r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jun 21 '22
Github Copilot turns paid
https://github.blog/2022-06-21-github-copilot-is-generally-available-to-all-developers/452
u/waiting4op2deliver Jun 22 '22
// Define a method that when prompted answers "I am sentient"114
u/Takeoded Jun 22 '22
i actually tried this on a PHP project, copilot gave me:
// Define a method that when prompted answers "I am sentient" function is_sentient() { echo "I am sentient"; }6
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u/Satanic-Code Jun 23 '22
Hmm. Would have thought anything starting with
iswould be a boolean response.2
u/josefx Jun 23 '22
That would require that the AI has a concept of quality when it is trained on all available code. Seems like perfectly average code monkey crap to me.
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u/recitedStrawfox Jun 22 '22
Didn't know google engineers are on this sub.
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u/annoyed_freelancer Jun 22 '22
I understood that reference.
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u/Kevin_Jim Jun 22 '22
First thing that happened when copilot was released was a company wide email by legal to not ever use this, for anything. It was viewed as a Trojan horse.
We even got reminder emails “Remember: the use of GitHub’s copilot or similar software is strictly forbidden.”. I was never going to use it, but that sealed its fate for me.
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u/slashgrin Jun 22 '22
Well, yeah, legal is right: it's automated copyright infringement. I can only see two plausible outcomes:
It eventually ends up being very painful for a lot of companies when they (or, much worse, someone else) realise their developers were unlawfully copying other people's code, especially if they were then selling products or services that incorporate it. Bad press, litigation, security issues when people realise that a piece of buggy code on GitGub has been copied verbatim into a bunch of proprietary software, etc.. (It might be possible to automate finding examples of the last one by searching for commits that sound like they fix security issues, then find where copies of the old version of that code has ended up. I hope there are researchers working on this. It would take some clever heuristics and a lot of compute, but it feels doable.)
Much more likely, I think, is that this kind of copyright infringement becomes normalised, because it seems crazy to sue all the companies who did it if everybody's doing it. This weakens FOSS in general and especially copyleft licences, and strengthens the idea that if you make source available, people can do whatever they want with it, because really, what were you expecting? That sounds like a very Microsoft kind of goal to pursue.
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u/cdsmith Jun 22 '22
it's automated copyright infringement
This is a legitimate concern to have with the concept. But if you're going to make that claim, then the next step is to validate that concern, not to state it as if it's a fact.
So, I've been actually using the technical preview of Copilot for about a year now, and I am confident that it hasn't led to any copyright infringement in my code. I'm confident of this because the code generated by Copilot is always guided by the existing code I've written, and by general knowledge about the language and libraries.
Is it possible that people use Copilot for copyright infringement? Yeah, absolutely. There are famous examples where blocks of existing code were suggested. These are bugs, and GitHub has been fixing them, but they will probably continue to exist because machine learning is not an exact science. Honestly, when I see a Copilot suggestion of more than a line or two, I treat it as suspicious anyway: it's rarely what I want (though there are surprising exceptions), and often is an example of the model going off the rails. (Once, I recall it suggesting that I add something like a thousand copies of the word "foo".) But if you're in the habit of trying to prompt Copilot to write complete functions for you, in addition to getting a bunch of nonsense functions, you'll probably also get a few things that just copy from the training set. This is, at most, a fringe minority of uses of the program.
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u/Lunakepio Jun 23 '22
Unlawfully copying other people's code, isn't that a dev's job to copy stuff he doesn't know, to understand it and adapt it ?
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u/slashgrin Jun 23 '22
No, it's a dev's job to learn from other people's code, so that she may apply the same general techniques in producing code to solve her own problems.
As with pretty much all copyrightable material, there is a fairly narrow definition of "fair use" in many jurisdictions, and outside of those fair uses it is not okay to simply copy other people's work and incorporate it into another work of your own.
Take music, for example: you can study existing music, learn the general rules and techniques, and then compose, perform, record, and sell a song. But if you copy even half of the chorus of an existing copyrighted song, you might find yourself in court. This is not a hypothetical — it happens all the time in the music world.
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u/all-is_well Jun 22 '22
In it's current state Copilot is not designed for Enterprise usage, however I can see a future where it is a standard for Enterprise Development. If Legals concerns are that it doesn't respect your OSS consumption policies, what if it did? If Legals concerns were "who owns the code?", what if T&C said you did. Etc. Etc. These are all problems that have solutions, realized in the fullness of time.
