[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot X - Sign up for technical preview ___________________________________________________________________ GitHub Copilot X - Sign up for technical preview Author : todsacerdoti Score : 936 points Date : 2023-03-22 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.blog) (TXT) w3m dump (github.blog) | bpodgursky wrote: | No JetBrains in the preview :( | gbuckingham89 wrote: | This is a big disappointment | mewmew07 wrote: | how is this big? | | it's a preview for new features, calm down | bpodgursky wrote: | It's big because I want it now! | hu3 wrote: | Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is | at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the | writing is on the wall. | | Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering | food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will | punish those who refuse. | | We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just | like we need less manual labor in farms today. | | And coding is just one of the many applications where AI can | replace brains. | | Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of | people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. | Universal Basic Income? | | It's amazing and terrifying at the same time. | | Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we | created ourselves. | ra1231963 wrote: | At one time, people programmed without google or search | engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read | through them and then type out what they saw in the book. | Today, that sounds absurd. | | Then came stack overflow and google. We search, pray we get a | good result or someone else took the time to ask the question, | then read (and sometimes copy+paste). | | Then AI assistants. I'm not exactly sure what's next, but I do | think coding without some type of AI assistant will be | extremely antiquated very soon. I already use it all the time. | I never want to go back. | | The next generation will look at finding answers via SO, | google, and random forums just as we look at people use used | books -- as an absurdly inefficient way to do a job | DeathArrow wrote: | > At one time, people programmed without google or search | engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read | through them and then type out what they saw in the book. | Today, that sounds absurd. | | Even if it's absurd I still like to buy physical books. The | information is better structured and I like holding a book | and turning pages. | randomdata wrote: | _> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a | world of people who became inferior to machines at almost | everything. Universal Basic Income?_ | | Why would the machines want to pay us once we can no longer | provide them value? Maybe they'll keep a few of us as pets and | for sport, but the rest will be sent to the human equivalent of | Bovine University. | mrinterweb wrote: | I use copilot, and I feel that it is useful about 40% of the | time. Most of the time the suggestions are not what I'm going | for, sometime the suggestions are close or help me think | through the solution easier, and occasionally spot on and I can | tab complete the code. | | I've noticed that the suggestion quality/usefulness varies | considerably between projects and programming languages. For a | self-contained bash script, it is incredibly useful. For a | rails application, less so. | mrinterweb wrote: | Still most of the time, the suggestions are not helpful, and | it takes time to look at the suggestion and dismiss it. So | I'm usually torn between is this useful or distracting. | Curiosity keeps it around, but I keep getting closer to | dropping it as the novelty wears. | pastor_bob wrote: | >We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. | | We've always progressed to needing fewer developers to do what | we currently do. Companies like Squarespace, Shopify, AWS, etc | have allowed people to do more with less. Long gone are the | days an artist would hire a developer to build them a website | they could host a portfolio on. | | But growth has filled in the voids with more ambitious work. | | It's daunting, but you can also look at this from the opposite | perspective. Why work for someone on a 5 person team, when you | can try and run the same business with 1 person (i.e. you). | | The people who should be afraid are actually those that run | companies like Meta and Twitter. Better developer productivity | means competitors can chomp at their heels with much smaller | teams. | soiler wrote: | > We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. | Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. | | When my team gets crunched, it's not usually because we can't | write the code fast enough. It's because of product | requirements (changing, needing to be fleshed out, being | unrealistic, being understood properly by QA, being adapted to | the realities of reasonable code, not existing, etc.). | | On top of that, needing fewer workers to do X work !== getting | X work done cheaper. Quite often, it means getting 2X, 3X, 10X | work done. As an overall trend, modern society has increased | worker productivity dramatically over the last few decades, yet | many work as many or more hours than they used to. We could get | the same results with fewer workers, or we could make them work | more. We know what 99% of CEOs will choose. | | Of course, maybe it will reduce developer jobs. I'm not ruling | that out entirely. But when (not if) we create an alien | intelligence that can wipe out our industry, we may have bigger | concerns than steady employment. | nbar1 wrote: | > Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world | of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. | Universal Basic Income? | | Try mass culling | sharemywin wrote: | I call it Universal Pet Income. Because at that point won't we | just be AI's pets? | | Not that I'm against it. just call it for what it is. | kapperchino wrote: | Not AI's pets, but oligarch's pets | RivieraKid wrote: | No, the AI will work for us, it's our pet. | klibertp wrote: | That's completely backwards. Pets don't have to work. Try | to convince my cat to do something useful. I'd switch | places with him in heartbeat if could. If an AI, or anybody | else for that matter, offers to make me their pet without | me having to grow fur and losing the opposite thumb (but I | still could learn to purr if needed), I'd be even more for | it... | mkaic wrote: | Why would something smarter than us be our pet? | RivieraKid wrote: | Because we will have full control over it. It will do | what we ask. The AI has no motivation or personality, | it's just a tool used by humans. | pferde wrote: | Maybe it's time to start differentiating between | artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness? | Surely I can't be the first one to think of this... | mkaic wrote: | I agree with the sentiment, but I also don't think such | differentiation is possible, because we have no testable | definition of consciousness. I genuinely look forward to | the day we discover/understand the physical processes | underlying our own consciousness, and how to | detect/disprove it in machines, but until then... it's | unfortunately unfalsifiable. | cubefox wrote: | Agentic AIs are more useful than mere tools, therefore | they will be built, and agents have motivation. The | alignment problem is how to give them exactly the right | motivation, such that they keep us as pets instead of | killing or factory farming us. Like humans keep cats. | mkaic wrote: | And what if a human tells it to control other people? | What if a rogue third party terrorist group replicates | OpenAI's latest and greatest in the year 2030, but | explicitly tasks it with hurting people instead of | helping them? | | I don't agree with "we will have full control over it." | I'm more concerned about how much control it will have | over us. | nemo44x wrote: | > We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. | Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. | | I don't think that's right. Farms may have less manual labor | but there's man, many times more people building farming tools, | software, tech, etc. | | What will happen is you will be able to do more with your time. | We are limited by how many people we can actually hire and the | output of those people. Now each person can output more and | more. So much that we want to build but we don't is because we | are limited by output. We need to prioritize certain things for | everything has an opportunity cost. Now we will be able to burn | down more things more quickly. | | Also the math. Imagine developers just became about 30% more | efficient. I want MORE of them now as my money is better spent! | If my competitor downsizes to remain at their current capacity | then I will crush them because I want 30% MORE developers that | are coding 30% more efficiently allowing me to release 40% more | things for the same money! I crush my competition then and they | know this so they have to keep up as it's an arms race. | RivieraKid wrote: | > Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world | of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. | Universal Basic Income? | | Inferior to machines at almost everything? Most jobs are safe, | look at the 25 most common jobs in the US - cashier, food | preparation worker, stocking associate, laborer, janitor, | construction worker, bookkeeper, server, medical assistant, | bartender, administrative assistant, marketing specialist, | police officer, electrician, mechanic, etc. | | In theory, if all developers are replaced, they should be able | to find a different job. The problem is that the different job | may have lower pay and status. | | There's really no need for UBI. | realharo wrote: | If there is no more demand for developers for the kind of | projects that most work on today, what do you think will be | the next area that they'll all try to get into? | | Automating all the other stuff that's left on the table. | waboremo wrote: | Do you genuinely believe machines can't handle most of those | jobs with ease? | | The only reason why they haven't already been replaced is | because humans can be exceptionally cheap. Much easier to | hire somebody to sit at a desk for $10/hour doing repetitive | tasks than spend millions implementing systems across the | board to do what they do (for now). | zeroonetwothree wrote: | While we have seem some huge leaps in AI, robotics is still | far behind human capability. Things like food preparation | are not anywhere close to being feasible right now. | | So perhaps in the medium future humans will be "stuck" | doing only physical tasks, while AIs take over everything | that can be done virtually. | czbond wrote: | There is a display at Meow Wolf (absurdist immersive art | experience) which paraphrased is "Thinking is for | machines, labor is for humans". May turn to be true... | intelVISA wrote: | I'll reply to this once GPT4 provides a thought for me to | borrow. | czbond wrote: | It should only cost you a few credits | waboremo wrote: | That is one of the common outcomes talked about. | Certainly nothing more stable right now than being an | Electrician or Machinist! | | I will say though, that for a lot of those jobs human- | replicating robotics isn't even necessary. We exaggerate | the difficulty required because we're still assuming that | the exact current system should stay in place. However, | sticking within food preparation example, look at those | elaborate cake vending machines found primarily in asian | countries. There really isn't a reason why McDonalds | can't do the same for some of their offerings, after all | most of their stuff is frozen anyways. | RivieraKid wrote: | Yes, I believe machines can't handle most of the jobs I | listed with ease. | waboremo wrote: | Cashiers, already replaced by self scanners, fewer and | fewer of them are found in stores, even if you do get | hired as a cashier you usually make horrible hours now. | Food preparation is another one hit huge by automation, | where it's become normal now for companies to announce | automated locations (like McDonalds and Taco Bell did | last year). Server, bartender, same thing applies. There | have already been police officer bots being tested. I | mean truly the list goes on, out of the ones you listed | really only electrician, construction worker, and | mechanic would be hardest to automate. | gjulianm wrote: | Honestly, this just seems like another tool. An amazing one, | yes, but a tool nevertheless. | | > Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as | delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because | markets will punish those who refuse. | | The same way coding without Internet feels antiquated, or | coding without autocomplete, or coding without fast compilation | times... | | If anything, progression of tools has shown several things: | | - That the more tools we have, the faster we can work and | iterate, the more value we can deliver in less time. | | - That IT work doesn't ever end. Tons of IT jobs exist only to | support IT itself. The arrival of AWS made sysadmins "obsolete" | but on the other hand created the need for SRE and DevOps | engineers. | | - The existence of tools that let "laypeople" do IT work do not | really delete those jobs. Tons of "nocode" tools exist so that | people can build their own websites, applications, etc. But | designers, coders still exist. | | - People still stay behind. Tons of companies still run on a | crappy NFS that's hosted in the IT guy closet. Others don't | have a webpage and use an @hotmail.com address for email (if | they even have email!). The market punishes, yeah, but not | _that_ hard. | nodogoto wrote: | [dead] | CalinR2 wrote: | Screenshooting both comments for a guaranteed agedlikemilk | SergeAx wrote: | We already had several tectonic shifts in software engineering | in the last ~50 years, and there was never a consequential | redice if engineering workforce, only otherwise. | idkwhoiam wrote: | Translating ideas into code has never been the bottle neck in | software development. Well, not in web dev anyways. Developers | spend very little time writing code compared to reading. You | still need all your expertise to guide copilot & evaluate its | suggestions. | | I see copilot as just another productivity tool. Combined with | ChatGPT it may save a few roundtrips to Stack Overflow too. | agentultra wrote: | It feels absurd. | | A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate | writing tests! Yay! | | Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it | explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated | specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from | examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the | reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense | and specify the correct properties? Can Chat-GPT discover | properties and prove theorems? | | We used to do this in code review where humans could explain | their reasoning. Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a | plausible-sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no | sense. We have to read every line it generates and make sure it | contains no errors, is properly specified, makes sense, etc... | something we're extremely ill-equipped to do. | | The problem of programming, for me, hasn't been about how much | code I write or how quickly I write it. It has always been | about solving the right problems with elegant solutions. The | code itself is an artifact of the real work. | | CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't understand | specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It can't take a | specification, generate a program, discover new abstractions | that make the solution more elegant, and explain its reasoning. | It can generate a heck of a lot of code though! Wow! Is it the | right code? Maybe! | | But that's what we get with humans, right? No! | | Humans can explain their reasoning. | wfeefwfwe wrote: | this all sounds very plausible and convincing until this | part: | | > But that's what we get with humans, right? No! | | > Humans can explain their reasoning. | | can you explain your reasoning as to why a language model | would never be able to match a human's ability to explain its | reasoning? | | i've met a lot of humans that are quite bad at this, and i | will likely never know for sure why they wrote the unit tests | that they wrote unless i rewrite those tests to myself. | | but if you have them explain their reasoning enough, and if | that reasoning is plausible enough, and if the relationship | between that reasoning and what they did is strong enough, | consistently enough -- you start to trust them. | | you don't trust gpt4 to write code for you. which makes | sense. but that doesn't mean as much as you think it means, i | think. | havelhovel wrote: | > can you explain your reasoning as to why a language model | would never be able to match a human's ability to explain | its reasoning? | | It's a language model, not a reasoning model. A lot of its | training data happens to be logical, so it sounds logical, | but it's still just acting on probability. Thinking it's | "explaining" anything it produces is a mistake. | adambard wrote: | Copilot user here. | | Copilot (the existing gpt-3 one) definitely helps at writing | unit tests. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't nail it, but one thing | it can do reliably is to repeat a pattern, and I don't know | about you, but my unit tests tend to repeat the same pattern | (with some tweaks to test this-or-that-case). Quite often it | infers the correct change from the name I gave the test | method, but even if it doesn't it'll write a 90% correct case | for me. I imagine the GPT-4 version will do more of the same | with better results. | | It cannot replace reasoning, but it can augment it (by | suggesting patterns and implementations from its latent space | that I hadn't thought of), and worst case it can replace | quite a bit of typing. | | Long-term, it remains to be seen how far | bigger/better/stronger LLMs can push the illusion of | rationality. In many fields, they may be able to simply build | their ability to pattern-match to beyond some threshold of | usefulness. Perhaps (some subset of) programming will be one | of them. | Xelynega wrote: | > one thing it can do reliably is repeat a pattern | | Isn't this something we've built into every modern | language(and arguably the entire point of languages)? If | you have multiple pieces of code that share code with | tweaks(to test this or that case for example), shouldn't | you parameterize the bulk of the code instead of getting | autocomplete to parameterize it for you and dump it into | your source file multiple times? | thornewolf wrote: | Testing best practices have the opposite philosophy for | the most part. Avoid abstraction as much as possible. Do | repeat yourself. Because a bug in tests is insidious, so | you want to minimize that. One of the best ways to | minimize bugs is to explicitly avoid abstraction. | simonw wrote: | Copilot helps me write parametrized unit tests. You might | find this example useful: | https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/writing-test-with- | copilot | adambard wrote: | Oh shit, you're right, I forgot about loops. Guess I'll | go uninstall copilot now. | SergeAx wrote: | I have a "Generate... -> Test for function" in my JetBrais | IDE out of the box for several years, and it takes care of | boilerplate pretty well. | adambard wrote: | That just generated an empty test function in a | convenient place for me. I'm not just talking about | boilerplate, it's definitely a more... organic-feeling | sort of pattern matching. In fact, one of the things I | find most interesting about it is the sort of mistakes it | makes, like generating wrong field names (as if it simply | took a guess). This is the sort of thing that I've grown | to expect the deterministic tooling of IDEs to get right, | so it always surprises me a bit. | | By the same token, often it takes a stab at generating | code based on something's name (plus whatever context | it's looking at) and does a better job than the IDE | could, because the IDE just sees datatypes and code | structure. It really does feel like a complementary tool. | rat9988 wrote: | You haven't tested how powerful copilot is, have you? | IanCal wrote: | Just a note I think it's 3.5 for the code work. 4 would | probably be prohibitively expensive to run and they carefully | mention that they use 4 for the PRs and a few other bits but | not the code gen - there they just talk about chatgpt. I'd | love to be wrong about this. | bavila wrote: | > Can it explain its reasoning? | | Yes, actually, it can. | jeremyjh wrote: | That's interesting, considering the fact that it doesn't do | any reasoning. Sure, it can generate plausible sounding | explanations, but it generates those just like it generates | everything: one token at a time, based on the expected | probability of that token appearing next if this text were | found in the wild. | deeviant wrote: | Based on your statement, I feel you haven't used GPT based | code much. The code it generates is generally beautifully | organized and commented. | | Sure, it can be flat out wrong, but it is always eminently | readable. Self-documentating code _with_ clean comments, far | above the standard I see on average human code. That 's about | as good as "explaining it's reasoning" as you get. | | Also, you can literally ask chatGPT to explain the code, line | by the line, and it will. So there's that. | | Is it ready now? Certainly not if it will be expected to the | do the entire job of a SWE. But it is already extremely | useful, especially to less experienced devs as both a | production for specific tasks and as learning tool. And it | will only get better. | steve_adams_86 wrote: | > Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can | it explain its reasoning? | | In my own project I've got it generating solutions to errors, | and if possible, it also generates simple unit tests to | validate the fix. What I haven't implemented yet (and likely | won't, because Copilot does it now) but I have tested is | generating a pull request describing the fix, why it works, | and the same for the tests. | | > Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a plausible- | sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no sense. | | With limited scopes, it works quite well. For example, | something fails because a DOM reference is undefined in a | React component. GPT will add a condition to assert that the | reference is present, then generate a simple test which | mounts the component with stubbed references that are present | or undefined using jsdom. The tests makes sense. A quick scan | shows they're sensible, and upon running them, they do work. | | I began adding a recursive feature which would automatically | debug issues with its own solutions, but it can get a little | weird in some cases. Likely due to bad prompting - I haven't | dedicated enough time to it. But it can also make it so tests | with errors are revised and corrected so they will at least | run. | | All of that with a coherent explanation of what was changed, | why, tests, and why they assert the fix is valid. | | Is it perfect? No. Could it be useful? Absolutely. I'm a | little sad Copilot makes my project redundant because it was | actually very exciting to build. There is real potential | here. I started the project in order to learn and validate | GPT, and I'm very convinced it has genuine utility and | massive potential. | | > CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't | understand specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It | can't take a specification, generate a program, discover new | abstractions that make the solution more elegant, and explain | its reasoning. It can generate a heck of a lot of code | though! Wow! Is it the right code? Maybe! | | I think the key is limited scopes. Like with the React | component example, the solution is small, easy to reason | about, and tedious to resolve yourself. I understand why it | doesn't work, I get the error, and spinning up an entire | branch and PR to clean up the mistake is a bad use of my | time. I don't want Copilot/AI to work magic, but I'm okay | with it resolving minor mistakes and misuses of languages and | libraries here and there. | | I do think it will grow from here to do more and actually be | good at it, though. | waboremo wrote: | I'm not sure this works out in the long run. We're currently | using extremely generalized tools here, it's difficult for it | to establish any "reasoning" when it does not have a | "history" to rely on so to speak. Which is where our | reasoning stems from, history. We opt for Solution B because | we previously tested Solution A in another similar project. | | I just don't see this as being a barrier for too long. Not | when more companies opt into training data internally. | geraneum wrote: | That won't happen only using text. Language does not | capture the full spectrum of thought which is what is at | work in case of an expert. Companies training their custom | models or increasing the model size, etc. won't change this | fundamentally but it might help in some aspects. We need | models that can observe/capture the "history" from | everything else (i.e. physical world) in addition to text. | Or perhaps mix LLMs with other models in order for our | models to posses something we call "common sense". This | common sense is needed when you transition from "Solution | B" to "because we previously tested Solution A in another | similar project". There are a LOT going on with this | transition between A and B that might not be apparent to | you. | | But in general I agree with the basic premise of what you | say in that, it will eventually happen. | ogogmad wrote: | Why is it absurd? If it writes readable code, you can check | it. Writing the first version often takes a long time, so | this is clearly a breakthrough. | joshvm wrote: | Then there's a vicious circle. You need to have technical | expertise to evaluate whether the code from these models is | fit for purpose. Until these models get sufficiently | reliable that you can use them without worrying if the | results are correct then you still need developers. This | may be much better than Stack Overflow, but I imagine it | will still suffer from the same problems with regard to | copying "answer" code. | | I would give an answer from ChatGPT where it confidently | told me that I should evaluate an object detection model by | ranking matches using negative IoU (and it indeed generated | code to do it and gave a confident explanation of how this | was normal in computer vision, but it was completely | backwards). | bhj wrote: | I would much rather use it as a code review tool than | become the code review tool. I suspect the latter will | happen at a lot of companies, though. | sh4rks wrote: | Why? When the latter is just as effective but also much | quicker? | jeremyjh wrote: | It isn't just as effective for me. No matter how much I'd | like to, I can't review code with the same thoughtfulness | and thoroughness that I apply when I write it. I know the | same is true for the people who have reviewed my PRs as | well, but maybe its different for others. I do use | Copilot but mostly it only generates one liners for me | that save a little time. | agentultra wrote: | Empirical studies on large-scale projects employing | informal code review (the study I'm talking about | monitored the Qt project repositories) suggest that | humans have a very low impact on error rates. Reviewing | more than ~200LOC every couple of hours makes the effect | disappear. | | So you're not alone. You can even point to the plethora | of "find the undefined behaviour," tests: humans are | really bad at finding errors in code. | globular-toast wrote: | Good. I'd rather not have to work forever. The whole point of | this job is that I'm lazy. I don't want to do any work so I | make machines do it for me. Why are people so attached to | having to work? | eggsmediumrare wrote: | I'm not attached to having to work, I'm attached to paying my | mortgage and buying groceries. | hatefulmoron wrote: | I'm in my 20s, I'm a bit sad to think of the possibility that | I've missed the boat of human ingenuity. It's not like if AI | puts me out of work I'll be free to create works of art -- | GPT-12 will do that much better than me, too. | | Maybe this sounds naive to you, but if I'm not good for | anything, what am I supposed to be doing? How should I see | myself? | lugu wrote: | I feel you, in the same time we have been through so many | changes. Some people still prefer Vim (at least i do) over full | fledge IDE with refactoring helpers. Think of stack overflow, | not a habit for everyone. Using macros/snippet to generate | code, not that popular. Iterative development in a debugger | (think Smalltalk), didn't make printf obsolete. The bottom line | is: all software is legacy. Deleting code is the preferred way | to debug. Finding the correct abstraction or most simple way to | get what you need takes more than the ability to dump code into | a computer. Free software didn't ruin the profession, quite the | opposite. | cidergal wrote: | There is something to say about how we will not push UBI until | automation comes for _our_ job. | prewett wrote: | I think you're doing that thing that makes software developers' | estimates chronically low: we find a pathway to the solution | and think, great, that's basically 80% done, and we don't think | about everything else. Let's take a login screen for iPads, | should be easy, right? | | ---- MagicAI, write me a login screen for iPads. The project | should be configured to be iPad only. I want a logo in the | center and under it the login and password entry textboxes. The | password entry should not be in plaintext. Put a login button | underneath the password entry. | | Actually, the logo + textboxes + login button should be | centered as a group. The logo should be centered horizontally | within the group as well. Make the login button right-aligned. | | The login button should be right aligned within the group, but | the text of the button should be centered within the button. | | Put "Username" and "Password" labels to the left of the | appriopriate text fields | | Make sure that the labels are the same width, so that the left | edges of the text fields are aligned. | | Put a half em margin in-between the labels and text fields. | Actually, make the vertical margin between elements in the | group a half em, too. | | By "margin" previously, I meant "spacing", my mistake. Please | fix. | | Does the German translation of "username" or "password" cause | the text field to be too short, especially on an iPad Mini in | portrait mode? | | Fix the alignment to work correctly in both portrait and | landscape mode. The group should have a 10% left and right | margin in both modes. | | The keypad enter button should say "Login" when entering text | for the password field, but should remain "Done" for the | username field. | | Great, now add a waiting indicator while waiting for | verification from the server. | | Actually, put the indicator to the right of the login button, | but do not make it part of the group for alignment purposes; it | should be in the margin. And turn the indicator off if the | server times out. Oh, add some error text for the error. | | I said error text, not error dialog. Never give me a disruptive | dialog if there is a way to obviously display the error text. | Make this a permanent setting on my account. Also, make this a | permanent setting on all my colleagues' accounts, and | especially the accounts of the low-cost outsourcing companies | that make the apps I use. | | File bug report to MagicAI HQ that there is no way to make some | directions permanent. Include in the report that there should | be a way to look at the set of permanent instructions, and | automatic reporting if new instructions contradict old | instructions. | | Disable the login button if there is no text in the username or | password field, or if the password is too short. | | Whoah, make sure that the text field scrolls so that it is | visible above the keyboard, especially on an iPad mini in | landscape mode. It should scroll back down to its original | position when the keyboard disappears. ---- | | I guess I'm not seeing how this is too much different from what | I actually did in creating the login page in the first place. | That's even without the dialogue where you try to figure out | why the alignment isn't doing what you told it. | | You might also want to keep your instructions in a text file | some place, in case you need to change them and regenerate the | code. Maybe there should be a preprocessor of sorts, so that | you can add comments to the file explaining your reasoning for | certain instructions, or to not include some instructions on | certain environments. You might also want some way to refer to | a set of previous instructions, so you could say "do these | things what we did over here". We could call this a "function" | since "procedure" sounds too much like ancient Pascal, and math | is cool. | fn-mote wrote: | > For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at | risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the | writing is on the wall. | | My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging | complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. | | Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are | still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we | consider quality. Now maybe you're going to see a larger and | larger gap between F500 companies and the rest (surely you do | already), but playing out the consequences is a long and | interesting story. | | > coding without AI will feel as antiquated and inefficient | [...]