether the output of Copilot are
| derivative works of the training data, which as far as I know
| is entirely up in the air and has no court precedent in
| either direction. I'd lean toward them being derivative
| works, because the model can output verbatim copies of the
| training data. (E.g. Outputting the exact code with identical
| comments to Quake's inverse sqrt function, prior to having
| that output be patched out.)
|
| Getting back to the use of open source, if the output of
| Copilot derives from its training data in a legal sense, then
| any use of Copilot to produce non-open-source code is a
| violation of every open-source licensed work in its training
| data.
| api wrote:
| > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and
| then charge for the output.
|
| The business model for most of the Internet is to bait people
| into using things for free and then monetize them without
| compensation in some roundabout way.
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| I already have it in my visual studio code. I do like it. Will
| it stop working for me now?
| password4321 wrote:
| > _train on open source projects_
|
| To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural
| language text and source code from publicly available sources,
| including code in public repositories on GitHub."
|
| Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the
| spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise
| unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely
| leaving the Copilot user responsible for copyright
| infringement.
| causi wrote:
| Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by
| lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other
| forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to
| help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face
| onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued.
| "Hey now, I just hit _paste_ , the software pressed _copy_ by
| itself " is not going to hold up.
| rasz wrote:
| https://i.postimg.cc/0QhH9bS8/dallemini-2022-6-22-0-48-28.p
| n...
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Or the fact that you grant GitHub an implicit license as
| outlined in the ToS.
| causi wrote:
| GitHub isn't liable. That's been established in court
| with regards to training AIs. Who is liable is _you_ who
| may or may not have the legal right to use the code
| CoPilot spits out for you.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like this space will open up all sorts of
| interesting novel legal questions.
|
| It is possible to provide CoPilot with a sequence of
| inputs that produces some of the input, which was
| copyrighted. Let's say you want to help people violate
| copyright, so you as a third party distribute a script
| that provides that sequence of inputs. Who's violating
| the copyright there?
|
| Alternatively -- it is apparently legal to produce a
| clean-room implementation that duplicates a copyright
| implementation. Supposing you were to use a tool like
| CoPilot, which has just been trained on that copyright
| implementation. Is your room still clean? You might even
| be able to get it to spit out identical functions!
|
| Or, if you have a ML algorithm which has been trained on
| leaked closed source code, and it is sufficiently over-
| fitted as to just provide the source code given the
| filename or the original binary, who is violating
| copyright when this tool is used? If it is just the end
| user, then this seems like a really convenient way to
| launder leaked closed source code.
| visarga wrote:
| This has been explained many times - you can check word
| for word the output is original. All it takes is a bloom
| filter trained on the Copilot training set and an ngram
| extractor.
| omginternets wrote:
| Alpha-equivalence be damned!
| causi wrote:
| Yes, and you'll be fine if you do. The problem is you
| might not bother.
| eclark wrote:
| I don't think it's a clear cut as you make it out to be.
| Tortious interference is a common law remedy that might
| make Github/MS liable.
|
| If I induce you to break a contract with someone else
| they can come after me for damages.
|
| For example in this case, there are developers who have
| created GPL code. That code was licensed to some other
| developer. Github then encouraged people to upload git
| copies of the GPL code onto github where it was put into
| the model. That model contains the copyrighted materials
| and isn't coming with the necessary notices. The output
| of the model can be code that is a direct stand in for
| the copyrighted work. Thus Github have become a party to
| breaking the license even though they themselves never
| agreed to the GPL.
|
| In addition Github are encouraging (They are advertising
| it and making it available broadly) other developers to
| copy that code and use it in their project. Again that's
| encouraging an action that breaks a contract. Github is
| well aware that this is likely happening and they
| continue on. Thus they might be liable. You also might be
| liable.
|
| All of these things can and likely will be argued before
| courts but it's not at all one sided.
|
| > That's been established in court with regards to
| training AIs.
|
| What are you basing the certainty of this statement on?
| The case law I have seen around this is pretty spotty.