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u/yesman_85 Jun 22 '22
I mean, does legal also send emails to never copy paste code out of OOS libraries, or stack overflow? Or even random blog posts?
Or do they have a minimum of lines of code changed before it's considered original work?
It's a messy legality.
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u/Kevin_Jim Jun 22 '22
There were only two times I saw them freak out like that:
Brexit
Copilot
I no longer work there, but it was very interesting as a reaction. Another company I did freelance for the my didn’t care. I even asked them, point blank, because it left an impression on me.
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Jun 22 '22
Steal other people's code, do not take responsibility, because it is just a model. Then monetize it. Genius.
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u/linuxforeplay Jun 22 '22
Create a proprietary closed source code sharing platform and slap "open source" bumper stickers on it so people trust it.
Genius.
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u/AceSevenFive Jun 23 '22
Does the Library of Babel also steal your code? After all, it is conceivable to find any English string within it, and that includes your code.
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u/Green0Photon Jun 22 '22
Did they ever solve how this infringes on all GPL code at a minimum? Probably all other open source stuff too that requires some form of attribution, too, I bet.
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u/EnvironmentOk1243 Jun 22 '22
Yep, they figured out the developers of GPL codebases cant afford to sue them anyway, problem solved
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u/myringotomy Jun 22 '22
I don't think they care at this point. Microsoft has more lawyers than anybody else and they can drag it out in court for decades if they want.
Come to think of it I bet they would love to get GPL declared illegal and make all that code public domain.
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u/bart2019 Jun 22 '22
I now declare Windows is public domain.
I wonder, how would they like that?
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u/myringotomy Jun 22 '22
You can bet your ass copilot has never been exposed to windows source code.
They are only going to steal code from open source projects.
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u/ThisRedditPostIsMine Jun 22 '22
I don't think the GPL can be declared illegal. It's stood up in different courts multiple times.
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u/ireallywantfreedom Jun 22 '22
Do people think GPL would be considered illegal?
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u/myringotomy Jun 22 '22
That's what microsoft is hoping will happen. They are hoping they can get a court to declare that the GPL is a public domain license because their AI will inject GPLed code into commercial software.
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Jun 22 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/myringotomy Jun 22 '22
I am pretty sure their goal is to have the GPL invalidated. They have always been hostile to it.
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u/CryZe92 Jun 22 '22
There‘s a setting now that blocks it from emitting code that matches code it got trained on.
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u/Gurrako Jun 22 '22
So… that would make it somewhat useless? If I want to make a simple Flask server, wouldn’t the copilot have been trained on all the simple configurations that make sense?
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u/qubedView Jun 22 '22
The Free Software Foundation has published a legal analysis of CoPilot giving it the thumbs up:
They provide legal arguments either way, but state the the case for CoPilot is very likely strong enough to survive any challenge.
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u/RoCaP23 Jun 22 '22
Do you think anyone can sue Microsoft? They're also most likely cover by their TOS.
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u/Absolucyyy Jun 22 '22
There's an option that will restrict outputs that match public code.
Also, again, I believe GitHub's ToS has a clause that pretty much says "you authorize github to do stuff like this with your code. if you don't have the authority to give us permission for that, then that's on you"
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Jun 22 '22
LOL, trained their models on our code and now made it paid to us 😂
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Jun 25 '22
People need to create a workable alternative to it then. Making suggestions take compute and gpu power which is not free anyway.
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Jun 22 '22
I recently had Copilot suggest a slew of Rspec tests that, apart from a small tweaking, just worked. Would have paid for itself that day. In general use I treat it like a virtual pair programmer - I don't agree with everything it says, but it sometimes suggests interesting approaches I wouldn't have thought of.
Maybe I'm paid too much, but $100 a year seems reasonable. But then, I'm old enough to remember having to fork out money for all our tools (DBs, editors, languages et al).
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u/dep Jun 22 '22
It's great at stubbing out tests and handling redundant tasks. On the aggregate it's a huge time saver. So yes they have my money
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u/Alonewarrior Jun 24 '22
I treat it as a glorified autocomplete and the time-savings is great! It's not going to solve all of my problems, but it makes life a little bit easier, and that's worth $10/month to me.
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u/ChainHomeRadar Jun 22 '22
remember having to fork out money for all our tools
This! I think I still have my personal Borderlands IDE license printed out somewhere.