. And resistance is futile because markets will punish | those who refuse. | | Fortunately, the "punishment" by the market will just be | reduced salaries. Move out of the Bay Area now. :) | | > And coding is just one of the many applications where AI an | replace brains. | | And writing about those is interesting. With the development of | DALL-E (etc), I would say coding isn't even the primary | interesting application. (If "it's not AI", whatever... that's | not the point.) Or not yet. | tauntz wrote: | > My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging | complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. | | That might be true for you and me but imagine somebody fresh | out from university - the job market for junior devs will | totally collapse in the near-near future. And then what? | Where do the mid-level engineers come from if there are no* | junior roles? Where will the future senior level engineers | come from? We're certainly living in interesting times.. | | *: There will be some artisanal companies who will pride | themselves in having hand-written, AI-free code. These | companies will be a minority and 90% of junior level software | development jobs will disappear in no time. | immawizard wrote: | Mid level engineers will come from building something like | GitHub, Netflix or Gmail over the weekend using powerful | AI. The skills of current senior engineers will be much | easier to gain since the feedback loop for software | architecture and design will be down to hours instead of | quarters. Being able to architect massive software systems | well, will be expected from a new graduates. | | The role of junior software developers will not be needed, | just as we don't need people doing multiplication by hand. | intelVISA wrote: | This seems the likely end result. We'll always need SWEs, | of course, but gone will be the days of entire dev teams | working toward a common product. | | I suspect SWE may trend toward other ailing fields like | law with individual devs working on entire 'cases' and it | being very competitive; rather than the recent "20min Js | tutorial on YT to SF startup" industry. | dgb23 wrote: | Senior developer aren't senior because they can type code | very fast. They are senior because they can take on | responsibilities and make decisions. A junior that types | code very fast is a junior that types code very fast. | immawizard wrote: | I think we're in agreement. | | The key here is what are you taking responsibilities and | decisions for. Senior engineers take decisions which | consequences will be apparent in a year or two. If | productivity increases to the point where features that | take months to deliver take days, the decisions made | _currently_ by senior engineers can be taken by fresh | graduates. | | There're still going to be senior roles, but their scope | will be much bigger and expertise sought will be | different than what senior engineers do currently. No one | will hire a senior engineer just because they can | architect and deliver a scalable SaaS product on a short | timeline. | | Engineers who learn and adapt will be fine. Engineers who | dropped learning the moment they graduated from | college... not so much. | visarga wrote: | Mid level engineers will be surpassed two years later. And | then seniors. But we'll still need humans in the loop, | humans who understand. | teaearlgraycold wrote: | Nah, I'll leave the bay once salaries drop. Not years before. | sharemywin wrote: | I wouldn't own housing there. | teaearlgraycold wrote: | I don't! | golergka wrote: | > Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are | still contracting out to get web sites | | They used to, 10 to 15 years ago. Now they just hire a SMM | specialist to set up their Instagram account. Why would they | bother with a website? | waboremo wrote: | Even those places that do have their own website (as | opposed to just relying on Facebook Pages and Google's | information sidebar), they just use Squarespace or Shopify. | Shopify in particular has also been incorporating a lot of | AI into their tooling as well, reducing the need to hire | copywriters, translators, etc. | goldfeld wrote: | Almost a decade ago I jumped ship as a programmer for several | reasons, and since '18 I am definitely not coding at all. | Friends and family have wondered much at my path and letting go | of what has become the one promised career for ever larger | parts of the population, and making my inroads into the arts | and literature, finally settling a bit with the profession of | writing on many capacities. Now I look back more gadly than | before, as I hadn't really imagined that coders would be on the | very frontline of impacted jobs. I think the 10x will become a | sad concrete thing, with salaries crunching and a team lead | expected to take up the work of teams being fired, resorting to | AI minions. It's a crazy tables have turned situation. | | So that really I'm writing with and about AI[0] to get the best | of my technical and literary backgrounds, and to reach good | audiences. | | Meanwhile writing is safer because contrary to code, a | personality and a personal life will ever be valued in flesh | and blood writers. And how could an AI, ever write love poems | with a soul if it has not opportunities for falling desperately | in love, suffering, changing wholesale because of an experience | like that? It could emulate it. But readers want to read real | sufferers, mortals who get old and lose their looks and so | forth, not little gods of sillicon. | | [0]: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative- | revie... | causi wrote: | _I think the 10x will become a sad concrete things, with | salaries crunching and a team lead expected to take up the | work of teams being fired, resorting to AI minions. It 's a | crazy tables have turned situation._ | | I don't really see that it's sad. Imagine truly democratized | programming. Not like how the refrigerator did the ice man, | but in how Youtube and smartphone cameras did video | production. A rising tide that lifts all boats and can give | absolutely anyone a taste of what they could achieve with a | little effort. | naillo wrote: | HNs version of ads | [deleted] | goldfeld wrote: | Point taken, though I have long thought the ads were | officially the hiring and also the Launch HNs that are now | popping left and right from YC W23, and every single one | naturally abou ML. | substation13 wrote: | I think replacing a SWE with AI means we have reached AGI | levels. | | However, GPT 4, which is amazing but not able to do what a | SWE does, is already making concept artists, voice actors and | content marketers obsolete. The arts are far more susceptible | to this technology. | | Anyone who thinks SWE is generating Python snippets doesn't | really understand the role. | layer8 wrote: | Maybe you need to get yourself into an application domain with | more bespoke protocols and tooling, and domain-specific | expertise, that aren't public on the internet and that AI | therefore doesn't have much of an idea of. At least at this | point, AI is only of little help in my daily work, | unfortunately, because I'd have to first explain it orders of | magnitude more context than fits into its token buffer. | kiviuq wrote: | Porn? | | (scnr) | [deleted] | danwee wrote: | I have the opposite feeling by watching their mini video demos. | All I see is: engineers blindly commiting and pushing what | copilots spits at them. Not only that, also the PRs | descriptions/comments will all be one TAB+enter away. That | means many things will go wrong and more engineering time will | be spent reviewing nice-looking code good that only does what | it's supposed to do in 80% of the cases. Meaning, it's gonna be | hard to debug those 20% remaining cases. | | Besides, coding is probably the least of my problems. Dealing | with people is harder. AI can help there as well, but | ultimately people like to interact with people (see the whole | trend about RTO)... we cannot stand each other faces via Zoom | => we are not gonna stand talking to an AI. | nivenkos wrote: | UBI is a half-measure, we need democratic, communal control of | industry. | 0xDEF wrote: | >we need democratic, communal control of industry | | That is called socialism. I don't mind socialism and state | owned enterprises as long as the force of market competition | is still at play. That is the reason state owned enterprises | don't suck in China. They have multiple SOEs within the same | fields like car manufacturing and telecommunication competing | against each other. | pleb_nz wrote: | The state doesn't own SOE in pure socialism, society and | the workers do. This is the idea behind socialism and I | don't think anywhere on the planet practises true socialism | and instead it's morphed or combined where it is said to be | used. | czbond wrote: | Treasury just needs to "print those dollas" and make Musk | even more so richest person in the world. I'm being serious. | | Retaining the profits and placing them back as UBI could | work.... although if we do that, the politicians will just | find a tax or another project that needs the money before | giving it to people. | what-no-tests wrote: | Agreed - we don't control our destiny as a people by buying | what they're selling with free money we get as a door prize | for existing. | skybrian wrote: | We do have that for many government projects and they often | don't go well, so I'm not sure what improvements you're | expecting? | visarga wrote: | > We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. | Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. | | There will be more developing than ever, but humans will sit on | a different place in the stack. We'll be more like team | managers. Stable Diffusion can make pretty pictures by itself, | but only when a human directs it then it can have value. | pleb_nz wrote: | The point is you'll need less humans to do the same work. | Possible far less, maybe it'll be a smaller ratio to start | with but eventually that ratio will grow. | | Most organizations are there to make profit for shareholders, | if more profit can be obtained through less hires while still | meeting money making goals the you can bet your bottom dollar | they will hire less people where possible. | | People early in their careers should be ready for this as one | day there may be far less times available to them in this | field. | wilsonnb3 wrote: | Literally every programming advancement from punch cards to | now has made you need less people to do the same amount of | work but we have more programmers working today than ever | before. | | Your outlook sounds plausible in a vacuum but doesn't match | reality. | randomdata wrote: | _> Just like we need less manual labor in farms today._ | | Back of the napkin suggests we have approximately the same | amount of manual labor in farms today. The difference is that | the same amount of labor today is able to feed a much larger | population. | | This may simply mean much more software written, not fewer | developers. | airstrike wrote: | _> Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we | created ourselves._ | | Man, that is some food for thought. Beautifully put. | ChancyChance wrote: | Here's a simple way to tell if your expertise is at risk: | | - If you can get more done by working more hours, your job is | at risk. | | When I was a programmer for most of past life, this was this | case. Now I've got multiple decades under my belt and am a h/w | and system architect. I can't get more done by grinding. My job | depends on sharing information with other people, that have | their own schedules, resource dependencies, supply chains, and | pricing, and arriving at best fit solutions to move complex | projects forward. | | I think if you want to protect yourself from being replaced by | AI, you need to be part of a larger network where the | challenges are more about synthesizing information than | grinding. | | My $0.02. | Arkhaine_kupo wrote: | People said the same thing about Excel in the 80s and 90s. | There are more accountants now than then. | | There might be more programmers out of this developments than | before. It just will lower the barrier of entry, and increase | productivity. Like most tools | pleb_nz wrote: | Companies are there to make money. If the same job currently | dinner by 5 people can now be done by 3, and it means more | profit for shareholders, what do you think shareholder will | want? | | While profit is the main driver, it'll mean smaller teams | | Not today, not with current tech, maybe in the near future | though | istjohn wrote: | But just like building more roads induces more demand by | making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of | custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps | one day soon it will be affordable for every company of | every size to have a fully custom ERP solution instead of | shoehorning their business processes into Salesforce or the | like. Perhaps every family will have a custom app managing | their household's smart home appliances, childrens' | allowances, autonomous vehicles, home maintenance, bill | payment, child homework tracking, etc. in an integrated | system. | pleb_nz wrote: | Are you saying don't worry, don't have a fallback plan, | everything will be honky dory? | Arkhaine_kupo wrote: | Well productivity is up 240% since the 1950s. So due to a | single person being more efficient than 2 in 1950 and the | 43.5 million workforce we can extrapolate that no more than | 20 million workers will be needed nowadays. | | Except in 2020 there were 152 million employed americans, | with a productivity 2.4x higher than 1950s, or a | cummulative workforce of 365 million 1950 americans | working. And somehow they all had stuf to do and work on | pleb_nz wrote: | I dont think that's a fair and direct comparison tbh. | There's a lot of new industries now that people have | diverged into and population growth has exploded which I | hope for the sake of the planet and human kind is going | to slow , at least until we're in a better position to | manage bigger populations without killing the planet and | other life. | | I'll be happy if I'm wrong, but are you confident enough | to bet that there won't be less need for general | developers and engineers and not have a plan in case? | Personally I would be looking at my options In case I | needed to pivot and not waiting 5o find out. | Arkhaine_kupo wrote: | > There's a lot of new industries now | | And if this tech is really revolutionary there won't be | new industries? Have we peaked? | | > but are you confident enough to bet that there won't be | less need for general developers and engineers and not | have a plan in case? | | I am confident there will not be a lack of work. Whether | the roles are similar is a different question. Actuaries | and accountants look very different now to before excel | was common place. Web developers were not a thing before | the internet. | | If the revolution comes, and jobs are no longer needed, | perhpas there is an industry for prompt engineers. Or | model fine tunning experts. Dev ops roles to connect | super computers to Modelling APIs. Who knows, but the | skills of a decent Engineer are on problem solving, on | learning new ideas, on applying problem solving laterally | those are such broad skills that is hard for a job market | to exist without needing them. | devrob wrote: | This would be the contrarian perspective, and it's an | interesting thought to consider. If memory serves, I think | Marc A points out in an old Youtube conference video how most | new technologies follow the Promethean myth in their | relationship to society. | | Funny enough your observation of | | > "There are more accountants now than then." | | could be extrapolated from in two ways | | The optimistic perspective might suppose technological | development gives rise to new marketplace adaptations and | creation of new and tangential jobs. For example, Facebook / | Social Networks / Search creating new roles like: | Influencers, Social Media Managers, Search Engine | Optimization, et cetera. | | For the pessimist perspective, I think you could suppose the | "end state" of all technological progress in human societies | is, eventually, an oligopoly of two industries: bureaucracy | (legal) and politics (marketing). | brachika wrote: | I remember reading Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is | Near' (a book with bold predictions about human development and | future) and thinking this guy is nuts, we are decades if not | centuries away from these predictions. Well, now I don't feel | so comfortable. | substation13 wrote: | The book was way over optimistic but many of his predictions | are coming true, a few decades late. | | I might have to revisit it! | bwanab wrote: | Historically, this response doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes, | farm labor became redundant, but it became redundant because of | machines that had to be built, maintained and repaired. People | who would have been on the farm their whole lives moved to the | city and got jobs that paid well and lived possibly better | lives as a result. | snickerbockers wrote: | >Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise | is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but | the writing is on the wall. | | I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen | any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or | even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it | to create something that isn't like anything in its training | set? | | My experience is that GPT just makes shit up that looks | plausible at a glance when it doesn't have an answer instead of | just admitting that it doesn't know; this is obviously very | dangerous when it's supposed to be writing computer programs. | That OpenAI hasn't made any progress towards fixing this makes | me wonder if it's even possible for the GPT to understand that | sometimes it doesn't understand. At the very least it must be a | non-trivial problem. | ctoth wrote: | Counterpoint: how often do you as a developer create | something totally novel that has never been built before? | snickerbockers wrote: | I have to make new things pretty often. If you step outside | of the high-level cloud/webdev stuff that most people seem | to be obsessed with these days, there are a lot of non- | trivial problems being solved in lower-level software such | as device drivers, kernels, and compilers. | | EDIT: i misinterpreted what you were saying, initially i | thought you were asking _how_ i make new things, not _how | often_ i make new things. my original reply is below. | | weelll, i think about it real hard and do research? Not | sure what your point is, but I definitely don't solve these | problems by trying to find somebody else's solution to | copy, or just dumping a bunch of C code that doesn't do | anything and calling it a day like GPT would. | [deleted] | naillo wrote: | Reminder that they read your code as part of this which then | feeds their models. Basically you're paying to replace yourself | long term. | nemo44x wrote: | Wow, Microsoft was so ahead of the curve when they bought Github. | They saw this coming and knew they had to acquire them to make it | into this kind of thing. Just absolutely impressive execution | here. Especially since Github would not have been able to do this | on its own. Just an absolute perfect acquisition here. They don't | often go right, but when they do so much new value is created for | everyone. | singularity2001 wrote: | I am praying for some alternative platform to take the throne | off Github. This is way too much power in the wrong hands. The | competing product needs to add a fundamental new idea or | feature. Gitlab as it is doesn't cut it. | steve76 wrote: | [dead] | eawlot3000 wrote: | the future is here. lets gooo | cpb wrote: | Better PR descriptions explain why. | singularity2001 wrote: | Jetbrains and NeoVim logos also in there: | https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x ! | | Above "Can't wait for the future? " | azemetre wrote: | It doesn't say it in the blog post, but sign up to the preview | does require a paid subscription to copilot. | | Unsure if this applies to those who are given copilot for free | (doesn't apply to me as I pay). | cristiioan wrote: | I was able to apply with my student account(it has copilot and | pro for free). | ertucetin wrote: | It seems as though all the companies deliberately agreed to wait | until 2023 to release their AI products | ivxvm wrote: | So it still can't write new code according to project's patterns | / conventions and "core" library? | vbezhenar wrote: | I'm not impressed with this announcement. | | What I miss with Copilot is not reflected there: | | 1. Separate hotkeys to accept either single token from the | suggestion or single line. Often Copilot tries to autocomplete 50 | lines method which I'm not happy with. | | 2. Ability to edit existing text. It only inserts new text. I'd | like something like multiple cursors or macroses working | automagically by recognising similar text patterns below current | position and applying similar edits. | | 3. AI linting. If some code looks obviously wrong, I'd like to | know about it. | pjot wrote: | To your first point, `cmd + <right>` will accept the suggestion | word by word. | vbezhenar wrote: | Thanks! | hislaziness wrote: | Copilot with GPT-4 model, chat and voice, pull requests, command | line, and docs to answer questions. | nico wrote: | Are you doing that? Any specific tools/services you use for it? | unity1001 wrote: | I dont get it - has the copyright problem with AI generated code | trained on other people's repositories been solved yet? | renewiltord wrote: | I currently use copilot in my terminal by using copilot.vim and | then using C-x C-e in my command line to bring it into my editor | but I have to exit and re-enter to get traditional autocomplete | which I find annoying. Paths come easy since neovim will complete | this for me with Deoplete but the rest is not straightforward. | jacooper wrote: | Looks like anyone who left Github because of Copilot won nothing, | as GPT4, the new model used for new Copilot includes everything, | not only Github code. So even if you uploaded it to GitLab, | codeberg or Sourcehut it still trained on your code... | | That supreme court case is becoming more important by the day. | visarga wrote: | > A ChatGPT-like experience in your editor with GitHub Copilot | Chat: We are bringing a chat interface to the editor that's | focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS | Code and Visual Studio. This does far more than suggest code. | GitHub Copilot Chat is not just a chat window. It recognizes what | code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown, and | it's deeply embedded into the IDE. A developer can get in-depth | analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, | generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs. | | This is what I am excited about - seeing its errors and other | things it needs in order to accomplish tasks. Can't wait to see | it in action. | DeathArrow wrote: | Microsoft lost some trains trains with mobile and servers. But | they won with AI, developer tools, cloud and gaming. | ComplexSystems wrote: | There has been this bug with Copilot in VSCode for just about | forever where it only suggests one line at a time. People have | been asking for this to be fixed for months and months: | https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522 | | Do the people here in the comments section, who seem to be | getting good results with Copilot, somehow not have this issue? | If so, what is the workaround? | aldarisbm wrote: | At which point do we not need to understand what is in front of | us? | | eg: The Code. | | I was using chatgpt, with a groovy project (havent used groovy in | years), I prompted chatgpt for an answer, and it gave me a | solution. The solution (to me) was a bit obfuscated, but it | worked. Since I'm only using groovy to figure out this one task, | it would've been extremely easy for me to not check what the | solution did, and just keep going with my day. Luckily, I'm | curious and wanted to know how things worked. | | What if we increasingly stop to care, because of the confidence | instilled by the media. | | "It can make errors" but also "This show SIGNIFICANT improvements | over last generation (which tbh was pretty okay)" | | A lot of dis/misinformation. | | I like using copilot/chatgpt, but it's incredibly hard to believe | that we wont just become 100% reliant on this tool, and coding | will be something akin to assembly code to engineers. | jnovek wrote: | One hypothesis I have is that the future of programming is | natural language and the "compiler" is a LLM. This would be no | different from the days when C took over for asm. | layer8 wrote: | The difference is that natural language doesn't have a well- | defined semantics and is open to interpretation. Programming | languages being compiled, on the other hand, have precise, | well-defined semantics (excluding UB I guess) that you can | formally reason about. | | Using an LLM for programming is not like compiling, it's like | employing a developer you either have to trust how they may | happen to interpret your instructions, or to manually double- | check their work. | NeuNeurosis wrote: | This was my take on the tech. Ultimately it will need to be | prompted. Now the form that prompt takes is open to a bunch | of speculation but even if it gets superhuman at producing | code or any output it is directionless by itself, for now. We | are what direct its ability, which I think is really cool. I | think getting good at extracting exact outputs from the LLM | will be the new engineer. | elevenoh wrote: | [dead] | kumarvvr wrote: | A curious question. Would it be possible to build LLMs off of | bytecode / compiled code, and then translate it back to different | programming language codes? | | Is that a viable way to get more fine-tuned outputs from these | models? | mad0 wrote: | I don't think so, bytecode / machine code must be really | precise, while LLMs are producing nondeterministic outputs (at | least GPT). Add "hallucinating" of the output to the pile and | right now I think it's infeasible. | bilsbie wrote: | So how do I get started with this. Explain like I'm a vim cgi-bin | programmer. | Someone1234 wrote: | Just to save others from wasting their time (and free trial): The | Copilot extension in full Visual Studio (i.e. NOT VS Code) is | super terrible, broken, and buggy. It is so bad it is worse than | nothing (literally, it can make Visual Studio lag out). But don't | take my word for it, read the reviews: | | https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c... | | This is the polar opposite of VS Code where it works super well | and reviews great accordingly. In my opinion if you're a Visual | Studio developer who wants AI assist, you'll need to figure out | how to open your solution in VS Code instead to use Copilot or | just pay the $20/month for ChatGPT Plus then copy/paste. | | PS - This isn't a version specific thing, it has been broken | since launch. They've been replying to reviews with "Try Copilot | version [vNext] with Visual Studio [latest]" since last December | to last week, yet the one-star reviews keep coming in unabated. | Funny enough they recently replied to a complaint with "The VS | Code version does this!" | squeegmeister wrote: | I haven't noticed any issues with it, other than it | occasionally just not chiming in. I'm using vs2022 on windows | fwiw. | | That said, it wouldn't surprise me if vscode is getting | preferential treatment | symlinkk wrote: | Visual Studio is a legacy product. You should be switching to | VSCode. | Someone1234 wrote: | Tell that to Microsoft. .Net's VS Code support is a joke | relative to Visual Studio (as opposed to TS which is better | on VS Code by far). People aren't using Visual Studio (and | spending $3K+/year) because they WANT to. | veec_cas_tant wrote: | Visual Studio has free versions for Windows and Mac [1] | | [1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/ | steve_adams_86 wrote: | I have no illusions that what I've been building was ever going | to be commercial or even particularly useful (it just offers code | improvements, bug fixes, etc. as errors are piped into the system | - it's very rudimentary but neat), but it's striking right now | how incredibly deep Microsoft's moat in this arena is right now. | | I realized it would be best as a VS Code extension in its current | form and started writing that this morning. I was thinking Github | would do this _eventually_ , it was obvious -- copilot already | existed and was primed for this -- but evidently they'd already | built it a while ago. I was also thinking eventually it could be | a bot which generates pull requests based on error correction, | but... They did that too. | | If I wanted to go all in one this project, say as a hypothetical | competitor to Copilot, I don't see how it would be possible to | succeed. Any clever UI improvements would rapidly find their way | into Copilot, offering far better solutions due to their absurd | access to pertinent data. | | They can even train Copilot to resolve errors based on how | they've been resolved in the past; it could probably patch all | kinds of common errors reliably soon. | | I think this is cool in the sense that it'll be genuinely useful | to people, but frightening to realize how dominant MS is here, in | this moment. Maybe I'm not creative enough and I can't see a way | to build something novel with this which they haven't already. | That's arguably likely. At the same time... I'm a little shaken | at how narrow of an opportunity anyone had to try to get into | this space. I don't think it's a good thing. | chrisan wrote: | Is there a way to talk to copilot after something has been made? | For example: I just asked it to search for something on a public | api in a comment and let it auto complete the function. | | The resulting code was pretty decent except it included a hard | coded access_token in the url. This was a blank project, I don't | even have an access token for this api - guessing someone posted | theirs in a public repo at some point. | | Is there a way to talk to copilot at this point to refine the | code? | muny wrote: | What I normally do in cases like this is set up the necessary | scaffolding for the solution. In your case, that could be | introducing a variable named something like `access_token` for | it to substitute into the URL. | | Then, when you trigger a suggestion it's very likely that | CoPilot will use your `access_token` variable. | drBonkers wrote: | I think this is what Copilot Chat will do. | chrisan wrote: | ah yes, you are correct. Visual Studio (code) only at the | moment | lovasoa wrote: | GitHub Copilot X is currently a representation of GitHub's vision | for the future rather than an available product offering of | GitHub Copilot. As we continue to design, test, and build | features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also | taking the time to determine the best way to provide them to our | customers. | sqs wrote: | From https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x (FAQ: When | will GitHub Copilot X be available and how much does it cost?) | [deleted] | w-m wrote: | I tried getting myself on the CLI waitlist | (https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli/). That they use | ffmpeg as the example hits a huge pain point for me. But: | | "Next Waitlist by GitHub Next would like permission to: Act on | your behalf | | Not owned or operated by GitHub" | | Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give permissions | to an app to act in my account? An app that isn't even officially | from GitHub? | | This sets a bad example for permission requests, getting people | to just click through the dialog, which requests too much access, | and from the wrong domain. | localhost wrote: | While I don't remember to use it (too much AI in too many | tools!) Warp has this feature as well "Warp AI". This is what | it told me for the demo scenario: ffmpeg -i | input.mp4 -i watermark.png -filter_complex "overlay=10:10" | output.mp4 | | Bunch of descriptive words too. | macNchz wrote: | It's interesting because the Copilot for PRs preview uses an | app that does say "Owned and Operated by GitHub". Probably just | an oversight, but I'm pretty sensitive about what access GitHub | apps have, especially given the list of major attacks that have | happened in recent years that were initiated by someone | sneaking malicious payloads in somewhere along the development | pipeline. | | Curious why they'd use a totally different domain in the first | place-how much access do you think you could get to private | repos just by cloning that page onto githubfuture.com | (available) and spearphishing interesting targets? | w-m wrote: | Signing up for the technical preview of Copilot Chat also | worked as expected, it was just a checkmark and a button on | github.com, not even an oauth dialog. | darepublic wrote: | +1 for copilot is good for ffmpeg. Recently did a project | involving complicated ffmpeg filters, it could handle them on | it's own quite well. | pastor_bob wrote: | Interesting, how does this know what executables are available | on your PATH? | nicky0 wrote: | I guess since it runs does a shell executable, it can simply | examine the path. | joshmanders wrote: | > Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give | permissions to an app to act in my account? An app that isn't | even officially from GitHub? | | Because it uses GitHub's oauth flow, all applications who use | this flow show the same stuff. | justin_oaks wrote: | OAuth allows the use of different scopes for different levels | of access. So just because it uses OAuth doesn't mean it has | to require major account access. | | I assume the problem is that GitHub doesn't have sufficiently | granular permissions (OAuth scopes), or that the requesting | app doesn't use the correct scopes. | Bedon292 wrote: | I was wondering the same thing. It seems like it is labeled | weirdly since it is part of GitHub, but definitely was triple | checking what was going on with that. | ilaksh wrote: | There are several CLI programs like this. I built mine before | ChatGPT came out so it uses text-davinci-003. It | https://github.com/runvnc/askleo If you google for ChatGPT CLI | I assume some will come up and those are probably better | because they are cheaper and faster. | filmgirlcw wrote: | It's officially from GitHub. There is some weird language (that | I'll absolutely pass feedback on to the team), I think because | GitHub Next is a different organization from GitHub proper, but | I can assure you, this is an official GitHub app. | | But I totally agree that this isn't a great/clear message about | where this is from. | madeofpalk wrote: | I raised this concern before about how unclear this is and | the concern was pretty much dismissed | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539150 | | "Techies" often lament about how silly users are about | falling for phishing tricks, but then they also routinely | make it so difficult to determine what's legit from what's | fake. | basch wrote: | >routinely make it so difficult to determine what's legit | from what's fake. | | Like the amount of times on my phone where I get prompted | for a username and password different from the app im in | (to make some kind of connection) but then suppress the url | from visibility. An astoundingly poor design choice that | has proliferated into every single variant of that | interface design flow. | cyrusatjam wrote: | Not to mention, the app you're in can inject JS into the | page it renders. Best practice is to open in your default | browser and then allow the deeplink in the callback_uri | to return you back to the original app | BubbleRings wrote: | This becoming the top thread here might get their | attention. You have a very good point. | filmgirlcw wrote: | Totally agree. I did the same double-take with some stuff | at Universe and I work here. As Idan said back then, there | are _lots_ of reasons that we want Next to be separate from | GitHub proper. But you're absolutely correct that we should | make it more clear that anything from Next is not a rogue | org and also part of GitHub. | | Thanks for the feedback. | Borgz wrote: | Unfortunately, I think this is another indication of a lack | of understanding by GitHub of how their OAuth/GitHub App | systems are expected to function by end users. | | I'm reminded of this incident [1] from a few months ago. | Allegedly, a malicious actor abused GitHub's poorly designed | OAuth permissions to obtain up to 500 stars from developers | without their consent, all thanks to a "sign in with GitHub" | button and a flawed consent screen that did not communicate | what the victims were consenting to. Even worse, GitHub | allegedly decided to suspend at least one victim's account. | | We're left with a number of questions: | | 1. Why does GitHub give third-party apps permission to star | repos when it is apparently against the terms of service to | automate such an action? | | 2. Why does GitHub lump this permission in with public_repo, | a scope that grants read _and write_ access to all public | repositories? [2] | | 3. Why does the consent UI for this scope display simply as | Repositories Public repositories | | and not even mention that this grants _write_ access unless | the user clicks on it? [3] (it also doesn 't mention that it | gives permission to star repos) | | 4. Why does GitHub punish victims with account suspension for | being tricked into giving consent to malicious apps? | | It is good that GitHub is taking some steps to improve | account security, such as fine-grained personal access tokens | and mandatory 2FA. But these improvements do not seem to be | extending to the OAuth system. The GitHub App system, while | better in that it has granular permissions, is also flawed | with its mysterious "act on your behalf" consent UI. [4] [5] | | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33917962 | | [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/developers/apps/building- | oauth-ap... | | [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919481 | | [4]: https://github.com/community/community/discussions/37117 | | [5]: https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-ci-docs/issues/751 | someguyformdn wrote: | [dead] | idan wrote: | Correct! We know this is a terribly confusing thing. | Hopefully by the next big launch we can work out a way to | have GitHub Next things not bear the "not owned or operated" | thing. | RulerOf wrote: | The domain name on that authorization prompt was more than | enough to get me to decline. | | I wouldn't have hesitated at all if it were at | next.github.com. | dheera wrote: | Time to register a rogue Github Pages site at | next.github.com? | tcbyrd wrote: | Pages sites no longer work on github.com | | https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-29-github-pages- | will-s... | filmgirlcw wrote: | Next.GitHub.com redirects to GitHubnext.com fwiw. | eitland wrote: | The amount of companies, including serious banks, that | doesn't understand this is mind blowing. | | Just the other day I had to verify with a Norwegian bank | that the KYC form (which IMNSHO was utter nonsense as | usual) that they linked to was actually them and not | someone who had gained access to sneak in a link. Because | the domain was something completely different. | filmgirlcw wrote: | Totally get it. | | I've passed feedback on to the team so (hopefully) the CLI | app will be be clearly from GitHub soon (we need to | transfer it to the regular GitHub org and then there | hopefully won't be any confusion). GitHub Next exists in a | different org from GitHub proper for lots of reasons, but | we should definitely make it more clear that those | experiments are still from GitHub. | RulerOf wrote: | FYI, after digging down a few links from there and | winding up at the GitHub Next org page[1], seeing the | verified email next@github.com and the official site link | to https://githubnext.com was enough validation for me. | | Can't wait for Voice Copilot :) | | 1: https://github.com/githubnext | rjzzleep wrote: | To me the auth flow looks wrong. The CLI oauth would get | act on your behalf, but the website to apply for access | should not under any circumstance do that. | | Maybe it's just copy and pasted from somewhere, but it | looks wrong to me regardless. | Kye wrote: | It seems like one organization being able to specify a | relationship with another, possibly with the ability to | set a list of approved permissions, would solve this. | vlovich123 wrote: | Doing it under a liberated domain under GitHub.com sounds | like it would work (still a separate org but it's a | signal that this is from main GitHub) | envy2 wrote: | I think this is just a standard API access prompt. The GitHub | Next page clearly indicates it is (C) GitHub Inc and the blog | post makes GitHub's control clear. | retrocryptid wrote: | Well. That's what the AI wants you to believe. | madeofpalk wrote: | > The GitHub Next page clearly indicates it is (C) GitHub Inc | and the blog post makes GitHub's control clear. | | This is not clear at all. Phishing websites always say (C) | Bank of America. That doesn't make it legit. | mmaia wrote: | Huge impact for commercial open source projects. I'm thinking | that it could even change incentives for companies to open source | more projects. | trashface wrote: | Funny how if AI puts programmers out of a job, they won't be able | to afford all these AI coding tool subscriptions. I'm unemployed | (and probably, now, unemployable) and I can rationalize/afford | the $10/month for regular copilot, but not more. | the_other wrote: | It should be free, or at least significantly cheaper. It was | trained on millions of person-days of work people shared for | free. This is _our_ work being sold back to us. | | (ok, not really mine, I don't contribute to OSS very much; I | should probably pay for it.. but you get my point). | cal85 wrote: | As an OSS contributor I'd love it if GitHub decided to share | their profits with me, but I did knowingly contribute my work | under free software licences so I don't see myself as having | any moral or legal right to that. (If they've trained it on | private repos that's another matter, I am assuming they | haven't.) Either way, I don't think it's a strong argument to | say it's our work being sold back to us. Whatever it is that | makes people pay for Copilot, it can't just be the OSS code | that it was trained on, as that is all still freely available | online. People must be paying for the part that GitHub has | trained/built, the part that reads your codebase and makes good | suggestions. | yodon wrote: | After finally switching to a Mac full time last year for the | better developer experience (bash command line without the WSL | disk access slowness), I now feel like I need to install | Parallels to get the better developer experience (Copilot and | Copilot X under Windows) | web3-is-a-scam wrote: | Oh nice, so now copilot can not only hallucinate what completions | to use in the code, it can hallucinate what PRs even do and even | hallucinate the documentation. | c7DJTLrn wrote: | I can't believe how quickly things are moving. In five years | we're either going to look back on this as a hysterical hype | bubble, or one of biggest innovations in the 21st century. | | I have been skeptical of Copilot from the beginning, but it's | becoming clear that I'lll be left in the dust if I don't try at | least try it. | mikkelam wrote: | I have absolutely loved copilot so far. I especially love how | fast it handles indexing complex n-dimensional arrays, which I'm | really bad at. I also feel like often pushes me to more formal | solutions instead of hacking. I'd estimate a 10% velocity | increase for me with it. | | Super excited for GPT-4 behind it. | retrocryptid wrote: | I was going to say "blergh. that doesn't sound too complex." | | But... we all are better at some things than others and I | really like that you've highlighted a specific issue where you | find it valuable. | knodi123 wrote: | My team was freaking out about copilot because we're conducting | tech interviews right now, with a take home exam and some | pairing sessions, and they're worried we'll hire a bonehead | because he can make copilot spit out reasonable stuff in our | contrived and simple interview scenarios. | | But we finally had a guy whose take home test had tons of | handling in the controller for cases we weren't even using, and | test coverage of things that couldn't possibly fail, or were | actually part of the core language and not our own code. It was | really obvious! And when I wanted him to fix an SQL Injection | problem in our pairing, copilot carefully preserved the bug | while he was moving code around. Made me chuckle. | dougmwne wrote: | Something interesting is that there is no mention of fine-tuning. | Is GPT-4 so good at general tasks out of the box that fine-tuning | is obsolete? Can one model really be equally good at Python and | poetry? | og_kalu wrote: | Finetuning has been more or less obsolete for LLMs since the | introduction of GPT-3. This was a major discovery of the | original paper. Codex-Davinci only existed because the original | gpt wasn't trained on much code not because a version trained | on sufficient code would need special code optimizations/fine- | tuning. | | and yes, LLMs are general intelligences. there is nothing | narrow about them at all | flangola7 wrote: | >Is GPT-4 so good at general tasks out of the box that fine- | tuning is obsolete? Can one model really be equally good at | Python and poetry? | | This is correct. It is able to generalize across domains | intelligently. Given the results of fine tuning in earlier | models, fine tuning GPT-4 for a specific purpose will probably | produce super-human ability. | noworriesnate wrote: | This will be a hard moat for GitLab to cross. There is so much | value to having open source models though that I wonder if we | could come up with a project on the scale of Linux that is for | open source machine learning models. So many companies could | benefit from it. | prosim wrote: | BigCode is such a project: https://www.bigcode- | project.org/docs/about/mission/ | [deleted] | criloz2 wrote: | Why people will upload their code to GitHub (if they are working | in some state-of-the-art tech) is beyond me, you will be easily | replaced by microsoft and they will say that was a product | generated by gpt, see what happened in Amazon store with the | popular products | javier_e06 wrote: | I asked ChatGpt in plain english to cook some bash scripts for me | and the examples are good. It replies in plain english and then | generates working code that does what you ask it to do and then | you can ask it to refactor or to change and re generate. Very | impressive. Who remembers that ${my_string%%myword} shaves-off | the word at the end of the string anyway? | throwaway4good wrote: | Voice support? Can I get this thing to call into a teams meeting? | (Asking for a friend.) | cess11 wrote: | Why participate in the hype? | | It's highly likely this is the result of legal having mulled over | the Copilot litigation and deciding that it can go either way or | worse, so the top layer in MICROS~1 has decided to rush whatever | product development they can use the general public for and try | to hook as many people as they can to their stochastic parrots. | Which they wish to insert into not just every other government | machine, but also every Linux machine, preferably pumping out | every line of code written with those. | | It's better to support open source rights holders against this | exploitation than getting one's nose brown. | joeyh wrote: | To the extent of claiming that "GitHub Copilot is already | writing 46% of code". It smacks of desperation to lie so baldly | with statistics. | cess11 wrote: | Yeah, it reeks, makes me think of the "it's afraid scene" in | a well known movie. | | As for the productivity increase some claim it can bring, I'm | not so sure. The software doesn't know your style guidelines | until you give them away. Maybe it can help in some marginal | cases, cough up some XML there is no longer official tooling | for generating or whatever. If you don't have snippets and | IDE support for boilerplate you're doing development wrong | and should start looking into techniques for code generation | in your stack. | | For any non-trivial application design you really want to | know what your inspiration is and what it's used for, so you | can judge the context of the code you take inspiration from | and can cull the parts you don't need and adapt to your | particular situation. | | And typically code output is more about learning the problem | domain deeply and doing code reviews. If one spends more time | writing stuff that doesn't need thinking than doing reviews | and study there's an obvious need for automation and code | generation, and one probably ought to think more about how to | make one's contributions more efficiently. | retinaros wrote: | do you see this as a tool to increase productivity in a way that | shareholders ask for leaner team or in a way that it creates more | demand for products and devs? | swader999 wrote: | One should expect both. | dangerwill wrote: | Increased productivity usually leads to cutting team size | instead of expanding scope. A lot easier to justify doing the | same work you have been doing with less, as opposed to doing | new work with the same number of people. | digdugdirk wrote: | But since the question was asked about shareholders | specifically, the guaranteed bottom line improvement is going | to come from cutting labor and running leaner teams. That's | where large corporations will go first. | geraneum wrote: | That's the main idea behind developing such systems. It's | telling execs: Hey, look, you are paying a lot of money to | those pesky workers (i.e. developers) and we like that | number. Give us a cut and we save you a lot of money. This | is nothing new actually. Has happened over and over in | other industries and is not really surprising. What happens | is that a lot of added value that the developers were | generating will be consolidated into the pockets of a few | and the rest will be automated. They businesses cannot be | upset about this because the ultimate goal of a business is | not be your friend but to generate more money and one way | is to reduce costs. | m_ke wrote: | People should keep in mind that these human in the loop AI | systems are built to learn from the human until they're good | enough to replace them. | highwaylights wrote: | Until they're good enough to _liquidate them for fuel_. | | FTFY. | ilaksh wrote: | I am building my system https://aidev.codes and adding virtual | servers to allow back-end code with the explicit goal of | selling this service to end-users as an alternative to hiring | software engineers. In the niche I have previously been working | in, there is a huge demand to build fairly complex integrations | (such as with my other service) without an adequate budget to | hire a person. | | I already know at least one designer who previously would have | considered hiring me for something but now has explained that | they are achieving tasks with ChatGPT. | | Especially when you start to understand the reasoning ability | of GPT-4, what the 32k context window and ability to understand | images means, any software engineer who thinks their job will | remain safe is in complete denial. | | In fact, with this release you will start to see quite a lot of | non-programmers start using Github. Within X months or a few | years, its quite feasible that Microsoft will have a software | engineer built into Windows. | jnovek wrote: | Do you have evidence to back these claims? Specifically that AI | will be replacing software engineers any time soon and that | Copilot exists explicitly to gather data towards that purpose. | m_ke wrote: | I've been working on ML systems like that for the last 10 | years, usually as tools to automate boring data entry tasks | like tagging photos, automating food logging, giving dietary | advice. | | At first these tools offer suggestions, but as more data | comes in they start to do parts of the work autonomously, | until they can handle all cases. | | Stable diffusion will replace a ton of paid design work, self | driving cars will at some point replace most drivers. | make3 wrote: | Well it's hard to argue against the idea that the final aim | of Copilot is to automate as much of software engineering as | possible. | | I don't think that their aim is explicitly to replace humans, | but to be as helpful as possible to developers, but doing | that does exactly the other thing | qwertox wrote: | > ChatGPT-like experience in your editor with GitHub Copilot Chat | | The best thing about VS Code is how you can click on the tab of | the current editor and drag it out into a new self-contained | window, so that you can move it to another monitor. This is such | an optimal use of screen real estate. | | I will drag out Copilot from the main VS Code window to my right | monitor, have the main editor in the center monitor, and Google / | GitHub / API docs on the left monitor. | | Yes, I'm being sarcastic. | awestroke wrote: | What's your point? | magospietato wrote: | VS Code constrains a single IDE instance to a single window. | Extra flyouts like Copilot chat can only exist in this | window, impacting on available real-estate for the code we | actually care about. | | It's Code's biggest weakness IMO. | qwertox wrote: | Why not offer parts of it as a website? The part where I chat | with it, where I ask my questions and get my answers. (Maybe | it could bridge into VS Code via a local server to exchange | code.) | awestroke wrote: | There is already a website. It's on chat.openai.com | [deleted] | retrocryptid wrote: | But for the fact that it would likely get me permabanned, I would | suggest making HackerNews Copilot X, the system that responds to | HN posts and comments on your behalf and in a manner guaranteed | to get more upvotes from other AIbots hanging out in internet | comments forums. | retrocryptid wrote: | I see that the AI bot has already down-voted this comment. | yanis_t wrote: | On the negative side, no mentions of the Vim plugin update so | far. | simonvc wrote: | vim mode in vscode is good enough honestly. i've not booted vim | for anything other than quick hacks in ages. | | 99% of the time i `code` now instead of `vi` | w-m wrote: | What I'd love to see in the future is a proper refactoring UX. | This new chat interface is probably a good start, as it seems | able to replace code blocks in your original source file. But | most code changes in the real world require changes in multiple | locations. And I don't usually have questions for the AI, I have | small tasks for it to do. | | I hope we can get to a point where I can give quick commands to a | Copilot-like system to do more complex changes. Changes which | traditional refactoring tools balk at. Stuff you would discuss | with other humans. Like "this value needs to be calculated once, | move the code to the constructor", which then requires code being | removed in one method, a member variable being created, and | possibly a constructor, and some code being moved there, and | perhaps a few changes in method parameter lists. | | The jump from single-point edits to multi-point edits is | obviously a huge one, not only for the AI part, but also for the | UI (being able to understand, accept or modify the changes, for | the human). That for me would be truly next level (up from the | amazing place where we are already with Copilot), and I can't | wait for it to get there. | salt4034 wrote: | I agree. Before finalizing the changes, the AI could show you | the diff and ask "is this what you had in mind or would you | like me to change anything else?" | w-m wrote: | Are diffs really the best we can do though? Can't we come up | with a better model of interaction? | | I find that looking at code and looking at diffs are | different mental modes, for lack of a better word. For me, | parsing diffs seems to engage a different part in the brain, | and is much more exhausting than reading code. | | In comparison, reading code while someone makes changes to it | seems to stay in the same code-mode. And I don't want to | switch back and forth from code-mode to diff-mode all the | time. | | How about after being prompted, Copilot acts like a remote | user in my code base, with its own cursor, changing the code | at the speed that ChatGPT currently writes out answers? | Perhaps even commenting on what it does next to it. You could | still have accept/modify/reject buttons at the code change | locations, but they would change the new version, not a diff. | | Getting this slightly wrong will of course make you curse the | whole thing to hell and back. | ilaksh wrote: | There are multiple startups for this. | | You can test the concept on my site https://aidev.codes | although I don't have github integration yet. | w-m wrote: | Looks neat! But I would need it for pushing numbers around | with Python, not building websites. | ilaksh wrote: | You can do that, it will output whatever. I just can't like | execute or show any output. When I have the virtual servers | I will be able to run the code. | elil17 wrote: | Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is | a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would | consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables). | Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional | mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely | astounding. | DeathArrow wrote: | They automatically switched Copilot to GPT 4 without you | enrolling in the limited access list? | gunshai wrote: | I used sympy the other day for the first time. I was blown away | by that library I wish I had known about this years ago. | vintermann wrote: | Yes, I feel like it is much better than HN has given it credit | for in earlier discussions. But that may be influenced by the | fact that I only started using it relatively recently; I've | probably mostly seen it at its best. | | Also, I have no illusions about how language models work. I | notice that the sloppier the code I'm editing, the worse | suggestions (and dumber comments) it suggests. If I start | writing a comment and copilot immediately suggests "TODO: | delete this", that's a better indicator of poor code health | than any metric I know about. It's not a magic wand, but it can | be extremely useful if you use it sensibly. | | Then again, you can just decide to forget how it works and ask | it questions directly in comments: // Hey | GPT3, write me a poem // ANSWER: | | It's not sensible, but it's great fun. | Kiro wrote: | You're being too kind on the HN crowd. We're usually | extremely pessimistic for no good reason and useless at | predicting things. It seems like we just love to hate on | stuff. | qgin wrote: | It's definitely not considered high status here to be | positive about anything | vintermann wrote: | If you think that you should see what Slashdot is like | these days, lol. | acdha wrote: | People here love hot takes, especially if it stakes out a | contrarian position as the smart one. Criticizing the big | players is just too easy to do that with since it doesn't | require you to build an alternative and is often right in | some aspect so you can get validation. | kreas wrote: | I would say this about most developers not just HN. It took | years for me to break that mindset. | toomuchtodo wrote: | I don't think people understand the hockey stick we're on. | Don't focus too hard on the failings, look at the scaffolding | being rapidly deployed that makes the iterative improvement | process exceptionally tight. | brookst wrote: | It's the same with every paradigm shift. | | "GUIs are pretty but slow. Ok, they're faster but just glued | on to CLI programs. Ok, they're native but less information | dense. Ok, that's a good thing, but..." | | "The internet is nice but you still have to go to the | store/bank. Ok, you can shop/bank online but you still have | to call airlines. Ok you can buy airline tickets but you | still have to go to the library to research. Ok, you can | research but you still have to drive in to work. Ok..." | | Maybe it's a half empty / half full thing, but there is some | portion of the populace that can't acknowledge the promise of | anything until it is perfect and comprehensive. | | And, yes, there's another portion that can't acknowledge gaps | or flaws of the promise is sufficiently huge. But it's the | former that grinds my gears. | scandox wrote: | Your overall point is reasonable, but to take your point | about GUIs...we actually lost an awful lot moving from text | based interfaces going to GUI. We got universal adoption | and more or less zero training required...but we got very | slow and inflexible interfaces. | chaxor wrote: | Command line didn't vanish ... You can still use it. | Approximately 90% of my work is done via TUI, so it's | certainly not gone. | scandox wrote: | I'm talking about people behind counters, people in stock | rooms, people in all kinds of data entry and so on. The | terminal did vanish from many places. We're not the | market. | headcanon wrote: | I would assert that the "here are the current flaws" side | is still necessary in the overall conversation, since they | provide the necessary feedback that allows technology to | improve. Similar to political debates influencing the | Overton window of a population, I see the "future promise" | vs "current flaws" as a human algorithm realizing itself. | The debate never ends, but the "mean" value keeps moving as | technology progresses. As a "future promise" person myself | I used to be annoyed by the "current flaws" side as well | until I started seeing things through this lens. | darkwater wrote: | I'm speaking more generally but | | > Maybe it's a half empty / half full thing, but there is | some portion of the populace that can't acknowledge the | promise of anything until it is perfect and comprehensive. | | Probably because paradigm shifts or new ways of doing | things come with a lot of trade-offs that can be seen only | after the change has been absorbed more. Early adopters are | usually blind to these issues (or decide to be blind at | them), conservatives don't look at the improvements but | think that there might be something not that good in the | future by projecting past experiences. | agent281 wrote: | I'm mostly curious how far the hockey stick will go up. | Eventually most things level off. | throwaway4aday wrote: | Considering this hockey stick is in the field that is in | the business of making hockey sticks it could go pretty | far. A hockey stick maximizer if you will. | substation13 wrote: | This is the big question isn't it. With self driving cars | we have been on the final 20% for what seems like forever. | elil17 wrote: | Big difference here is that it becomes more useful as it | gets better. Self driving cars aren't useful until they | reach a certain threshold. | wfeefwfwe wrote: | [flagged] | danenania wrote: | To me the key issue are these 'hallucinations'--mistakes | that seem plausible but are completely made up, like API | endpoints that would be super useful except for the small | problem that they don't exist. GPT4 is better than GPT3 on | these but it still produces a lot of them. | | The question is whether these are somehow inherent to the | LLM approach or whether scaling up and continued | improvements can eventually get rid of them. | | They are the main barrier at this point between a _very_ | useful tool, but one that still needs to have all its | output carefully checked by humans when it comes to | anything important, and a true autonomous agent that can be | given full tasks to do on its own. | elil17 wrote: | It seems pretty clear to me that you could do some more | RL to enforce truth-telling/admitting when it does not | know - it would just be much more labor intensive | compared to the RLHF they have already done because fact | checking is difficult. | danenania wrote: | I'd imagine they've already been doing lots of RL in this | direction, which explains the improvements in GPT4, but | it's still an issue. Maybe they can eventually eliminate | hallucinations completely, but I could also imagine that | it will end up being difficult to do that without | lessening its creativity across the board. Perhaps making | things up is fundamental to how LLMs work and trying to | stop it from doing that will kill the magic. I'm not an | AI researcher so I really have no idea--just speculating. | | I'm not at all trying to downplay the power or | significance of LLMs, btw, in case that's why I'm getting | downvoted... I'm using copilot/GPT4 every day and they | are massive productivity boosters. But currently I see | them as tools for producing rough drafts that need to be | revised and checked over. If they can't solve | hallucinations, LLMs will stay in this lane, which is | still incredible, amazing, and useful, but won't | necessarily get us to the AI endgame that the hype is | predicting. | barrenko wrote: | They were probably apprehensive beforehand, and now just | unleashed it on everything. | retrocryptid wrote: | So it's on par with a junior software engineer? | elil17 wrote: | No, I don't think it's comparable to a junior engineer. It | works best for pretty short snippets of code. It also can't | decide when to run the program and how to interpret/make | changes based on the results. | mynameisvlad wrote: | So... a junior developer? | | I (mostly) kid but some seniors I know struggle at those | things. | elil17 wrote: | I mean I get what you're saying. But it doesn't just | struggle with those things - they aren't even the sort of | things it can do. | retrocryptid wrote: | Yes. Of all the comments I've made on HN, that one most | deserves to be down-voted. Jr. Devs I know are motivated | and reasonably intelligent. | steve_adams_86 wrote: | > It also can't decide when to run the program and how to | interpret/make changes based on the results. | | Not quite, but a bit of plumbing can get you closer. Not | human using a computer close, but interestingly closer | nonetheless. | | I've been trying to accomplish something akin to this by | having a program monitor and alter another program within a | virtual machine, using GPT-generated solutions to error | traces to correct bugs in the sand boxed program. | | It watches the program to see when an error occurs, feeds | the error to GPT with pertinent code, then tries to splice | in the solution. | | It kind of works. I don't think we're going to see human- | levels of success from this in the immediate future, but I | was able to write a simple event-based system which alters | a program to resolve simple bugs. It even does it on a | different git branch, and there is some stubbed out code | and prompts for generating tests. In my manual testing, | this actually worked too. If the tests passed I was going | to have it push the change set and create a PR explaining | the changes, tests, etc. | | I doubt I'll continue now that Copilot is doing this | already. My point though is that with the right | configuration, the right data and prompts, and a system | orchestrating the start/stop/test patterns based on the | state of the sandboxed program, you can begin to achieve | something akin to an inexperienced person solving bugs. | | Sometimes it does a terrible job and other times it kind of | falls over itself. But we're already leaps and bounds ahead | of previous systems, and I just cobbled this together with | what's possible via OpenAI's API. | | The crazy part is that there are so many possible layers. | Like say we get our initial solution and we verify that it | works. Well, now we can have a system which optimizes the | implementation. Like a PR buddy that observes the | implementation and determines: should this test be appended | to an existing suite of tests? Can the test case simply be | added to an existing table-driven test? How can we | streamline this patch to avoid an endless stream of | additional files and tests to maintain? I think that's | actually tractable already. While the success rate won't be | 100% today, it'll clearly only improve. | vintermann wrote: | Sure. One that never gets tired, never gets frustrated, | always does his best, and has a pause button. | geraneum wrote: | This applies to managers and many founders too. I imagine | it's gonna affect the startup scene more than people expect | and the number of current model of startups where you build | a custom software solution for a problem may also fall. It | applies to all white collar workers. This is the goal of a | corporation like Microsoft to develop such a system (to | consolidate those added values), and it will happen one day | as it happened with physical labor. Although we are not | quite there yet. It might be far or not. Who knows? | RivieraKid wrote: | I admit that I'm anxious about the possibility that AI will drive | down demand for developer jobs. My base case is that it won't | have a meaningful negative impact, but it's possible that it | will, so it's unpleasant to have this uncertainty about the | future and to see the technology develop very rapidly with big | news coming almost every day - which I would be normally extatic | about. | | I've been on a path to financial independence (= saving and | investing) but still need ~9 years to be able to safely retire. I | slightly envy people with US-based FAANG jobs, where achieving | financial independence seems like a breeze. | | This also adds fuel to my desire to start a side project. | | What are your thought on this? Are you preparing in any way | financially? | BarryMilo wrote: | I'm thinking over the medium to long term, we'll lose jobs but | we won't see them, they just won't have been created. | wfeefwfwe wrote: | this is a very, very important nuance, i think. | digdugdirk wrote: | Here. We. Go. | | I made the analogy a few days ago about how all modern | manufacturing and machining processes were essentially | bootstrapped from two fairly flat stones. Its going to be | interesting to see how the acceleration in improvement of the | tools for "making things" changes in the LLM age. | hobs wrote: | I love the "Origins of Precision" | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 that goes into this | very topic. | dw_arthur wrote: | There's something really satisfying about using a tool that | makes you more productive, even more so if you built the tool. | fnordpiglet wrote: | Stochastic Markov Monte Carlo cut and paste is clearly more | powerful than deterministic cut and paste. | retrocryptid wrote: | I think the gnu emacs code base is proof of this statement. | I'm fairly certain they fed the source into disassociated | press and kept doing it until it compiled. | mk_stjames wrote: | Well, technically, three flat stones. Two flat-appearing stones | can match (like two stacked Pringles chips) and still not be | flat and thus not match a third true flat reference. Thus: | | "When two plates are not flat but still match, one will not | match the third. By continually lapping or scraping the high | points of their contact until all three show perfect bearing | when intercompared, three flat planes are created" [1] | | [1] Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy by Wayne R. Moore c. | 1970 | | (An absolutely fantastic read) | danielvaughn wrote: | Agreed, I think we're entering the 4th era of the internet (as | I see it). | | The first era was pre-consumer (arpanet etc). | | The second era had internet installed in several homes across | the country, but it still wasn't clear what the internet was | going to become, and it was still considered an oddity. This | was roughly 1990-the mid aughts. | | The third era saw the internet become socially viable - | myspace, facebook, twitter, instagram all took over peoples | lives. This roughly coincided with the release of smart phones, | as well as the increased computing power of browsers, spurred | mostly by V8. | | For the last few years there's been this implicit expectation | that we're entering into a new era, but it wasn't clear what | that era would be. For a minute, people thought it was | crypto/metaverse, but that was always kind of a silly idea. | | It's now clear that AI is going to be the catalyst, and I think | it's ushering in something equivalent to the industrial | revolution, but starting from where we are now. It's just | impossible to fathom where we're going to go from here. | eterps wrote: | I am guessing that at some point a class of programming languages | will be designed that is both optimal to generate by LLMs and | easy to read/understand for humans. Right now most PLs are | optimized for writing code by humans. | gwoolhurme wrote: | That is what makes them also optimal for LLMs as is. It would | be more efficient to have something that is direct machine | code, but LLMs are Large <Language> Models right? | AlexandrB wrote: | > easy to read/understand for humans | | I think many languages are actually already optimized for this. | Where "reading" means reasoning about what the program does and | not just reading text. | brookst wrote: | Do we even need such a language, beyond just English / other | human languages? | | IMO we'll see LLM interpreters / compilers where the spec is | the code, and whatever the LLM does in the background is opaque | to the "programmer". | kypro wrote: | Slightly unrelated I suppose, but I'm not sure how I feel about a | world where people frequently communicate with each other via AI | generated prompts. | | I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something quite | creepy about this future we're currently being sold. A world | where inauthenticity is the norm, and where everything you read | is no longer written by your family, friends and colleagues, but | by their AI assistant. | | I suppose people have expressed similar feelings about phones and | video conferencing, and AI prompts are just the next step of | optimising human interaction by removing all the constraints and | annoyances that come with interacting with other humans. | | Any way I would be interested in hearing how others feel about | this. Or if it's more convenient, how you feel as interpreted by | your AI assistant. It's all the same after all. | maicro wrote: | All joking below aside, I'm not sure how I feel about this | either, though I also haven't been following things too closely | yet. The below is the first "real" use I've made of an AI to | write a response for me. | | I guess there are a couple different layers there. On the one | hand, the technology/medium being used has always caused us to | adjust our communication style - we communicate differently if | it's a letter that will take weeks to deliver and weeks more to | receive a response, vs. a hasty limited text message, vs. an | email, vs. a face to face conversation with no time | constraints, etc. So I guess that as long as the person sending | the message agrees that it conveys what they want, having an AI | draft it isn't terrible... | | --- Me: Write a response agreeing to this message: [contents of | your post, without correcting the original typo thus explaining | paragraph 4] Bard draft 3: I agree that there is something | quite creepy about a world where people frequently communicate | with each other via AI generated prompts. It seems like a world | where authenticity is lost and where everything is just a | simulation. | | I can see how people might be attracted to AI prompts because | they are convenient and efficient. But I think there is also a | risk that people will become too reliant on AI and that they | will lose the ability to connect with each other on a deeper | level. | | I think it is important to maintain a balance between using AI | and interacting with other humans. AI can be a tool that helps | us to communicate more effectively, but it should not be a | replacement for human connection. | | I have not been interrupted by my AI assistant, but I can | imagine that it would be annoying if it was constantly trying | to interject or offer unsolicited advice. I think it is | important for AI assistants to be respectful of human privacy | and to only provide information when it is asked for. | | Overall, I think that AI has the potential to be a powerful | tool for communication, but it is important to use it | responsibly and to be aware of its limitations. | UK-AL wrote: | I think they've done it backwards in regards to it writing tests. | Tests are the check to make sure the A.I is in check. If A.I is | writing tests, you have to double check the tests. | | You should write tests, then the A.I writes the code. It almost | doesn't matter what the code is, as long the AI can regenerate | the code from tests. | layer8 wrote: | Tests don't (can't) prove tthat code is correct. They are | merely a rough plausibility check that the code isn't | completely wrong and didn't regress. You generally can't derive | the right code just from tests. | UK-AL wrote: | You can write tests about properties you care about which may | not be everything. Generally in some of the more financial | applications i've written I would be ok with people rewriting | the app as long as it passes the tests. | | I've even written tests that say this set of input goes to | this output, for various different subsets of input. Anything | outside of the of the defined input sets fail validation. | | Than it randomly picks a couple of thousand inputs from the | input sets I've defined and runs them. More confidence you | need, the more exhaustive setting you put it on. | | It's a bit like QuickCheck. | layer8 wrote: | You can approximate it, but to represent really _all_ | properties, in the end it becomes a mirror picture of the | actual code you are testing, which then begs the question. | | A random sample of inputs that is hidden from the AI also | won't allow it to derive a corresponding implementation. | And if the set of sample inputs is not hidden, then the AI | is still free to produce an implementations that only works | for those sample inputs. | UK-AL wrote: | You'd probably separate example tests and validation | tests. Also test descriptions should fed into the prompt | to help guide it, like BDD style tests. | | On test failure, the data is fed back into the prompt | about what failed for another iteration. | | This will help avoid over-fitting, and generate another | generation on test failure. I mean you can't guarantee | correctness, but you could probably get it pretty close. | Humans also have the same problem. | electrondood wrote: | > GitHub Copilot Chat builds upon the work that OpenAI and | Microsoft have done with ChatGPT and the new Bing. | | Cool, so it can sass me and threaten to stop responding when it | doesn't like my tone? | | Whatever PM decided that tools need to have a personality should | be fired and blacklisted. | drdrek wrote: | I would love to hear from other people here but I tried it for a | while and dropped my subscription. For short things it was nice, | but the larger the suggestion the worst it got. I found myself | constantly mentally debugging the output it suggested, I do not | know if it was faster but I was mentally exhausted by it, unable | to go for long periods of time. Dumb code completion is | predictable, I know I'll need to press down three times before | its even shown to me, enabling me to think forward. With "smart" | code completion I need to constantly stop my train of thought to | process what ever it throws at me. I even tried to just trust the | system, playing it fast and loose, not double checking | everything, but then it just produced bugs. | | I'm developer with 16 years of experience, currently working | mainly with python for API work. | | I'd love to hear accounts of other people, please add your | background if you feel comfortable. I want to see if there is | some correlation to experience, programming languages or use | cases. | yanis_t wrote: | I mostly code in JS/TS and ruby, and find it pretty handy. | Especially when I need to write some unit tests, I usually only | write it("should work like this and like that"), and 90% of the | time it generates a useful unit test[0]. | | Also, I find it very useful when I code in an unfamiliar | environment, for example python. While usually I know what I | want to do, I'm not exactly familiar with details of syntax's, | or how a specific library api looks like. This is where it | shines, in my experience. Huge time-saver. | | [0] https://www.strictmode.io/articles/using-github-copilot- | for-... | photochemsyn wrote: | That's been my (limited) experience, you have to debug its | output and if you don't you have problems later. Pasting | CoPilot's code into ChatGPT was sort of interesting but not | really a time-saver, although pretty useful for understanding | new concepts. Ultimately I'd still have to go read the | documentation to actually understand how to use something new | correctly however. Not really sure if it's worth $ for. | | Where it is pretty useful I think is in examining large chunks | of poorly commented code bases, where you're using CoPilot to | generate comments describing what the code is supposed to be | doing, i.e. '#here we ..'. | raincole wrote: | At this point, Copilot is as natural as autocomplete and syntax | highlighting to me. Of course I can still write code without | them, but it would feels really off and counter-productive. | aloer wrote: | My trial ran out yesterday and I cancelled the subscription. It | feels limiting on its own. There are three use cases off the | top of my head | | - auto complete. This one is amazing but I'm not willing to | spend 10/month for only that | | - generate code inline. The main purpose of copilot. It works | okay but too often I feel like I'm faster if I google things | myself. Perhaps I'm just a very fast googler and reader. | Wouldn't surprise me | | - use a solution and adapt it to my own code. I don't know how | this could work without copilot having access to my browser and | knowing what I just read somewhere. I'm very excited about this | but right now copilot does not seem the right tool | | But above all I cancelled for two reasons: it's too slow and I | can't trust my privacy and code IP to be respected | | Edit: I also feel there is a lot of secondary information lost. | If I google I have multiple tabs and windows and (temporal) | structure. I also learn about neighboring concepts via | stackoverflow comments, or I learn about how to navigate the | docs for whatever I'm doing right now. | | With copilot I am not exposed to all of this. Not yet | throwaway4aday wrote: | I currently use copilot and 80% of the benefit I get from it is | boilerplate and refactoring, the rest is just using it as smart | autocomplete where I can zip through adding a bunch of | properties or arguments. I use it for a lot of greenfield stuff | though which is really where it shines since a lot of that work | is just standing up all the essential bits and pieces before | you have to do anything complex. It's helped me massively with | going from an idea to a working implementation both by getting | rid of a lot of the boring typing and by keeping me going when | I started to get a bit run down or uninspired. | | I can understand why you might not like it if you were using it | for critical things that needed to be well planned and debugged | before running. I don't find it very good at intricate work but | that's ok with me since I want to really slow down at those | points and think about what I'm doing. | | As a side note, using ChatGPT with GPT-4 or even just GPT turbo | is an amazing unblocker for projects where you need to use | unfamiliar packages, APIs or languages. You can just talk to it | about what you're trying to do and it'll provide you with great | examples and explanations. It won't be right 100% of the time | but it's right enough to get you unstuck and a lot faster than | searching through docs or stackoverflow for a good answer. It | helps to be very precise with your problem statement as well, | like specifying the version of the package you want to use or a | time frame. Those little prompt tricks remind me a lot of the | Google-fu we had to learn to search effectively. I'm excited | that Copilot is going to be moving to GPT-4 with chat built in, | it'll unify the whole process. | babl-yc wrote: | (Software dev for 15+ years) | | I'm using it for Typescript + NodeJS development. I find | Copilot most valuable when it's something I'd need to Google | anyway, like how to format a date string or how to do X in | selenium. 