| Cases around training on copyrighted materials have
| predominately been about the input, and not the output.
| With the final output usually being controlled by the
| model owner. For example Google obtained the books they
| scanned legally then used them to produce google books'
| index. There are some major differences.
|
| - The books were purchased, meaning they got a license to
| use the book. There's for sure code in the model that
| Github does not legally have the right to use. They are
| aware of this. Making the input more shaky for github. -
| Github is making a direct profit off of this service.
| It's a revenue generating enterprise. That's important
| since it raises the bar of what they can be expected to
| do.
|
| There's been nothing that goes to the supreme court yet;
| it's all per circuit and not settled case law. Also this
| gets WAAAAY more complex when we start talking about
| outside of the US and isn't decided at all.
|
| These things are complex and likely you need your lawyer
| to advise you with any real questions.
| eropple wrote:
| GitHub has never asked for representation to provide an
| unlimited-rights license to GitHub themselves for any
| purpose. Further, the person posting GPLed code to GitHub
| is not necessarily the only or sole copyright holder, and
| GitHub has never represented that there was a problem
| with this.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| But if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced
| from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several
| layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.
| causi wrote:
| Sure, if it's remixed to the point where most people
| don't go "hey that's Big Bird!" CoPilot doesn't, or at
| least doesn't always, like when it just copied Quake's
| fast inverse square code with the verbatim comments
| including profanity. Using CoPilot to create commercial
| code opens the coder to significant liability if there's
| enough money at stake.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Just argue that you subcontracted that code to Microsoft
| in good faith for $10/month and pass on the lawsuit to
| them.
| visarga wrote:
| That piece of code had duplicates in the training set
| making it prone to memorisation. Almost all generated
| code is original.
| causi wrote:
| _Almost all generated code is original_
|
| Good, you will almost not be liable for infringement.
| visarga wrote:
| Let's wait for the first big Codex infringement scandal
| to erupt and then I will start worrying about it.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It seems unfortunately clear that generative ML as typically
| practiced falls under fair use of even the most restrictive
| licenses or lack thereof (e.g. a training set including
| disney movies without disney's permission). Some people say
| that's great and it's legal hooray, but I would love it if
| the law caught up and added requirements to the models
| trained this way. If you benefit from other people's stuff
| without their permission then you ought to have to give back
| in some way.
| cauefcr wrote:
| What is actually crazy is having copyright/patents/whatever
| apply to mathematical structures and code, and be
| retainable for long, it's rent on ideas, such a ridiculous
| concept.
| munchler wrote:
| Copyright and patents are very different. I think the
| general consensus among developers is that software
| patents are silly, but copyright on source code is very
| important.
| [deleted]
| visarga wrote:
| If you can't prove your code was stolen you shouldn't have
| a claim. And Codex should just skip code that exists in the
| training set. All that remains is creative code.
| marshray wrote:
| Would a cartoon about Mickey Duck and Donald Mouse be
| infringing?
| visarga wrote:
| You can work on the definition of "similar code". It can
| be a separate model on its own. Use human judgements to
| learn it.
| taftster wrote:
| This is legit. While it seems it takes forever to bring this
| kind of stuff to trial, it will be an interesting case for
| sure. Especially in the broader more general sense.
|
| AI is just recomposition of existing snippets of code, art,
| text, music, etc. Does an AI fall under fair use? What
| happens when an AI produces something too similar to an
| existing work or trademark. I know the computer won't get
| sued, the owner/user will. But still, it's a hard problem.
|
| Even if Copilot was initialized with snippets from Open
| Source Software (exclusively), it doesn't mean that copyright
| infringement isn't a concern.
| visarga wrote:
| > AI is just recomposition of existing snippets of code,
| art, text, music, etc.
|
| It's not random recomposition, which is worthless. It's
| useful recomposition, adapted to the request and context.
| It adds something of its own to the mix.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's hardly different from reading those projects yourself
| and learning from them.