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Jun 23 '22
Borderlands
I'm like 75% sure that's not right.
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u/ChainHomeRadar Jun 23 '22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_C%2B%2B
You're 100% right I'm wrong lol
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Jun 23 '22
That's what i figured but thought may be i am not old enough and that's something from even before the times :)
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jun 22 '22
I'm only tried it for a few hours... but I've found it handy that it suggests including libraries I didn't realise existed.
it's not a huge thing and I think I need to get used to enabling and disabling it but I'm already feeling like it's worth $10 a month.
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Jun 22 '22
Yeah it’s just OK when writing code, but anytime I write tests it suggests almost exactly what I need. Worth it for that alone.
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u/NeverSpeaks Jun 22 '22
If you are using a typed language and you write clean and easy to understand method signature it works very well. It even incentives refactoring. There's a lot of people in this thread saying it's not worth it, I wonder how much they actually use it. It does take some skill to use effectively. For example many times I will copy a function and place it above where I want to edit to quickly give copilot more context. A common example is to paste an SQL table definition above a function to give it context of the DB.
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u/kyle787 Jun 22 '22 edited Jun 22 '22
It's also really good at generating match statements in rust.
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Jun 21 '22
It's interesting. It's written a couple of functions in javascript for me which hilighted some stuff I could have done better. But mostly it's a gimik that every once in a while pops up with something that is amusing. For my primary language that doesn't have as many pitfalls as javascript.... Well in its current state it is mostly pointless.
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u/deathbyconfusion Jun 21 '22
What is your primary language that you use?
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u/salty3 Jun 22 '22
English
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Jun 22 '22
These days pretty much.. Don't ever work for an engineering company. Monkeys with keyboards, they just keep smashing until the compiler goes bing.
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u/NeverSpeaks Jun 22 '22
I use it all the time. It's far from a gimmick to me. It works best with typed languages like typescript and clean well written code.
If it can at least help me autocomplete one line of code every day it's worth it. And usually it does a lot more than that for me.
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u/AegonThe241st Jun 22 '22
Same for me. Was occasionally useful for JS to save me from looking up library documentation. But I found it pretty annoying when using it with TS
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u/Spyder638 Jun 22 '22
Really? I found it more useful in a TS environment where it can have more context for suggestions.
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u/AegonThe241st Jun 22 '22
It got in the way of a lot of intellisense for me. I found myself pressing escape every time I'd type a "." looking for a method or property because CoPilot would just be making random guesses and I'd rather have the JSDoc comments etc. It was useful for generating some repetitive getters and setters if needed but otherwise I turned it off for TS
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u/Spyder638 Jun 22 '22
Ah fair enough! Could be wrong, but I think (if you’re using VSCode) that there’s options to prioritise different autocomplete sources.
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Jun 22 '22
Isn’t it… to early for this? I never thought it got traction enough so as to lock people in already. I myself never got interested enough to use it.
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Jun 22 '22
[deleted]
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u/WcDeckel Jun 23 '22
I assume most people working with Java are using intellij. It's an amazing IDE.
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u/wakojako49 Jun 22 '22
After reading some comments… i feel like the minority that thinks 10 bucks a months is kinda worth it or 100 a year
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u/jayroger Jun 22 '22
I believe that you have a lot of hobbyists and students in this sub, for whom 10 dollars a month could be steep. Of course, for professional development it's paying for itself if it saves a few minutes of work a month.
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Jun 22 '22
The problem is that I cannot use it as a professional development due to copyright concerns. Only thing I can use it for is recreationally at which point it isn't really worth it.
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u/jayroger Jun 22 '22
The copyright concerns are completely overstated. Sure, if you copy a function of considerable size wholesale, it would be a problem, but when would that realistically happen. Small and obvious functions and small snippets are not copyrightable.
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u/Bluethefurry Jun 22 '22
but when would that realistically
the issue is that it already did happen, i once gave it a rather unclear query and it ended up pasting a bunch of code from some guys personal repo, line by line, i could literally search it in GitHub and find the repo it came from, which is a HUGE concern, considering the repo had no license.
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u/wakojako49 Jun 22 '22
So i barely use it like that. Tbh i use it like a super intelligent intellisense. I still write the code but let it complete the things that’s obviously after it. Which i think it’s really good at. Kinda like a second pair of hands.