8 out of 10 times the answer is right, and the other | times it is at least interesting (gives me an idea of what to | look for). | | This quick feedback is _way_ faster than googling and keeps me | in the IDE, and also just makes it more enjoyable to code when | there is this "pair programming" partner that I can interact | with via code/comments and it will generate ideas for me, even | if they aren't all perfect. | ddren wrote: | I used it for a while but I found that too many suggestions are | worthless and having to consider them makes me waste more time | than just writing the code myself. For the things that it is | useful like snippets, I found that ChatGPT is better anyway. | phist_mcgee wrote: | Copilot for generating TS prop types on react components is | fantastic, or guessing the write type for a library object's | type. | Myrmornis wrote: | I don't know about the new developments but with last year's | copilot, it's great as long as you don't have it on all the | time. Just turn it on when you want it to complete something. | Unfortunately VSCode didn't/doesn't make that easy -- you have | to hack something together yourself: | | https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7553#discussio... | Epskampie wrote: | Totally agree, I cancelled my subscription because the way | the extension works (worked?) is just way too distracting, | shoving (often wrong) suggestions in my face all the time. | | It should have an mode where it only ever suggests a single | best guess when I press a certain shortcuts. | nprateem wrote: | It mostly just gets in my way by being frequently wrong, and | disabling my IDE's autocomplete. If I didn't get it free I | wouldn't pay for it. | danielvaughn wrote: | I haven't used copilot but your experience sounds exactly like | what I would expect. Since AI is based on prediction, it makes | sense that broader predictions would be less accurate. I think | stringing together output from a lot of smaller predictions | would yield better results. Which, at the end of the day, means | that a human + AI will always be more productive than AI on its | own. At least for the foreseeable future. | BratishkaErik wrote: | Another reason to switch from GitHub, I don't want to strengthen | this ecosystem. AI-generated description for PR? gg. IMHO it will | drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on | this platform (but still increasing whatever fake metric | [accepted pull requests? stars?] people love to check) | blibble wrote: | personally I cleared out all my highly starred projects and | filled them all with randomly generated crap that happens to | compile | | and will never contribute to public open source again | | (I guess MS have finally managed to kill open source) | mrcwinn wrote: | The non-fake metric is the accepted pull request itself, ie, | work done in service of the objective. | sebzim4500 wrote: | >IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those | who will remain on this platform | | Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot | has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports | differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%. | mike_hearn wrote: | Not everyone - me and quite a few others I know tried it and | turned it off. | | It might be better now they've improved it, but for the sort | of work I do (maintain a mature Kotlin codebase) the prior | version wasn't a productivity upgrade, it was a downgrade | because the type system and IDE generated more accurate | suggestions that I don't have to double check for errors. | Copilot and ChatGPT both seem to have error rates too high | for this sort of work. | | I can see though, that once I switch to some other sort of | work it might be more valuable. | SanderNL wrote: | I have used it for 2 months and disabled it. So there is your | exception. | | The code it suggests is always highly suspect and writing raw | code never was the problem in the first place (for me). I was | "discussing" with it for far longer than it was making me | "productive". I give it -5%. | | I do however love occasionally using GPT directly for | converting some weird list of values to JSON or coming up | with plausible test data. Sometimes some text or ideas for | emails (especially English, which is not my mother tongue). | Sort of a secretary of sorts. | hellcow wrote: | Copilot definitely makes me much less productive, since it | breaks my flow on every line. I give it a -50%. It is both | very dumb and very loud. It feels like I'm pair programming | with a 1st year CS student who pipes up on _every single | line_ trying to predict what I will type next and getting | 95% of it wrong. | | I found ChatGPT however outputs good code when I want it do | simple things. Writing unit tests is tedious, and ChatGPT | is pretty good at that. Optimizing a SQL query, etc. Things | that used to take some time are now either instantaneous or | get me 90% of the way there, and I can do the final edits. | BratishkaErik wrote: | sorry if i was unclear, by "real productivity" i meant | something that requires more creativity than copypasting | stackoverflow/copilot to your code, not measured in "lines of | code" but rather in how much it is unique. Highly subjective, | yes... | jwhiles wrote: | What's the reason to think that it reduces the amount of | creative code that's written. Doesn't it just let you get | through the copypastable stuff faster - all things being | equal I'd assume it means you spend more time on the | creative parts. | dagw wrote: | Copilot lets me get the 'boring' scaffolding work out of | the way quicker so I can spend more time on the parts of my | project that actually are hard and 'unique'. | elil17 wrote: | Right, but the idea is that copilot frees up more of your | time for the creative part. That is what I have found in | practice. | yunohn wrote: | > rather in how much it is unique | | IRL a lot of what people do is rehashing or gluing together | things as others may have done before. We all stand on the | shoulder of giants - code is a tool to enable an outcome. | | I don't agree with your definition of "code uniqueness is | productivity". | _bohm wrote: | Could you explain your reasoning? You expect that these tools | will create more work to get from point A to point B rather | than less? | BratishkaErik wrote: | In short: because there will be "current junk pull requests" | (see microchanges for readme) but increased x100, if you want | to use AI at least write description by yourself, orelse | there os no point in your pr as authors might make it | themselves | _bohm wrote: | I see. My impression based on this press release is that | GitHub is planning on marketing this more to teams using | their paid plan though. It seems like this would be a non- | issue for organizations using private repositories? | BratishkaErik wrote: | > As we continue to design, test, and build features that | fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also taking | the time to determine the best way to provide them to our | customers, which may include changes to Copilot for | Business and Copilot for Individuals. | | so we'll see :) | marginalia_nu wrote: | It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect just that. Overall, | producing code quicker is probably not something we need. | It's plenty quick to type code. What's slow is finding good | designs. I think more often than not, we jump to the coding | part too early and build things too soon. This creates | problems that are hard to fix after the fact. | | The easier it is to produce code, the more code will be | produced. The more code is produced, the more complex and | short-sighted the architecture will be as a result. | | This is much older than AI. You can take a one-person task | that takes two weeks to perform, assign it to a five person | team, and they'll solve it by producing 25 times the code. | | We create abstractions to cope with the noise of a large code | base, but in doing so, we also create a noisier and more | complex code base that needs more abstractions. | wnkrshm wrote: | Managing complexity was once the job description | _bohm wrote: | Yeah I think there's a lot of sense in that. I think it's | likely that the ability to use these tools in a disciplined | fashion will grow to be a significant differentiator | between more effective and less effective programmers. The | former taking a considered approach to design and then | using the tools where they're a real force multiplier e.g., | writing unit tests, and the latter prompting them to spit | out large swaths of code they would have previously written | by hand: "write an endpoint that does X". | gzer0 wrote: | There are 5 different sign-up waiting lists. Each one needs to be | signed-up for separately. | | [1] Copilot X: https://github.com/github- | copilot/chat_waitlist_signup/ | | [2] Copilot Voice: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-voice/ | | [3] Copilot Docs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-for- | docs/ | | [4] Copilot for PRs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-for- | pull-requests/ | | [5] Copilot CLI: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli/ | renewiltord wrote: | Thank you. Better comment than the release docs. | | This is going to be fantastic! | fortylove wrote: | This screams to me that each internal team just wants a piece | of the glory and the accompanying praise and "way to get this | across the finish line team!" emails. | usrnm wrote: | You're forgetting promotions | fortylove wrote: | True! | bigmattystyles wrote: | Soon - Introducing Copilot Copilot - to help you navigate the | Copilot offerings. | amelius wrote: | Coco-pilot, with a mascot that looks like Bonzi buddy in an | airplane. | vanillax wrote: | Underrated comment here | cloudking wrote: | Thanks saved a lot of time! | [deleted] | sqs wrote: | "GitHub Copilot X is currently a representation of GitHub's | vision for the future rather than an available product offering | of GitHub Copilot. As we continue to design, test, and build | features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are | also taking the time to determine the best way to provide them | to our customers." | | From the FAQ at https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x | (When will GitHub Copilot X be available and how much does it | cost?). | pastor_bob wrote: | $50+ in monthly subscription fees? | | BRB buying some MSFT | paxys wrote: | We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation of | developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN | subscription just as the base cost for doing business. This | is what Microsoft does. | cscurmudgeon wrote: | While building off of free open source. Perfect. | xxpor wrote: | the MSDN subscription was amazing for me to piggyback off | of my dad as a kid though. access to essentially | _everything_ in MS 's current and back catalog that was | even remotely related to dev work, including OSes :) | spookthesunset wrote: | The best was when you knew somebody who worked at | microsoft and could get the company discount! | LASR wrote: | If you knew someone working at MSFT, you would just ask | them for some free keys. | nwatson wrote: | My old MSDN keys for Windows from ten years ago will | still unlock Windows 10/11 installs when I need a Windows | VM. | nirav72 wrote: | Did individual developers actually pay that? I've done | quite a bit of development in the MS ecosystem and can't | recall anyone personally paying for MSDN. It was always | through their employer that they got access. | paxys wrote: | We will pretty soon get to a point where companies start | to volume license Copilot for their entire engineering | team, so really the same thing. | WaxProlix wrote: | Consultants and freelancers for sure did - though again | that's technically a business expense. | ghaff wrote: | I definitely had some sort of personal MSDN subscription | at one point. Plus compilers and the tike were far from | free. I had shelves of books. And computers themselves | cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars. | zerkten wrote: | Individual developers paying was always an insignificant | volume. It was still within reach so devs could get it | and be productive. As an example, the cost was fairly | insignificant to the many .NET devs who jumped to | SharePoint in the 2000s to keep their top rates. People | give SP a hard time quite rightly, but as a revenue | generator for devs in many markets with limited options, | it was a very good choice. | | It was priced and designed for companies to be buying as | a bundle with other licensing. individual devs would | frequently use some of the loopholes through licensing | partners to commit to what was basically a three year | subscription that spread the cost. For companies, it | could mitigate some of the costs associated with the | proliferation of environments that needed to be licensed | from top-to-bottom. Later, these may stop being eligible | for MSDN use and generate more revenue. License auditing | was real and gave visibility into this usage. | | VMware still have a program like this going for their | admin user base. It gets recommended by the r/homelab | folks who haven't adopted Proxmox. | arwhatever wrote: | I believe that they tended to hand it out for free or | very inexpensive to students, substantial trial offerings | to new/small businesses, etc. | reaperducer wrote: | _We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation | of developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN | subscription just as the base cost for doing business._ | | Or $800 for a COBOL|FORTRAN|C|AP/L compiler, plus $600 for | a debugger. | | At least when you upgraded the next year, you got $20 off! | axlee wrote: | Or $299 a year for the Apple Developer Program just for the | great honor to be able to develop for that platform... | booi wrote: | that's not entirely fair... you also need a iDevice and | some form of new-ish mac as well. | ericlewis wrote: | $299 a year? It is $99. | drusepth wrote: | The Developer Program plan is $99/year and enables | distribution via the App Store. | | The Developer Enterprise Program plan is $299/year and | enables corporate/internal distribution to employees. | | Most people only need the first, but the second is also | an option. And if you need both, it's technically | $398/year for the great honor. | jjeaff wrote: | $99 plus 15-30% of everything you create. | Terretta wrote: | Try selling through Amazon.com and see what % you keep. | | Then try selling through a grocery or drugstore chain. | whimsicalism wrote: | The difference being I can always walk to a different | grocery store without having to pay ~$1k. | brookst wrote: | As a brand, do you get more value from being on Amazon or | in a local grocery store? | DeathArrow wrote: | Have you tried selling apps trough Amazon or grocery | stores? | wysewun wrote: | Great point. Time to do research on how much GitHub | contributes to msft earnings. Really does seem like they're | on the verge of a huge jump | moonchrome wrote: | They are bragging about 1m developers on copilot, let's say | 20$/m to be generous - that's 20m$/month - they probably | have larger single client revenues than that and I doubt | copilot is high margin (I bet I spend more than 10$/month | in compute by the queries I generate). | | Unless this goes to hundreds of dollars/month (which I | would pay if it was a good experience) I don't see this | making a dent. | mewpmewp2 wrote: | Probably it will be using license for enterprises with | decent margins, and it will be much higher cost then. | Soon it's no-brainer for all enterprises to buy. I truly | think that a little bit more time and engineering costs | would be down 80% - 90%, because of all this tooling. | DeathArrow wrote: | Maybe they think of waiting until everyone uses Copilot | and then jack up the price. | | But that wouldn't quite work. | tarruda wrote: | It is basically free if you consider companies will be | automating a lot of the dev grunt work for now on. Learning | to code using tools like Copilot will be a requirement, but | instead of 10 developers you hire 1. | bg24 wrote: | Where is the pricing? I looked around and not obvious if I | missed it. Some of these used to be in copilot labs. I used | and then disabled it. Was part of monthly copilot | subscription. | rvz wrote: | > BRB buying some MSFT | | No. | | Tell me you buy the hype and on high impact macro-economic | news like FOMC and lose more money due to volatility without | telling me. | | Almost everyone here knew GPT-4 will release soon, months ago | in advance and you now decide to 'buy' MSFT as soon as it | goes up to $277? | | The market really does get retail FOMO'ing in stocks with the | hype and it just never ceases to surprise me that it happens | here too. | bavila wrote: | This "tell me X without telling me" meme is, frankly, quite | snarky and unnecessary. | travisjungroth wrote: | It's such a bummer that it started as a joke confessional | TikTok meme and became a bitter forum reply meme. | _boffin_ wrote: | I think you have a valid point or two, but I think you're | not grasping how much enterprises will be throwing money at | MSFT. | mewpmewp2 wrote: | Based on my own productivity, and how strong the tools seem | to be, then I presume current increase in the value is | still too very low. These tools would eventually reduce | workforce costs by 90% at the very least in my view. To me | it seems like most people don't truly understand how things | are going to change now. | vlunkr wrote: | Maybe when they become much much more sophisticated. | Right now they reduce time spent write boilerplate and | looking at docs. How much of you overall time is spent on | those tasks now? For most devs its not much. Significant | time is spent reading code to understand program | architecture, investigating bugs caused by obscure edge | cases, refactoring or extending functionality without | breaking everything. Copilot doesn't even scratch the | surface of those yet. | DeathArrow wrote: | It can find bugs, suggest fixes, write tests and do PRs. | berniedurfee wrote: | I feel like this is one of those eras where I will, yet | again, not invest early and will, yet again, not make stupid | money on the other end. | | Cheers to those who know where to put their dollars to ride | this AI bubble to early retirement! | csantini wrote: | If you want it cheaper: https://how2terminal.com | | This is when I build a product and then Microsoft releases it | three weeks later -_- | reaperducer wrote: | _If you want it cheaper:https://how2terminal.com_ | | Very cool. Too bad I don't do subscriptions. If you ever | figure out how to do a version on localhost, I'd pay $40 or | so for it. | MattSayar wrote: | What a great landing page. Clear, to the point, with a | self-explanatory demo. I know exactly what to do and how to | use it in under 30 seconds | dotancohen wrote: | Your pricing is terrific. The free plan provides just | enough daily queries to try it, and the monthly plan might | be a good fit for a business. | | I'm going to sign up for the free plan, not because I need | such a tool, but rather so that my boss might see me using | it and decide that it's worth $10 a month to her. | dotancohen wrote: | What is `!-*f(6s6U8Q9b` here: const | questionCriteria = { filter: '!-*f(6s6U8Q9b' // | body_markdown and link } | | I thought maybe it is a hard-coded CSS element name in | StackOverflow answers, judging by the context, but it's not | that. Could you shed some light on this? | | Found in the How2 source file `how2/lib/how2.js`. Thanks.* | JeremyBanks wrote: | [dead] | donmcronald wrote: | That's super cool. I hate the pricing. I typically know | everything I need to for day-to-day usage of the shell and | only do things that require discovery every few months. 100 | queries wouldn't be enough in those months, so I'd have | some months where I'm paying for nothing and the odd month | where I don't get enough usage. | | $9 per month also makes it costly enough that I wouldn't | buy it as a "just to have" kind of tool. I don't think I'd | get $100 of value vs searching online, _especially_ since I | attribute some negative value to tools that can be taken | away from me. I don 't want to pay forever _and_ be | dependent on something that could disappear tomorrow. | | I don't get why something like that needs to be an online | service. I don't know much about AI, so maybe it's a lack | of understanding on my part, but why can't I simply have a | copy of the trained model on my local machine where there's | no ongoing cost (to you) whenever I run a command? Isn't an | online API a complex solution to a problem that could be | solved with a local app + data? | | Maybe I just lack understanding and the models are too big | or the compute required to make a query is huge. If you | could give some insight I'd genuinely appreciate it. | | Even though I'd never buy it as a subscription, it's the | kind of thing I'd pay for as a perpetual app. I'd wouldn't | hesitate to pay $50 if I could install it on my machines | and forget about it until it would be useful. I'd also | expect to pay for updated versions of the models whenever I | need them. | | Regardless, I think it's amazing as a discovery tool. I | don't mind reading 'man' pages to figure out details, but I | always feel like it's a hassle to discover what command I | need for certain tasks. | | Also, I'm probably an outlier since I make a lot of effort | to avoid tools that rely on an internet connection to | function. IE: I won't rely on GitHub. I'll use it, but only | as a push mirror. | cess11 wrote: | In case you'd like to know, there are a couple of typos on | the landing page: focussed and Custome service. | smcleod wrote: | I really like copilot, I've used it every day since it was in a | closed alpha. Copilot voice however - is hilariously terrible | in comparison. | tough wrote: | talonvoice.com was developed by a develoepr that needed | himself to use the AI voice to code tech | drusepth wrote: | > [4] Copilot for PRs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot- | for-pull-requests/ | | One minor nit for the Githubbers inevitably lurking in the | comments: | | The confirmation message for [4] says that they'll contact you | at [first email address listed on your account], not [primary | email address listed on your account]. I hope that's just a | display bug since I don't have access to the email I first | created my account with (but want to keep it added for commit | attribution). It's not listed as the primary email though, | which is where I'd expect this kind of communication to route | through! | simonw wrote: | I had that problem too. | brightball wrote: | I think I prefer the WhatTheDiff approach to this one. | Jack5500 wrote: | So wait, is the switch to GPT4 done now or will it be done with | Copilot X? The wording seems unclear to me | Toutouxc wrote: | Is anyone actually seeing things IRL like 46 % of code written by | Copilot? I'm using it in RubyMine in a few years old Rails | codebase with some complex bits, and while I find it much more | useful than RubyMine's already nice autocomplete, I can rarely | get it to write more than a one-liner before it misunderstands my | intentions and touches something it shouldn't. | | One thing that I think contributes to this is that the codebase | is really messy in places, so often there isn't much good code to | parrot, and things that are named like should only do thing A | often do thing B on the side. | bottlepalm wrote: | Probably more than 30% for me, and there's a lot of low hanging | fruit I bet it could get up to 60% at least. This is a full | stack app. It knows from context what you're going to next in | many cases. | vslira wrote: | A bit sad that they'll go the price discrimination route instead | of improving Copilot | | Gotta pay for those H100 I guess | ThereIsNoWorry wrote: | This does not replace anyone, it just gets rid of people that | don't adapt. I bet any company and developer that won't be using | AI augmentation to increase productivity (not just coding) will | horribly underperform in less than 10 years. | drusepth wrote: | It's kind of mind-blowing to see how well Microsoft has navigated | the Next Big Thing (AI) waters compared to Google, whose bread | and butter is (was?) AI/ML. | | Microsoft seems to have positioned themselves extremely well not | only to be a leader in the space moving forward, but also to | completely change the space. That's the mark of a great leader | and it's exciting to see someone taking the reins whose not | afraid to shift a paradigm or two. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | Bard is very underwhelming if you've used GPT-4. | | Between search being trash and now even Maps being awful, I | think it's time to stick a fork into Google. They need new | leadership and they need it asap. | itamarcode wrote: | While in GitHub Copilot X you need to join a waiting list, you | can already today generate meaningful test suites right inside | your IDE. Check out: https://www.codium.ai | | https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/21206-codiumai--meaning... | | https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codium.c... | amelius wrote: | Stackoverflow should be afraid. | erdaniels wrote: | If you think about it, it's likely that much of the code | Copilot is trained on comes from stackoverflow Q/A that made | its way into open source GtiHub projects | johlits wrote: | Next step: Don't even show me the code. Just the results. | zzzzzhzzzzz wrote: | "At GitHub, our mission has always been to innovate ahead of the | curve and give developers everything they need to be happier and | more productive in a world powered by software." | | Maybe start with repo folders? | thisismahdyar wrote: | Make an organization? | zerop wrote: | So we will have to train our developers to produce code using gpt | prompts. | | I see many jobs are at risk. | la64710 wrote: | This is clearly a case when an idea is oversold and everybody | starts to blabber the same thing. Lose all the arguments to git | cli because of an AI chat interface? | stuckinhell wrote: | I have some interesting stories from writing a report about a | couple teams using AI pair programming for development at my | firm. | | I'm seeing experienced senior developers use the AI to context | switch like lightning. They know when the AI is bullshitting | them, but they can use that seed to "jumpstart" their memories. | | Junior developers doing very domain specific tasks are taking | longer to develop using the AI. However boilerplate work is speed | up significantly. | nixpulvis wrote: | The first video in this post is a _perfect_ example of the | problems I see in this space. | | First the programmer asks the AI to nebulously "fix the bug". | Then the AI spits out an answer faster than anyone can read and | prompts you to integrate it. | | Sure I can pause the video... but this is terrible marketing and | dangerous practice. | | The PR autocomplete is just braindead development at it's | conclusion. | nixpulvis wrote: | _GitHub Copilot for CLI_ however, seems exciting. | | Ask a question for how to execute a command, get an answer with | description of the options needed. Explicit and easy, cool. | | Still doesn't build the muscle/mind memory of finding it | yourself, but could serve as a reasonable substitute for | `tldr`. | symlinkk wrote: | Everything I have worked for is worthless. The programming | knowledge I sacrificed my prime years to learn is obsolete. | Everything I earned I used to buy a house which is declining in | value day by day. I wonder if I would be happier and more | successful if I didn't take the responsible path in life. | itsaquicknote wrote: | Ouch, this nukes a few startups I was watching working on | "basically this". What's the plan control.dev and cursor.so? | pleb_nz wrote: | This is cool no doubt and I use it every day and it still has | shortcoming and isn't perfect. | | However, I definitely see job cuts coming. Not now, in some | years. I'm lucky, I'm closer to the tail of my career than the | start. | | But I feel for the hords of young people who have got into this | career but may soon find only a smaller percentage of them are | needed. | | You can't fight it, it's going to happen. It's up to the | individuals to identify this risk and take steps to ensure their | bases are covered if it and when it does. | winstonprivacy wrote: | No support for jetbrains? Having a chat plugin directly in the | IDE would save me a crazy amount of time. | veec_cas_tant wrote: | The video[1] shows JetBrains at 31 seconds: "All in your | favorite editor" | | [1] https://youtu.be/4RfD5JiXt3A?t=31 | endisneigh wrote: | it's interesting to try and reconcile the anti-big-tech zeitgeist | with the pro big-tech AI offerings such as this. fun times | pornel wrote: | The Copilot Voice dictation experience looks way better than the | current state of the art of "type keyword import space quote foo | quote semicolon newline". | jchw wrote: | Not very impressed with either Copilot or ChatGPT for programming | purposes. I'm sure it will be interesting for some people, but | whenever I really feel like I could benefit from an intelligent | AI, it usually falls flat. Most commonly, it will just generate | calls that don't exist, and if you try to get it to implement | them, it will write bullshit. Now the thing is, maybe it really | does improve developer productivity by virtue of letting the | developer autocomplete boring things. To be fair, I did see some | opportunity here. But on the other hand, it also seemed to harm | productivity, as I had to carefully review everything it did, and | eventually had to disable Copilot so that it would stop annoying | me with nonsense completions every time I stopped typing. I'm not | really sure if language models are actually getting closer to | what we really want, or if they're getting closer to some other | maxima that just looks similar. Clearly they're doing something | that is novel and probably even useful, but with increasing | parameter counts it seems that the underlying problems are not | changing. Something certainly seems like it must be fundamentally | wrong... | woeirua wrote: | ChatGPT << GPT4 when it comes to coding. | thebackup wrote: | I second this. My impressions so far are pretty much the same. | Have been trying to get ChatGPT to generate code for some | algorithms that are pretty close to well known implementations | but with some twists and it absolutely fails no matter how much | I tried to provide hints to change the suggestions it gave me. | In the end I just went back to hand coding them since it | actually saves me the frustration of trying to get ChatGPT to | bend in the direction I need. | Donald wrote: | Have you tried GPT-4? | thebackup wrote: | Will give it a go. But probably it'll take another | generation or two before it's good enough. | teaearlgraycold wrote: | I use them all the time with success. For copilot it's very | useful for writing tests and autocompleting repetitive code. | Like writing a Typescript interface that matches a JSON object, | or listing properties of an object into an array. ChatGPT is at | worst a good rubber duck, and at best a superpowered | documentation tool. If I ever get confused by docker or some | popular JavaScript library it's able to give me a custom | tailored answer that usually solves my problem on the first or | second try. | | Neither of them are any good at just writing a ton of code | (unless the code is mostly boilerplate). But they're amazing | keystroke savers and a next generation stack overflow. | danenania wrote: | What would be amazing for Copilot + Typescript is if it could | somehow integrate with the TS compiler (or perhaps just get | sufficient fine-tuning on the TS type system) so that it only | generates valid/type-safe suggestions. | ren_engineer wrote: | Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem | with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. | They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their | models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies | can overcome that | | have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti- | developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from | their ecosystem. Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow | managing to turn around public opinion about them, it's an all | timer | mike_hearn wrote: | I hope that Copilot X will be brought to other IDEs as well, | not just Visual Studio [Code]. | rvz wrote: | Here we go again with the editor lock in as precisely | predicted. [0] | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685104 | mynameisvlad wrote: | I like how you probably spent more time looking up your | multiple-year-old comment that could have instead been used | to make sure that you're not sounding like a fool that | doesn't know what he's talking about. | | They have already committed to releasing it to all editors | Copilot supports. So, you know, the exact opposite of | editor lock in. | rvz wrote: | > I like how you probably spent more time looking up your | multiple-year-old comment that could have instead been | used to make sure that you're not sounding like a fool | that doesn't know what he's talking about. | | It took seconds and it is still true and evergreen to | this day. Thanks for your so called 'concern'. | | > They have already committed to releasing it to all | editors Copilot supports. So, you know, the exact | opposite of editor lock in. | | They are more 'Committed' to supporting VS Code than | giving total feature parity to other editors. Do you | really believe _everything_ that Microsoft / OpenAI | feeds you? | mynameisvlad wrote: | Considering they have several third party editor logos in | full display on their main landing page, I'm going to | believe Microsoft and OpenAI over some random naysayer on | the internet who didn't even bother to check. | | https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x | | What benefit would they even gain from locking it to | their free editor? If anything, VS Code is a way for | Microsoft to push other services _like_ Copilot. The | strategy has been and continues to be to bring these | services to where the developer is. | rvz wrote: | So there is 100% feature parity then for all other | editors other than VS Code then? YES or NO? | | As I said before, _" They are more 'Committed' to | supporting VS Code than giving total feature parity to | other editors."_ | | Sticking a bunch of logos with no guarantee of 100% | feature parity as seen in VS Code is _exactly_ what lock- | in is. | | > If anything, VS Code is a way for Microsoft to push | other services like Copilot. The strategy has been and | continues to be to bring these services to where the | developer is. | | Re-centralizing _everything_ and owning the entire | developer ecosystem to MS / GitHub. What could possibly | go wrong? /s | mynameisvlad wrote: | > So there is 100% feature parity then for all other | editors other than VS Code then? YES or NO? | | Yes. If you had taken the time it took to look up your | comment to actually do something productive like looking | this up, you'd have probably found it yourself. Yet, here | we are. | | Copilot fully supports JetBrains and NeoVim alongside | Code and VS: | | https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/getting-started-with- | gith... | | https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/getting-started-with- | gith... | | In fact JetBrains is listed before VS proper in the | getting started guides: | | https://docs.github.com/en/copilot | | Sounds _totally_ like a place that "is more committed to | supporting VS Code than giving total feature parity to | other editors". | | > Re-centralizing everything and owning the entire | developer ecosystem to MS / GitHub. What could possibly | go wrong? /s | | How, exactly, is providing Jetbrains and Neovim support | "re-centralizing everything"? | | Next time, do the most bare minimum of research before | you double then triple down on an absurd argument not | based in reality. | klibertp wrote: | > How, exactly, is providing Jetbrains and Neovim support | "re-centralizing everything"? | | Bait and switch. If it's good enough that Neovim users | can't live without it, pulling the plug from Neovim | support will result in some subset of users converting to | VS Code. Probably won't play out this way with Jetbrains, | but editors with smaller following and nobody backing | them will most likely suffer this fate. It's happening | all the time, most notably with Google products. Google | Talk that used XMPP was neat and I switched to it because | I could use Pidgin to contact most of my contacts. Not | only Google Talk stopped supporting the standard, it even | died and was reborn as something else I think 3 or 4 | times by now. Of course, my contacts stayed with Google, | so I had to leave Pidgin behind. It's going to be similar | here, though to what extent I'm not sure, maybe it won't | be very noticeable, or maybe it will. We'll see. | mynameisvlad wrote: | That's all fair, but that's not even remotely what their | argument was. | | Their entire point is that Microsoft is re-centralizing | everything by forcing people onto VS Code. Which is | something they're... just not doing. | | This is also an optional, paid tool to help when coding. | The comparison to Google Talk is IMO not relevant. It's | never going to be "good enough that someone won't be able | to live without it" because it's at its core a completely | optional tool. | | If Copilot for NeoVim goes away in 5 years, you can | just... stop using it. It's not like we haven't developed | things without Copilot for decades now. | efields wrote: | The sublime plugin for Copilot works well enough already. I'm | sure Copilot X will be something you can fold into any | editor. I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate | the UX lag in VSCode | crucialfelix wrote: | Try disabling all extensions. | | I know there are startup metrics, and I would expect there | are keystroke metrics to understand what's running | epolanski wrote: | Maybe they have a better machine than you so they don't | notice it. | jlkuester7 wrote: | My dev machine is sufficiently beefy (32G of RAM). I | recently tried https://lapce.dev/ and was very surprised | that it was noticeably more snappy than VSC. (I am not | super sensitive to that kind of thing after years spent | in Eclipse/IDEA.). | | Made me realize how I can just become accustomed to a | certain amount of lagging.... | pzo wrote: | I recently tried lapce on my Mac and just empty editor | with just one new tab was eating 70% of my CPU. I'd | better IDE eat 1-2GB of ram than eat my CPU cycles. Also | on their github lapce has more than 50% of open issues | labeled as C-Bug - that's not very reassuring | joshmanders wrote: | > I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the | UX lag in VSCode | | A lot of us don't experience any issues. To me, VSCode is | just as performant as Sublime is. | eitland wrote: | I guess what you experience is how I experience 1 px | misalignment and similar things that some people always | complain about in KDE: | | I don't notice it at all. | | Modern software that doesn't react _immediately_ even | when running on even more modern hardware however, that | grinds my gears. | acedTrex wrote: | VSCode never has any lag for me personally | norman784 wrote: | Seems that you didn't bother checked their site before | commenting. Check it out here[0], but TLDR: they have VS, VS | code, Jetbrains and NeoVim logos in there. | | [0] https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x | Version467 wrote: | The page you linked only shows those logos in a block that | specifically talks about Copilot, not Copilot X, so I don't | see how this implies that Copilot X will come to those | platforms as well. | | (I expect implementations for those platforms to show up | eventually, I just don't think the logos on that page are | evidence for that.) | mike_hearn wrote: | The blog post we're talking about says specifically: | | "We are bringing a chat interface to the editor that's | focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with | VS Code and Visual Studio." | celeritascelery wrote: | I don't know about jetbrains, but the neovim plug-in is not | full featured like the vscode one. For example, it doesn't | have the "explain this code" feature. The repo also does | not allow issues or PR's so you can't even ask for it to | have feature parity. I am a paying GitHub copilot user with | the neovim plugin (in Emacs), but I find this second-class | treatment frustrating. I expect copilot X to be more of the | same, since it is even more deeply integrated into vscode. | highwaylights wrote: | They've already committed to bringing it to other platforms | where Copilot is currently (JetBrains IDE's for example). | mwilsonthomas wrote: | Hey Mike: see this post for info about Copilot chat in Visual | Studio 2022! | | https://aka.ms/GHCopilotchatVS | | Hope that helps | | Cheers Mark Wilson-Thomas Program Manager, Copilot chat for | Visual Studio | _the_inflator wrote: | MS was smart enough to use the existing brands to somewhat | whitewash their previously not so well perceived reputation in | the developer community. | | I guess some folks at Google will regret not buying Github. On | the other hand, Google is in my opinion not the best choice in | regards to product development and integration. Their business | model centers around ads, while Microsoft has the better stance | here with a subscription model. | ilovetux wrote: | > have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti- | developer Microsoft used to be | | Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti- | developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in | my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their | developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first- | class. | | I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly | hostile to open source, but I don't think it's fair to say they | have been anti-developer. | bastardoperator wrote: | Is there anyone doing more for open source today? I hear you, | but it's clear they've changed that tune dramatically. | throwaway290 wrote: | By monetising OSS and sidestepping copyleft licenses to | suggest you the same code repackaged as part of proprietary | autocomplete for which you pay MS and not original authors? | DeathArrow wrote: | What do you mean by that? | bastardoperator wrote: | Yeah, that's totally what they did when they open sourced | ts, .net, vscode, wsl, powershell, playwright, fluent UI, | windows terminal, blazor, dapr... | | It's also clear you don't understand LLM or how anything | is working under the hood when it comes to AI. I'd use a | throwaway account too if I was talking such nonsense. | erikstarck wrote: | "Developers! Developers! Developers!" | | He wasn't kidding. | oefrha wrote: | Brings back the fond memories of Ballmer and his sweaty | shirt. | PurpleRamen wrote: | Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against | scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with | wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much | as possible for admins and devs. | | Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of | this, just more dev-friendly. | DeathArrow wrote: | Being a developer isn't the same as being a command line | user. | | Most Windows users prefer GUI over the command line. | | That being said, Microsoft released PowerShell, Windows | Terminal and lots of command line tools. A large part of | the Windows administration can be done trough command line | if one so desires. | klibertp wrote: | Yeah, but then they made PowerShell, which was at the time | seriously the most advanced shell and shell scripting | language out there. PS got pretty mixed reactions because | it was different than BASH, but the idea of typed pipes of | objects instead of one-size-fits-all streams of lines of | text was (and still is) powerful. (The syntax could be a | little less verbose though) | bradford wrote: | > Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and | against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, | with wizards and s*, | | I'd categorize this as incompetence, not malice towards | developers. | | Specifically: Microsoft thought that code-creation wizards | and UI would offer a better story than command line and | text. Those attempts were misguided, and MS adjusted. The | command line culture at MS has been pervasive for a long | time, despite the quirkiness of DOS, so I must object to | your categorization of MS being anti command-line and anti- | scripting. | | [disclaimer, MS employee, my opinion only.] | mistrial9 wrote: | the economic contracts offered to developers by Microsoft | were very different than in other development ecosystems. | Microsoft always represented a different economic culture | than many others, developers chose their allies based on | multiple criteria. | ensignavenger wrote: | At this point, it seems MS has almost as many years of being | neutral-supportive of FOSS as they have of being against it. | lancesells wrote: | Many people paid to host their code at Github to only then | have it sold back to them and others in the form of Copilot. | | IMO that's very anti-developer. | vincentkriek wrote: | That is not anti-developer, but definitely anti-opensource. | As a developer I dont really care my code is used to make | copilot better and sold in that way. | bhj wrote: | You should care if your code's license is being violated | by being reproduced without attribution. Undermining | OSS's licenses can ultimately weaken it, and the cynic in | me suspects MS is fully aware of this. | cornholio wrote: | There is some nuance here. Microsoft executed "commoditize | your complement" to perfection - the complements to their OS | being PC hardware and applications. | | This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast | array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally | good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low | in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for | these commoditized and neutered competitors - "ISVs". | Basically, Microsoft owned the OS and the major applications | like office & enterprise software, media, browser etc. and | everything else was supplied by an ISV, for example your | accounting software for country XYZ, a market where MS had no | interest in entering. | | As long as you kept within the ISV playground, MS was | developer friendly, but it would turn very hostile to any | perceived competitor to their core assets. Undocumented APIs, | monopoly abuse, dark patterns, the entire circus. This | strategy made the PC market impenetrable for nearly two | decades, and it was only through sheer luck and complacency | that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot. | DeathArrow wrote: | > it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the | mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot. | | Windows Phone wasn't bad and I wish we could have more | competition in mobile space. | cornholio wrote: | I wish we could have open platforms that competitive | players can extend and develop without owning outright | and excluding other competitors. | | It's the great next step in regulating monopolies, | contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the | marketplace but must always interoperate with existing | infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech | competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some | first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto | standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its | dominance and undeserved rent extraction. | | The situation is complicated by the nature of | international trade vs local regulations, it might not be | good for your national consumers to be fleeced by a | platform monopoly, but you more than make up for it if | your national tech champions achieve world-dominance. | DeathArrow wrote: | > I wish we could have open platforms that competitive | players can extend and develop without owning outright | and excluding other competitors. | | Who will pay for the development of those platforms? Who | will ensure the compatibility with hardware? | DeathArrow wrote: | > The last decades of tech competition were a repetition | of this basic tune, some first mover more or less | stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like | hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent | extraction. | | Isn't that true for every industry? | nonethewiser wrote: | Microsoft is far more open than it used to be. It's not simply | marketing. | kmlx wrote: | this just tells me it's only a matter of time before they will | be forced to split. | | windows, office, xbox, devices, github, azure, zenimax, | activision blizzard and so many others i'm forgetting. | PaulWaldman wrote: | Does anyone have a prediction for how this translates into | Microsoft's bottom line? I'd imagine it is mostly increased | Azure sales with a few Visual Studio licenses. | epolanski wrote: | Bingo, exactly what I'm thinking. | | Sure, they get more developers to use their software, but to | how much money does that translate considering the tens of | billions they have spent? | | Not sure how does that helps Azure by the way. It helps GH | more than anything. | toyg wrote: | Azure/subscription sales is what they care about anyway. | Everything else is a commodity. | ren_engineer wrote: | I could see them selling an absurdly expensive enterprise on- | prem copilot that is tuned for a company's codebase and able | to be customized to some extent. If they can show how much it | improves productivity it would be an easy sell. Plus tightly | integrate everything with Azure like you said | | Bill Gates was also talking about company AI's that "attend | every meeting" and are involved even in non-technical areas | via Office. Microsoft seems all in on this | Vespasian wrote: | They have some great products in there (probably) but most | likely they expect some of their attempts to fail (it's to | be expected). | | It's a "bet the retirement fund but not the farm" situation | where they invest a lot of money to see what stick. | | They are in a great position to do that and burning a few | millions in the process might be worth it. | piokoch wrote: | Who will verify that those data are correct? What if majority | of the code sucks, what if majority code uses "best practices" | that are no longer valid - think of many GoF Java "patterns" | that are now considered to be code smell? | | AI will not invent anything, it will effectively reproduce | mistakes made by others. | | The process of code writing is such a small part of the whole | IT project, that shortening of time spent on writing code does | not matter in practice. | nixarn wrote: | Have you tried co-pilot? I don't want to code without it. | Saves so much time and produces good results, instead of | searching for answers online, which isn't easy as you get | into ad filled sites, find shitty Stack Overflow answers and | webpages with outdated docs and examples. | | Two examples from this week. Formatting dates in javascript, | I had a datetime string and I wanted to show it as YY-MM-DD | HH:MM for our internal tool. I don't know by heart exactly | what to in this case although it's far from rocket science, | so now I could write a comment what I wanted done and copilot | coded it for me. | | Same when I wanted a request to become a file download for | the user, not something I've done many times before, and I | could kinda reason that it probably needs the header to be | set to something. And googling for this didn't give good | results, yo need the right language, framework etc. With | copilot I just wrote the comment // return file as download, | and co-pilot wrote the code to set the header and send the | bytes. Amazing! | taormina wrote: | So it set some headers. Did it pick the right headers? Did | it know what headers the recipient was expecting? | chatmasta wrote: | > Have you tried co-pilot? | | I wanted to try co-pilot, but noped out when I saw it | required a subscription. I thought it was in some kind of | beta and would still be free. Is there a way to try it | without signing up for a subscription? | | My general worry is about becoming personally dependent on | a paid tool just to do basic programming work. | pantulis wrote: | Your worry is going to become obsolete pronto, just like | you are not worried about depending on a paid CPU to | perform basic computations. The meaning of "basic | programming work" will be redefined by these tools. | | The entry barrier of the subscription is a shame, that's | for sure. But before open models are avilable, the field | is proprietary today: we are going to witness a battle of | AIs that will be as bloody as the Unix Wars of lore. | chatmasta wrote: | I suspect you're right, and I'm generally optimistic | about this future efficiency. But it doesn't make me any | less of a cheapskate :) | yamtaddle wrote: | I still want to know if MS lets, say, Windows or MS | Office developers use it. If not, they must consider it | too risky from a copyright standpoint, which means so do | I. | DeathArrow wrote: | > . Is there a way to try it without signing up for a | subscription? | | Yes, you can sign on the wait list and get 2 months free | trial. | tootie wrote: | I'm a fanboy of heavy IDEs with big fat debuggers like | JetBrains tools. It's ironic that Microsoft who used to | dominate that niche, is now dominating with a glorified text | editor. | DeathArrow wrote: | There are still lots of people using Visual Studio. | btbuildem wrote: | > Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow managing to turn | around public opinion about them, it's an all timer | | To be fair, it's been almost two decades. I feel like since | Ballmer's departure, MS began to turn things around. | soiler wrote: | > have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti- | developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from | their ecosystem | | I mean, any company can become hostile to a large portion of | its userbase. Most are. Microsoft already is with Windows OS | being spyware. Are you saying that you think all of this is a | trap to bring developers in to VSCode etc. and then transform | it into a terrible experience? People will leave then. SWEs are | not generally an audience that is unwilling to replace bad | tools. | boppo1 wrote: | If I'm using VS Code, am I opting in to sharing my code as | training data? | brundolf wrote: | Public companies aren't people. It doesn't make sense to trust | them, but it also doesn't make sense to hold a grudge against | them. They act in a way that fits the moment. Right now, | Microsoft seems to be in a "build good tools" moment. If they | get too dominant they could re-enter an "abuse power" moment. | But that would be because it's what they think is in their best | interest, not because "Microsoft is [uniquely] untrustworthy" | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Yep. But also this kind of essentialist thinking doesn't work | for people, either, so :-) Nobody is just one thing or | another. And neither are companies. They act on various | levers, in response to various interests, and it's about | looking at the tendencies and patterns. Holding grudges | against people makes little sense, either. | brundolf wrote: | Fair, although even on a sliding-scale I think trust | mechanisms are less-inaccurate when it comes to a single | person (who can change, but usually in gradual/limited | ways) vs a company (which is a revolving door of thousands | of people who come and go over the decades) | chatmasta wrote: | That may be true, but for many of Microsoft's flagship open | source projects, it is very much about the people. For | example, TypeScript has been created and maintained by a | relatively stable team of highly proficient developers who | have become the face of the project and in many ways the | driving force behind its success. | | It's important that Microsoft backed them, because it | provides a stable environment for the developers to keep | working on the project and gives confidence to the community | that it's a stable language to adopt. But fundamentally it's | the people who are important. | | In recent years, Microsoft has shown there can be real upside | to corporate-driven open source, especially when it has | proper buy-in from management and usage throughout the | organization (e.g. VSCode is developed in relative lockstep | with TypeScript, and both projects benefit from that | relationship). | DeathArrow wrote: | > Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer | ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with | OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to | optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI | focused companies can overcome that | | Other companies can focus on other areas where AI can be used. | There's room for everybody. | bob1029 wrote: | > have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti- | developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from | their ecosystem. | | At a certain point you may find that you've got your hand so | far in the Microsoft cookie jar that it would make more sense | to just accept that you are a MS shop and go for the rest of | the cookies as shamelessly as possible. | | We've embraced our fate. Almost everything is Microsoft branded | in our workplace now. | | It's really easy to hate on Microsoft through the lens of | programming tooling and other nerd abstractions. It's super | hard to hate on them from the perspective of IT administrators | and business owners wanting to enjoy their weekends. [Azure] | Active Directory and the modern Windows/Office suite are a | competitive advantage for enjoying your free time. I have never | seen a better overall experience for managing a small startup. | fossuser wrote: | Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon | Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don't have a | horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they're a scary | force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they | are again. | | There's a massive paradigm shift we're just at the beginning of | and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last | couple of years. Nadella has really turned things around for | them. | | Google and meta are scrambling. | | Things should get interesting. | bredren wrote: | If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a | wee bit caught out as well. | | I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other | advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will | propel it to forefront. | endtime wrote: | I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa | or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different, | since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with | those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard | part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as | extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect | their ability to use their users' data to train models. | | It'll be interesting to see, anyway. | listless wrote: | I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this | point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into | the net. | | Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. | Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a | language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate | some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins | because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous | compute happens - which is likely in Azure. | fossuser wrote: | Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some | extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). | | Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They | were first to market with Siri and it's still trash | 13yrs(?!) later. It's always been what they're weakest at, | I'm not sure LLMs will be different for them. | | The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform | advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface. | zer00eyz wrote: | > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. | | They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for | "ai" | fossuser wrote: | Siri still sucks? | withinboredom wrote: | "Siri, set an alarm for 5pm eastern standard time" ... | you get an alarm for 5pm local time, with the memo | 'eastern standard time' (assuming aren't located in | eastern standard time, this is not the expected | behavior). | shagie wrote: | Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface | to a few standardized interfaces that applications can | hook into. | | The system provided intents ( | https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are | rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the | architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that | easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). | | However, for those intents - it does quite well and most | processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and | that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. | It is _much_ less expensive than Alexa to run (where | nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also | something that can 't do as much. | | Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what | time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are | indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples | such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), | it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. | | This also means that its capabilities are limited to what | you can run on the phone. | fossuser wrote: | That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current | status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't | supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to | what they wanted. | | We'll see if that changes. | shagie wrote: | The "what they hoped" is a question of "what _who_ hoped? | " | | When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and | Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't | designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but | rather the intents show that it is designed for specific | functionality of specific types of applications. | | Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was | always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha | was the choice for a while). | | Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice | interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't | trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't | do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't | be a surprise to Apple. | | Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different | architectures with different goals and support costs. | | If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get | the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a | general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. | What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas | Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud). | fossuser wrote: | Just watch the introduction of the Siri product: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ | | "Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things | done just by asking" | | I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what | LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy | barely functioning timer setting app it currently is. | | Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's | not worth trying to use. | shagie wrote: | The tooling that it was designed for was things like | https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 | | Those were the intents that were set up. | | Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that | isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. | Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and | parsed for functions to call into apps that register that | they are able to handle that function call. | | If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to | Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While | Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot. | | Siri wasn't supposed to be _smart_. Siri was intended for | an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, | messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and | weather. | | When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your | phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and | you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer | setting app. | | What functionality in there that you see in this segment | that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? | What time cue do you see them promising something smarter | than what was designed? | canadianfella wrote: | [dead] | eitland wrote: | > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. | They were first to market with Siri and it's still trash | 13yrs(?!) later. | | Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years | ago: | | Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its | unsolicited suggestions. | | Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, | like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a | friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning. | | One single time I can remember Google actually getting a | suggestion correct. | | This probably works better today than four years ago and | maybe it always worked better if you were in a US | timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri | setting timers at least works and a few times a year it | comes up with smart suggestions. | | (Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.) | bredren wrote: | AI in support of user interface has been downright awful. | IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of | any other product at Apple. | | However, the company has deployed machine learning in | support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of | penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready | to do gen AI at the edge. | | The company has focused largely on STT and image | processing but has worked to support use of the chip for | general ML, via transformer. [1] | | I'd say Apple's only failed in the way everyone did--- | failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative | AI. | | Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its | ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like | behavior to Xcode. When will this occur? | | [1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural- | engine-tra... | pantulis wrote: | > I'd say Apple's only failed in the way everyone did--- | failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative | AI. | | This is so true that now the only differentiating | capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is | excelling here in an unexpected way. | insane_dreamer wrote: | Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will | regret that MSFT did so. | ugh123 wrote: | OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started | working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So | the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to | scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra | bredren wrote: | I think apple made a choice a while back to yield | software engineering workflows outside Swift to | Microsoft. | | I had expected Apple to produce its own version of | GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy. | | The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of | press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad | answers or questions about legality of what the models | produce. | | None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its | strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require | expertise the company doesn't have. | newaccount2023 wrote: | for now, Apple is in a different league | | if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply | pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will | only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at | the same time" and _everyone_ will comply | DeathArrow wrote: | And that's why I don't use their products. | pxoe wrote: | a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's | kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working | out great for them, isn't it. | | so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not | even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do | something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". | well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope | for much. | DeathArrow wrote: | > meta has a headset, and that's working out great for | them, isn't it. | | A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, | too, we' ll see another in 20 years. | hbn wrote: | I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're | gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of | free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big | breadwinner software is still abysmal to use. | | I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank | document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. | Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad | serving platform that happens to run the applications you | need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. | For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo | preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and | eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic | functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was | literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed | the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, | jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until | you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, | built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is | so clunky and prone to breaking. | Cipater wrote: | It takes three seconds to cold start Word for me on an old | (2015), underpowered (core i5, 8GB RAM, low end SSD) HP | laptop. | fossuser wrote: | They're strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of | their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good | reason (vscode, GitHub). | | O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they | crushed slack despite slack's headstart. Slack sold out to | languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own | that space. | | Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at | iTunes on windows, it's not really representative. Even | Windows itself isn't that important (that was one of the | big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took | over). You're right about edge though (which is why | Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit). | | Microsoft also ships (something Google can't do very well). | I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued | because people have not properly updated from outdated | historical sentiment. | moffkalast wrote: | > lot of their products > GitHub | | Yeah that one doesn't count, they've made exactly zero | changes since acquisition and Actions still has downtime | every few weeks. | matwood wrote: | > integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack | despite slack's headstart | | Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is | included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better | at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS | lock in most people still need office to deal with | interop. | | Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with | a free feature from a product suite most companies are | forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they | struggle at handling acquisitions. | zelphirkalt wrote: | Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is | still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather | join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% | of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will | cook up this time to ruin your call. | | O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document | creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any | normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water | in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted | documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office | (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has | gone downhill at alarming speed. | | VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but | ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in | most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a | convincing offer either. | | Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average. | And don't even get me started on Windows itself. | mynameisash wrote: | A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no | indication that offline Office is being discontinued. | | And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other | online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which | has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365. | | Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me. | | [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en- | us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe... | fossuser wrote: | It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their | opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say | Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's | just not something that matters in this kind of strategic | product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just | a signal it's not worth engaging imo). | | There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs | isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to | compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending | to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to | pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're | going to mock competition you better hope you're apple | and not netscape [0][1]. | | I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not | enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive | offering and they failed to do that. | | [0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/ | | [1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open- | letter_n... | Kwpolska wrote: | Desktop Office apps are still available, fully supported, | and fully functional. Office 2021 is the latest buy-once | release, but Microsoft 365 subscribers get all the | desktop apps with their subscription (and they get | continuous updates). The web apps are separate and have | their limitations. Microsoft 365 subscribers get to | choose between the two. Non-subscribers get only the web | version with some features removed. | adzm wrote: | Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have | stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they | turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer. | toastal wrote: | > at least we have Discord | | Poe's Law? | nicce wrote: | Discord is yet another walled garden to be fair. It might | be good replacement for some little, private communities. | | But also large communities are moving into Discord | instead of using some public, index-able and findable | platforms. They used to be public in the past and people | very able to read information about them without going | process for creating account, acceptance or even finding | whole community. | | Discord is terrible for storing long term information in | text form. People try to keep some pinned posts but no.. | information disappears, when in comparison for forums it | was there. | | And let's not start with privacy. | moffkalast wrote: | > information disappears | | Wait really? I've never seen that happen on Discord, I | can still see messages from over half a decade ago. Why | would they delete data they mine? | | Slack on the other hand deletes everything immediately if | you're not on the paid plan of course. | fossuser wrote: | I think it's more about salesforce, I have a pretty | negative opinion about them and everything they acquire | seems to limp along or die (and the good employees leave | immediately) - just seems like a boring place to be (nice | sky scraper though). | | Microsoft has a better track record with acquisitions. | eloisius wrote: | Salesforce wastes all their effort on new acquisitions | making business-driven decisions like "add Einstein to | it!" or "integrate it with the Lightning Experience | (TM)!" instead of doing anything remotely useful to pre- | acquisition customers. Once it's adequately diced up, | they can add it as another line-item to renewals who | already pay so much money to salesforce that they don't | care. | jackosdev wrote: | vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than | all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of | features they pump out month to month is outstanding, | just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why | they put so much effort into a free product that I run | from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot | subscription so it all makes sense now. | insane_dreamer wrote: | better than PyCharm for python? | OOPMan wrote: | Nope, but VsCode addicts are usually too cheap to try a | paid-for tool like PyCharm | snotrockets wrote: | There's a free, open source, community edition, which | provides most of the functionality | bombela wrote: | It's free and electron because they can run it in a web | browser, running everything on MS Azure. With code on | GitHub and CI on GitHub etc etc. The whole dev experience | offered to companies as a service via a series of web | applications. Companies will love this. | | Just get any web browser, preferably Microsoft Edge on a | Microsoft Window Pro on a Microsoft Surface laptop. Open | Microsoft GitHub workspace. To dev for your Microsoft | Azure hosted Linux VM. Run the CI on GitHub. Use | Microsoft O365 for your design doc. And Microsoft Team | for communication. | | Poor little Linux in the middle. | withinboredom wrote: | You honestly had me do a double take. Copilot costs | money? Maybe I get it through some other thing, but its | been free for me as long as I can remember. It's wrong so | often that I generally keep it on because it's | entertaining. I wouldn't pay for it. | GartzenDeHaes wrote: | You might be thinking of IntelliCode, which was released | in 2019. | https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/ | withinboredom wrote: | No, I use in PHPStorm as a plug-in. | infinityio wrote: | I think copilot is free in the education pack - you might | have got it from there? | withinboredom wrote: | Looks like I get it through my organization. | bitwize wrote: | You're complaining about 15 seconds? I can remember the | Windows 3.x days when it took _minutes_ to warm Word up. | computerex wrote: | No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If | it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete | monopoly on AI. | passion__desire wrote: | As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy | Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy? | mistrial9 wrote: | google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the | same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was | scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal | competitive moments | letsdothisagain wrote: | Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't | ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all | companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc. | airstrike wrote: | Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't | live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse | daydream wrote: | > When Microsoft executes well, they're a scary force. They | were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are | again. | | I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how | much they left on the table during this very same time. | Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing | read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well | as how much they got right. | | MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership | and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves | right now. Google in particular should be very afraid. | | [1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth | reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there. | LawTalkingGuy wrote: | I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be | afraid? | | There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS | is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like | MS can. | | If anything, this is where they should both be afraid | because an upstart with a browser extension could replace | them. | ignoramous wrote: | > _GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right | now_ | | Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. | They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS | and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, | including their XBox division. | DeathArrow wrote: | > That said, except for OS and Browsers | | Windows is not negligible. | siva7 wrote: | Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price | tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs | potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts | best acquisition in the last two decades. | neom wrote: | Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke | when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full | circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is | back on top. | dathinab wrote: | - lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, | probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a | lock down on macOS | | - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop | Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could | just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not | anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers | | - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games | and only through the Windows app store | | - maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well | | - probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the | sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants | (like gmail)" | | - probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not | work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it | hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux | system | DeathArrow wrote: | Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux | taking over the desktop? | dathinab wrote: | It never was about emotional things like being scared. | | It's about eliminating competition and especially | preventing potential future competition, it's about | maximizing control and power to the most you can without | losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost | consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and | future prospect. | | Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of | "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With | a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which | is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for | Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely | calculative perspective. | | And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in | context of how currently most Linux desktops are but | prospect anyway. | | I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges: | | - like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of | components and users, often with a lot of more emotional | then technical opinions | | - much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies | which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not | focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat, | Valve)) | | - a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all | decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing | things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not | be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental" | improvements and maintenance.) | | but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite | usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then | Windows. The main problem is normally not missing | functionality or hardware support but fragmentation. | Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a | software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack | and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources, | fragmentation making system management/hardware support | harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too | much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop | Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is | small). | | But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop | Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions | _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly | successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible, | hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible. | DeathArrow wrote: | Microsoft already owns the desktop and I don't think they | consider Linux a threat. | | macOS would be a a better contender but I don't think | they consider that a threat, also. | | In fact, Windows is starting to weigh less and less in | overall Microsoft strategy. Windows mattered when all we | had were desktops but now they have lots of cows they are | milking. | | I won't be surprised if in the future Microsoft will find | that it isn't worth to pay for the development of Windows | and will release it's own Linux distribution. It would be | quite a disappointment for me, but certainly possible. | | > but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is | quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then | Windows. | | I've tried since 23 years ago to use Linux as a desktop | but it failed repeatedly. I even have it installed on a | separate disk on my home PC but I seldom boot it. | boringuser1 wrote: | [dead] | dathinab wrote: | > There's a massive paradigm shift we're just at the | beginning of and Microsoft | | yes, but I hope people don't thing embrace, extend, | extinguish is dead, it isn't | mattferderer wrote: | Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued | that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than | Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also | very active with the company during those years as well. | | Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting | to crush it & make it dissolve. | | Nadella inherited an underdog. | | I think this should be considered when thinking about the | legacy of the CEO. | fossuser wrote: | I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer. | | - Massive miss on mobile | | - Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows | | - Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with | windows for same reason | | https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ | | > "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services, | Not Devices that argued that Ballmer's strategic priorities | were exactly backwards: Microsoft's services should be | businesses in their own right, not Windows' | differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his | memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft's dysfunction | that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that | allegedly played a large role in his ouster." | | I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad | strategy and things only started getting better when he was | finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the | previous decade's decisions caused them to become one. | quijoteuniv wrote: | Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in | windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux | distribution that runs legacy windows software within | containers :D | withinboredom wrote: | If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that | shenanigans[1] aren't required. | | [1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl | quijoteuniv wrote: | Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year | remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep, | command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will | eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird | workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a | github case 2-3 years old | wankle wrote: | I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, | and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 | in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user | tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with | Microsoft. | dathinab wrote: | or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying | out linux distributions in the past | | like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs | which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many | try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them | can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for | Linux servers etc. | | Basically they have accepted that windows server have | failed and their server license business model isn't that | good anymore too due to how the cloud changed things. So | instead of pushing for a Windows everywhere ecosystem they | now embrace Linux on servers (preferable on Azure ;) ) and | Windows on the desktop using WSL to bridge the dev | experience and also bridge to university student use case. | | But you can be sure that if they see a way to make it | harder to install Linux on systems and get away with it | both legal wise and PR wise (probably using some excuses | about "security") you can be sure they will do so. | Especially if they can push the blame onto others (like the | hardware vendors not implementing some option in the BIOS | which is needed to allow other OSes to be installed). | Through at least for now I expect them to act careful to | not damage their new image. | | Also one way the failed the "Windows desktop" thing is by | producing a pretty bad out of the box desktop experience | for many people (like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if | there is even a single AD in there, or bloat ware). This | create reasons for people to switch to Linux which had been | much less common during windows 7 days. | fossuser wrote: | I use macOS in large part because its a *nix OS under the | hood. | | WSL gives a lot of that power to Windows. | dathinab wrote: | macOS is tempting but it's a pretty bad nix IMHO. | | The amount of times I had to change ad-hoc scripts to | work around macOS limitations is absurd. | fesc wrote: | Except it isn't, so e.g. running containers still need a | VM. | | I wish macOS had something like WSL built-in. | DeathArrow wrote: | > Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers | etc. | | I develop for Linux but I use WSL only indirectly through | Docker Desktop. | DeathArrow wrote: | > like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if there is even | a single AD in there | | I can't remember last time I paid for Windows. Microsoft | usually offers free upgrades. | | I haven't seen any ad on Windows. I frankly find hard to | believe there are ads in Windows. | ashes-of-sol wrote: | [dead] | ipaddr wrote: | Sounds like you are on an older version of windows or | maybe you disabled them in a drunk rage. | dathinab wrote: | > I can't remember last time I paid for Windows. | | Every time you buy a new Laptop or pre-build computer | with Windows installed you (very likely) implicitly | bought a license. | | But I agree that due to Windows handing out a lot of | "free upgrades" even outside of their official supported | upgrade path they missed out on a lot of License cost, | but made more users upgrade so probably worth it. | | Most important Microsoft mainly cares about Businesses | buying Pro versions of licenses, potential in huge | batches. | | > ... disabled ads ... [from other adjacent comment] | | Or uses a pi-hole or a software which disables them for | you but which you might have installed to e.g. set | privacy settings or replaced components with 3rd party | ones or that LTT Linus ability to subconscious filter out | ads. What matters is that there are a lot of people which | have had the AD experience. | intelVISA wrote: | I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together | recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't | use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as | a business. | moneywoes wrote: | Reminds me of the IE days | knodi123 wrote: | half our team is really entrenched with jetbrains. but aside | from a couple of curmudgeons who are formally married to vim, I | think VSCode and JetBrains has pretty much sewed up the market. | mempko wrote: | Listen, if I divorce vim, it will take half my stuff. | airstrike wrote: | How about using vim mode in VS Code or is that like being | in an open relationship? | notpachet wrote: | It's more like marrying a sex doll. | eterps wrote: | It sure looks like they're setting themselves up to (again) be | in a position where no one can get around them. | popcorncowboy wrote: | The irony of this comment is absolutely wonderful. | rvz wrote: | Some people and developers here just never learn from history | rhyming with itself. [0] [1] | | Another bunch of startups destroyed by this announcement. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28324999 | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685104 | pongo1231 wrote: | Aren't lock-ins into their own respective ecosystem what | every tech giant is striving for? Don't see how that behavior | is Microsoft-exclusive necessarily. | bredren wrote: | The waiting list signup does not allow you to pick Pycharm, | which previously has had a GitHub copilot plug-in. | ModernMech wrote: | Funniest thing for me is how Ms has been left out of the FAANG | acronym for all these years, as if they somehow haven't been | relevant in the developer ecosystem for the past 10 or so | years. | tarruda wrote: | When you use copilot integrated in the editor, does microsoft | collect all source code data on your project or only context | used to perform the completions? | jghn wrote: | Concern over this is the #1 reason I have not yet tried to | use Copilot. For my hobby projects I don't care enough to pay | for it. And if it's phoning home proprietary code, I can't | allow that to happen. | programmarchy wrote: | It's worth it even for hobby projects, imo. It reduces the | time spent on mundane tasks and allows you to think at a | higher level and just move faster. Maybe you achieve a | level of zen from implementing utility level code, similar | to how some people might still write assembly code, but | otherwise it's a valuable tool/skill to learn. | | Tangentially, I think there's some fear associated with | adopting AI tools, perhaps because developers feel like | their skill sets are being displaced. And they are but | there's headroom e.g. assembly programmers learned C. There | seems to be some post-hoc rationalizations being put forth | to avoid that fear, but my sense is that developers who | don't cultivate this new skill set will fall behind. | discreteevent wrote: | > my sense is that developers who don't cultivate this | new skill set will fall behind | | That might be true but it's an easy skillset to pick up | compared to programming. The bigger danger is that new | developers will lean on AI so much that they do not pick | up the fundamentals of programming in which case they | will definitely be left behind. | aliasxneo wrote: | Many, probably. However, the curious types will likely be | further enhanced by AI. I've never been one to take code | at face value, and I have been enjoying sessions with | ChatGPT asking all sorts of questions about some of the | stuff it produces. The answer is usually sufficient, and | in cases where it's not, I've been given enough | background context to know where to find the answer | online or in books. | | Honestly, I've seen myself master many more additional | things since I've started including it in my daily | routine. | blibble wrote: | the result of this will be similar to hiring infosys | | hundreds of thousands of lines of buggy incomprehensible | boilerplate that doesn't work on anything but the easy | cases | | then you have to rip the entire thing apart and start | again with people that know what they're doing | Vespasian wrote: | I'm being reminded of a close friend of mine who is a car | mechanic. In recent years the fraction of BEV and PHEV | among new cars has risen to ~20% which absolutely will | influence his job and will require new skills of a | different kind. | | Yet, despite the obvious evidence, he is unwillingly to | even acknowledge the possibility that this is happening | and refuses to research what it could mean to him (which | may be very little). | | I never quite understood why. Certainly just keeping in | touch with the world wouldn't hurt right? | | With the rise of AI, I think I get it. There's a part of | me that is scared to shit about the prospect of being | made redundant in the near future with all my acquired | skill being worthless in this new world. The temptation | to put my head into the sand and hope it "blows" over is | strong. | | I've resigned myself to never become like my friend and | consequently have recently shelled out for a year of | Copilot. My thinking is that at worst it's 100EUR wasted | and at best I'm not blindsided by what is coming anyway. | | The reality will probably fall somewhere on a middle | ground where there are still jobs to be found. | unshavedyak wrote: | Can you describe how you use it? I struggle to imagine | how it would even be done. Ie do you write prompts? Just | code as normal but frequently hit a "copilot" button? etc | | Though i do wonder if it'll improve my ability to read | code. PRs are a pain because i find it easier to write | than read. I'd pay for Copilot in a heartbeat if it was | good at spotting PR errors/etc. | nicky0 wrote: | Just type your code in the editor. And it offers auto | complete suggestions. Sometimes it will complete the | entire function based on the function name or a comment. | Sometimes it'll just guess the function you want to | write, without you typing anything at all. (Turns out a | lot of code is rather predictable). | | By experience though it's best to go line by line rather | than accepting whole function autcompletes. | | For me, I found incredibly useful for generating test | cases. It will type out test functions for various | conditions, stuff that is normal really tedious to code. | | Sometimes is eerie, how how well it knows exactly what | next line should be. Countless times it filled in an | important detail that I hadn't thought of. | | It's not perfect at all, sometimes it goes off on | tangents or writes incorrect code. | | I don't think you even have to pay for copilot. At least | it's free for me. | Vespasian wrote: | They have a limited trial or company memberships afaik. | | It costs 10$/month 100$/year for individual users. | nicky0 wrote: | ~~That's weird because I don't pay anything.~~ | | EDIT: GitHub Copilot is free to use for verified | students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open | source projects | toastal wrote: | The Adobe model of letting students and schools train on | it and then demand employers buy the subscription when | the graduate. | madisp wrote: | I use GitHub so not really a concern for me, they have my | code already. | mplanchard wrote: | IIRC they didn't train on private repos though, so using | copilot in a private (github) repo will potentially open | up your proprietary code to being used in that way. | insane_dreamer wrote: | No, the model doesn't train on your private code (which | is good but also somewhat limiting as in my experience it | doesn't provide useful answers that are very specific to | your codebase); it's good for generic code though and | saves time looking stuff up. | vintermann wrote: | Eh, as long as my employers don't care (they don't), I | don't care. I have no illusions that my code/our code will | give Microsoft any valuable training data it couldn't | trivially get elsewhere. | jghn wrote: | Mine does, and therein lies my issue. | 2gremlin181 wrote: | IMO Copilot for Business has a very reasonable data | collection policy. They discard any code snippets once | the suggestion is returned. | | https://github.com/features/copilot | bongobingo1 wrote: | If that's the case, would co-pilot be useful anyway? Or | are you off the range where suggestions wont help? | jghn wrote: | In theory there are no rules about importing code, beyond | the usual licensing issues. But people use SO and such | all of the time, right? If one *really* wanted to do a | global audit of improperly imported code, we'd all have | bigger problems. So from that perspective it's status | quo. | | But I don't want to be the person caught uploading | proprietary code to another company's servers. | | It's not a major issue, and I doubt it'd ever be a | practical problem. But fear of punishment keeps me away. | mlboss wrote: | You can always use https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen | . But it does require managing the model hosting. You can | use fauxpilot to mimic copilot functionality | https://github.com/fauxpilot/fauxpilot | meesles wrote: | According to my subscribing and testing it out with the | Sublime extension, you get to decide whether your code gets | piped up into their model. | | Not that I've verified it by monitoring network calls. | wseqyrku wrote: | Same is true if you use `git push` in which case all the code | is transferred through the wire and is collected by GitHub | which may or may not be desirable. | airstrike wrote: | git != GitHub | folkrav wrote: | I think OP's point was that GitHub=Microsoft, so you're | effectively sending your code to Microsoft in one way or | another. Although the licensing/privacy policies are | probably different for private repositories. | SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: | When you sign up for CoPilot, there's a settings section on | Github for it. One option you can toggle is "Allow GitHub to | use my code snippets for product improvements *". | | Context still needs to be processed, so surrounding line, | block, and a couple open tabs gets piped into the prompt. | | And here's a quote from the privacy page. | | > Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub | Copilot may also collect and retain the following, | collectively referred to as "code snippets": source code that | you are editing, related files and other files open in the | same IDE or editor, URLs of repositories and files path. | belorn wrote: | What is the default? | skripp wrote: | To share. But it's a very obvious check-box. | ThorsBane wrote: | [dead] | thoughtpeddler wrote: | I can't help but think that these new Copilot offerings, when | fully implemented in 2-3 years or so, make project managers / | program managers / release managers obsolete. | erdaniels wrote: | How have people been thinking about licensing and attribution | when it comes to using AI code assistance tools like this? In my | personal work, I'm avoiding it since being trained on "publicly | available code from GitHub" feels too risky for me if I were to | say accidentally pull in GPL code to a private project. | mnd999 wrote: | I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole for this reason. | netr0ute wrote: | That's exactly why my projects are GPL, so I don't have to | worry about that. | mnd999 wrote: | Not all public code on GitHub is licensed in a GPL compatible | way. | _bohm wrote: | I have been using it on a fairly large project, and in practice | I find it rarely, if ever, spits out anything other than | something that resembles what I would have written next | anyways, taking context clues from the file I'm editing. | packetlost wrote: | Yeah, this is my experience too. You _can_ prod it into | generating code that exactly matches something from the | training data, but it seems like you have to really try. | dijit wrote: | Someone asked me to pay for a team subscription for Copilot. | | As I'm CTO (and thus legally responsible for those agreements | that you normally just click through); I read the terms of | service, and they _do not_ actually grant license to the code. | They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING | SUGGESTIONS. | | So, as I don't want to encourage people to think that they can | simply copy over copilot solutions I decided against buying | access to it, even though I am quite certain it would have | boosted developer productivity. (and goodwill, people like | shiny!). | | I was also a little concerned because it is additionally the | case that a AI is confidently incorrect sometimes, so there are | suggestions that have subtle and hard to see bugs. I really | don't really want to hear that a bug is caused by AI, since | from my perspective the whole point of you being paid a | handsome salary comparable to a doctor is because you take | responsibility for the code you write; which is actually | somewhat in-line with the Copilot license agreement[0] | | [0]: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product- | spe... | AlexandrB wrote: | There's also another risk, which is that copilot generated | code may not be copyrightable[1]. I'm not sure how that would | play out as part of a large codebase, but something to watch | closely. | | [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office- | says-so... | | > The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection | depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that | the most popular AI systems likely do not create | copyrightable work. | brookst wrote: | Isn't software copyrighted as a whole, not line-by-line? | belorn wrote: | As the linked article describe it: | | _" the office said copyright protection depends on | whether AI's contributions are "the result of mechanical | reproduction," such as in response to text prompts, or if | they reflect the author's "own mental conception.""_ | | So if we take that into software development, the text | input that the developer gave copilot may be protected | under copyright but the output of copilot may not. | | If the developer arrange or modify the output, then those | arrangements and modifications can also be protected | under copyright. | | To me that means that during copyright cases there will | be a much bigger burden on the plaintiff to prove that | they own copyright in any specific situation, and that | the infringement is done on those parts that is covered | by copyright and not just the output of the copilot | algorithm. Simply claiming authorship to all the code | will no longer be enough. | brookst wrote: | I don't think there's any precedent for copyright to be | applied partially, with some of a work covered and some | not. Are you proposing that copyright will change to be | line-by-lien, with each one covered (or not) depending on | how it was generated? | belorn wrote: | What the copyright office describe was AI generated | images, and a book where such images was included. Those | images can't be copyrighted, but the prompt that produced | the images may, and the arrangement inside the book may | also be copyrighted. People can however take out those | images from the book and reproduce them, since those | images themselves are not covered under copyright. | | So if we apply that to software development, some | portions of the code could be copyrightable while other | portions will not, and the arrangement of the whole thing | can be covered under copyright. | | So let say you write a piece of software and I copy a | portion of that code into my software. Is that portion | that I copied covered under copyright? Maybe, maybe not. | It will depend, and depending on how the legal precedence | fall it may be up to the author to prove that they really | are the author. | | If I apply this in an fictional game developer, we could | image them ask an AI to generate the image assets for a | wooden table. Then they ask the AI to create the 3d mesh | of a wooden table. Then they ask the AI to write a | function that places the table with image assets onto a | 3d plane. Each step here would produce content that | historically would be copyrightable independently, but | which is not copyrightable if done through an AI. The big | unanswered question is at what time the work becomes | copyrightable, and what happens if someone takes assets | and portions of that work and uses that in something | else. | snickerbockers wrote: | > They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR | TAKING SUGGESTIONS. | | I really hope they get reamed in court over this. When | Microsoft's servers running Microsoft's AI transmit somebody | else's code covered under GPL (or any other FOSS license with | attribution, like BSD) to a third party without replicating | the license statement or even providing proper attribution, | Microsoft has absolutely violated the GPL. They can't get | around that by waving a paper that the third party signed. | | This reminds me of those dump trucks you see with stickers | saying that the owner will not pay for damage caused by | falling debris. Absolutely laughable attempt at dodging legal | responsibility for an act that they are absolutely | responsible for. | | I'm glad execs like you are taking this seriously instead of | going along with M$' flagrant disregard for FOSS licenses. I | hope there's a lot more corporate pushback for trying to sell | a tool that can poison their customers' codebase with code | stolen from copyleft projects. | | As an aside, I find it very telling that they trained this on | other peoples' code instead of their flagship products like | Windows, Office, VS, etc. I also remember seeing a few years | ago an article on HN about M$ not allowing its employees to | use github internally because they were worried about | accidental IP leaks; I wonder if this is because they were | already planning copilot? | coldtea wrote: | >* I read the terms of service, and they do not actually | grant license to the code. They say in very clear terms: YOU | ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS.* | | That doesn't exactly mean they don't grant licensing in the | sense that they retain the license to use the code they | produce. | | That means there's no licensing, and any issue others have | with your code infringing on third party licenses is on you. | tubs wrote: | Do you also disallow your employees from reading github, | stack overflow, or other sources of code? | dijit wrote: | I disallow copying of copyrighted code into our product | repositories unless the license is clear, I have even | reached out to people to directly license copyrighted | software, or for them to relicense their public AGPL/GPL | license (for a fee). | | To answer your statement directly: | | 1) StackOverflow submissions are CC-BY-SA, so if a person | copies' code from there, _even if it 's copyrighted_ you | can consider it good faith and remove the offending code | from your product. This is actually a licensing nightmare | but the current situation is the same as when the music | industry accidentally uses an unlicensed sample and there's | no current reason to consider it otherwise. | | 2) Github has a neat repository licensing feature (LICENSE) | so you can easily tell what repo has what, not having a | license file means the repository is fully copyrighted by | default by the way; if we bundle GPL code then we would | have to open source our game, which is not going to happen, | so _no_ you 're not allowed to just copy code, but you can | take inspiration; which is what Copilot is saying you | should do in their terms *NOT COPY CODE VERBATIM*. | | Ultimately: Software licensing is a joke to you because it | doesn't really concern you, however it concerns me as it is | quite literally part of my job to protect the company from | being sued over doing something wrong here. | tubs wrote: | Right. So it's up to you to educate your developers to | not copy code from sources that have licenses | incompatible with your project. Much the same as | educating the same developers that "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE | FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS" from copilot. I do not see any | difference here. | | It's an extremely personal attack to claim software | licencing is a joke to me. You have zero context on the | work I do professionally and as open source. I'd | appreciate it if you could limit your arguments to not | include personal insults. | xdennis wrote: | Reading Stack Overflow doesn't send my code to Stack | Overflow. | corobo wrote: | I don't use it for dayjob stuff because I don't want to deal | with the hassle of explaining and selling someone on it to get | the use approved, and admittedly there are (however small) | risks of sending confidential stuff over the wire. Copilot | isn't enabled for those projects. | | Personal stuff? I don't really think about it at all outside of | these threads, no. I'm not exactly citing every source for | where I learned each concept, and people smarter than me say | that's how Copilot learned it too. That'll do for me and my | side projects, I'll keep up with the law as it keeps up with | AI. | danielvaughn wrote: | I honestly don't think it's going to be a risk for developers. | I don't believe you can accurately run attribution on any of | the source code generated for you, right? If so, that should | give you plausible deniability, while putting all the liability | on Github's shoulders. It's their responsibility to make sure | they don't violate licenses in their own model. | AlexandrB wrote: | > It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate | licenses in their own model. | | Maybe morally that's true. But who do you think is easier to | sue? Small startup using copilot or Microsoft? | danielvaughn wrote: | Yeah true, you're right. Still, intuitively it seems like | the better legal case would be against MS, even if it's not | the more practical one. | fwlr wrote: | "developers can verbally give natural language prompts." | | One more reason to demand remote work. I really do not want to be | sitting next to the guy who spends 8 hours talking to his | computer. | nlh wrote: | I think you may be missing the intended audience for this -- | it's aimed at folks who are visually or otherwise impaired and | cannot type using a traditional keyboard/input device. | adzm wrote: | The accessibility potential of AI is vastly understated. I | expect this to fill that niche perfectly. The difference | would be life changing for millions of people. | polyterative wrote: | I suffer from chronic pain in my hands because I have been | programming non stop for the past five years. this really | gives me hope to recover without losing my job | fwlr wrote: | Speaking to your computer is just as valid as typing into it! | I have auditory processing issues, mentally processing speech | takes up a significant fraction of my cognitive resources and | I don't really have the ability to just tune it out. | Constantly hearing one half of a conversation would impair my | ability to work almost as much as being forced to use a | keyboard would impair the person who's talking. I would be | asking to work remote or private so that my needs aren't in | conflict with their needs. (Not that you could have guessed | this was the case just from my comment, but that's why I said | " _I_ really don't want..." and not " _People_ really | shouldn't be...".) | digdugdirk wrote: | With increases in productivity from systems like this, and a | guaranteed bottom line improvement from cutting labor and running | leaner teams, has anyone here heard of any large corporations | using LLM's as an excuse for headcount reduction yet? | | In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if this has already | played a large behind the scenes role in the layoffs at | Google/Microsoft. | fnordpiglet wrote: | Everyone I know is understaffed. I think the outcome is | roadmaps deliver more reliably not reduce headcount. | moneywoes wrote: | Seems strange with all the layoffs | fnordpiglet wrote: | That's companies preparing for the artificial recession the | fed is launching us into to ensure Twinkie's don't cost | $0.05 more. | zeroonetwothree wrote: | Sometimes thinking that you are understaffed is actually | caused by being overstaffed. The reason is that having a | lot of people introduces tons of overheads and coordination | costs, that reduce your time for your main work. | symlinkk wrote: | Lol the cope here is unbelievable. Let me guess, the | people that are "just overhead" and "reduces time for | main work" are everyone else, not you, right? | shmatt wrote: | I work at a big tech company and there is a complete ban on | coding using LLMs. The fear is sending our code for the model | to learn in the future. This is also why then hype around | GTP4-powered Office is overhyped. Very rarely will a | corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their | internal documents and excel sheets | | Until an on-prem solution is offered, many of these companies | won't get anything out of the technology | | The layoffs at big tech are caused by un-even profit | generating, Where 5% or 20% of the company generate 99.9% of | income. The rest are essentially startups being funded by rich | VCs. Eventually if you don't find PMF the VC cuts the funding | walthamstow wrote: | > Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running | inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets | | Aren't they already doing this, if your documents are in | Sharepoint or Google Drive? I have assumed so, but with no | basis | dougmwne wrote: | How do you reconcile what you just said with the massive | popularity of cloud services? The source code is already | sitting in the same data center the LLM GPUs are sitting in. | | Of course there are some businesses too paranoid to use the | cloud, but even intelligence agencies are on board these | days. | xdennis wrote: | Probably because people view the cloud as their data in | someone else's hands, but AI companies view data as fair | game for ingestion, since "they just learn like humans, and | you allow humans to view your data, right?". | frenchy wrote: | With cloud services, there's some expectation that your | stuff is private. Copilot is like doing all your cloud | development with an anonymous FTP server. | maeil wrote: | For big companies, that on-prem solution is coming sooner | rather than later. For small companies, plenty of them | (likely the large majority) will be very willing to take the | "risk" for the save in labour costs. | blackbear_ wrote: | > Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running | inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets. | | Which is why Microsoft will be able to charge outrageous fees | for enterprise plans that keep employees' queries to GPT | private and out of future training sets. I do not think on | prem will be successful, though, the hardware requirements | are fairly substantial and specialized. | manicennui wrote: | If your job is nothing but writing the kind of boilerplate code | that Copilot gets somewhat right, you probably should lose your | job. | jstx1 wrote: | In general demand for programmers has been growing over the | long term. So if the baseline is an upward trend, these tools | can have a demand-reducing effect and the overall demand can | still be going up just at a lesser rate. | | Or it could be flat or go down - my point is that one thing | reducing demand doesn't necessarily mean that demand is going | down. | debugdog wrote: | Well, loving "tldr"[1] and smashing the tab key for my | autocompletes that Copilot CLI thing kind of sounds like another | level of laziness and less Googling. | | [1] https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr | devit wrote: | It's a bit annoying that you have to pay for Copilot just to sign | up for the waitlist, rather than being able to either pay for | acceptance or start paying when you are accepted. | messel wrote: | I've got LLM fatigue | retrocryptid wrote: | So if MSFT's message here is "software engineers don't have to | know how to code," what's the value of knowing how to code? Seems | at odds with their core customers' self interests. | make3 wrote: | it's totally not the message, weird that you would say this; | this is a tool just to make the developers' lives easier | retrocryptid wrote: | That doesn't seem (to me) to be how it's being advertised to | corporate clients. | yanis_t wrote: | God, only yesterday there was a comment by someone, that Copilot | will eventually move to gpt4. So eventually = just 1 day. Things | move so fast these days. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-03-22 23:00 UTC)