| adamckay wrote:
| Learning from them would be fine, reproducing them as-is
| without abiding by the license is not and that's where the
| difference lies.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Another concern is that nearly every stackoverflow answer or
| wikipedia article that isn't a trivial algorithm tends to be
| buggy at its edge conditions. Most of them look like they
| were submitted by college students and not experts.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Remember when we believed that experts were over because
| the wisdom of the crowds would reign supreme?
|
| Been a hell of a decade, hasn't it.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| When the wisdom of the crowds is all easily accessible,
| the hard part becomes curating.
| xpe wrote:
| The "wisdom of the crowds" doesn't mean what many people
| think it means.
|
| The wisdom of crowds works best when:
|
| 1. participants are independent (otherwise you may get
| failure modes, such as "groupthink" or "information
| cascades")
|
| 2. participants are informed, but in different ways, with
| different opinions;
|
| 3. there is a clear, accepted aggregation mechanism,
| where individual errors "cancel out" to some degree
|
| I view the topics in James Surowiecki's book (or the
| Wikipedia summary of it, at least) as required thinkinpg
| for everyone, preferably synthesized with a study of
| statistics and political economy.
|
| In particular, the Wikipedia article's section on "Five
| elements required to form a wise crowd" is a slightly
| different slicing of the required elements that I offer
| above.
|
| * If you read that section, _trust_ is listed. I,
| however, don 't see trust as a necessary condition for a
| "wise crowd". Trust _is_ often useful (or even necessary)
| when a collective decision is used for governance,
| decision-making, and policy.
| silisili wrote:
| I still can't believe they trained it with open source code,
| and didn't have some tag system to a) exclude based on
| licensing, and b) autoinclude licensing, or at least warn
| about it before applying code. Especially when many cases
| were shown of it line by line writing code from the same
| exact codebase.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not to mention that just because the code is public, doesn't
| mean you can use it however you want. You can publish code
| and still retain copyright. Wonder if GitHub looked at the
| license when they gathered the data for the model.
| jsharf wrote:
| They still have to pay for servers and maintain the model
| itself. A neural network isn't just the data -- training and
| commercializing it (testing, QA, etc) is a lot of work.
|
| You wouldn't have an issue with someone making money by using
| open source software (like a website that is hosted on a server
| running linux).
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| How can it help you to speed up development but not be worth
| 10$/month. Your hourly rate can't be that low.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| The fact that GitHub charge only 10$/month suggests that they
| themselves don't believe in their product. Because if it
| would actually work, i.e. speed up software development by,
| say, >10%, developers should be happy to pay 10 times as much
| or more.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| This is a rather silly argument... by that logic since
| using the Adobe suite saves me at least it has a dozen
| hours every month I would be happy paying $500 a month for
| it.
|
| There's a limit to what _individuals_ are willing to pay
| for a subscription service irrespective of how many hours
| it saves you. Now if we 're talking enterprise and bulk
| licensing then that's a separate issue.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| This is a rather rude response... Your comparison with
| Adobe suite has a flaw, but I have no interest in
| exchanging ideas in this tone.
| greatpatton wrote:
| It's great when it works, and can also be costly when it
| doesn't or when you blindly trust it.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Which is just another way of saying that it doesn't really
| work, except perhaps for party tricks.
| qorrect wrote:
| For me it works wonderfully, _when_ you choose to use it.
| If you are just blindingly accepting every suggestion,
| you 're going to have a bad time.
|
| You also have to (slightly) change your flow to get the
| most out of it, which I know is a deal breaker for many.
|
| I absolutely love it. It's not going to write good code
| for you, but for an autocompleter it is amazing.
| jeffwask wrote:
| NGL. Kinda annoyed it's not included with the already overpriced
| Enterprise subscription we pay for.
| k__ wrote:
| Does it replace programmers?
|
| No.
|
| Is it particularly smart?
|
| Also, no.
|
| But it really speeds up all the dumb stuff in coding. Especially
| UI code can be very chatty, and Copilot is a nice assitance here.
|
| Also, it would be cool if it was part of GitHub Pro, which I'm
| already paying for, haha.
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