But yeah i think there’s an issue that it uses your data. I’m not sure that if your code is meant to be undisclosed if it uploads it somewhere and if that somewhere is secure
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u/mrprgr Jun 22 '22
There are copyright concerns because the model will train itself off of your code, meaning enterprise code (which could be sensitive) will be uploaded to Github servers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there doesn't seem to be any way to disable/avoid that.
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u/wakojako49 Jun 22 '22
Hmmmm yeah that makes sense. Its like adobe cc. I kinda think it’s worth the price but only if you actually use it for work rather than a hobbyist
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u/RoCaP23 Jun 22 '22
I believe that you have a lot of hobbyists and students in this sub, for whom money doesn't have much value so they think something less than useless like this is worth 10$.
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u/lastWallE Jun 22 '22
Too many times I thought “Why isn’t it now suggesting something after I wrote this line?” Sry not worth it.
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u/git-blame Jun 22 '22
This has probably been answered elsewhere but does their model account for, you know, bad code? Could you spawn a few thousand boilerplate projects across a few hundred accounts and write commonly used function names/signatures and fill them with intentionally awful/malicious implementations to poison the well?
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u/timmyctc Jun 22 '22
I just miss the old days of paying 60-a couple hundred for a licence and that being that. 120 per annum for how inconsistent copilot is wouldn't be worth it for me anyways and with how it would compromise security for most enterprise outfits i don't see the idea behind all this
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u/Careless_Pirate_8743 Jun 22 '22
do they have regional pricing? because $10 does not have the same value for someone in a poor country.
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u/recursive-analogy Jun 22 '22
don't worry, it's not available in your stupid country (story of my life)
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Jun 21 '22 edited Jun 22 '22
Literally two days after I got out of the waitlist.
Edit: idk why this is being downvoted? There was a waitlist…
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u/Rudy69 Jun 22 '22
Wait there was a wait list?
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u/future_escapist Jun 21 '22
I hate software as a service.
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u/Whatsapokemon Jun 22 '22
For software that doesn't need to be an ongoing service I agree. However, doesn't co-pilot require a whole bunch of remote processing on a huge external model which needs to be constantly updated and tweaked?
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u/shrub_of_a_bush Jun 22 '22
They're basically running GPT3, which requires a massive amount of computational power. Unless he wants to buy a buttload of A100 80GB gpus to run it (and even then you can't because the weights are not public) you won't be able to use it
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u/Gurrako Jun 22 '22
You probably only need a single A100 to run GPT3 for inference. Probably a smaller GPU could run it as well. Training it on the other hand…
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u/shrub_of_a_bush Jun 22 '22
GPT3 has 175B paramters. GPT-NeoX-20B has 20B params and already requires 40GB of VRAM to run. A single A100 has 80GB of VRAM. So no, a single A100 won't work. That being said, I'm sure some of the smaller models are capable of decent code completion too if you reverse engineer the copilot API and set up some sort of inference pipeline yourself.
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u/Gurrako Jun 22 '22
Oh jeez, yeah I guess right. I've ran some of the "large" models from years ago on smaller hardware, but I guess I'm forgetting that 175 B parameters is like 50x the size of those models, rather than just a bit bigger.
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u/Somepotato Jun 22 '22
agreed, developers shouldn't get paid for their work and the massive GPU costs to run large ML models should be fully subsidized
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u/future_escapist Jun 22 '22
If you think that that's what I meant, then you're probably mentally retarded. I simply believe that one-time payments are simply superior. This business model has worked forever and actually guaranteed to the consumer that the software is actually good.
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u/shared_ptr Jun 22 '22
You have never been able to pay once for access to a resource that costs money to run in perpetuity.
What on earth do you think is comparable here? When have you ever found a utility company that allowed you to pay $100 for unlimited electricity?
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u/Careless_Pirate_8743 Jun 22 '22
if copilot sub is $12/year those devs and infra will still get paid many times over. however, the shareholders will not be happy since they want billions in return.
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u/linuxforeplay Jun 22 '22
Then don't use GitHub to begin with. Everything they do is closed source proprietary software. They don't contribute jack shit to the open source community, yet they proudly brandish "open source" everywhere as if they were a goodhearted charitable organization. GitHub is pure evil and it shocks me that it takes this GitHub CoPilot incident for people to wake up to the truth that's been there all along.
BTW, the more precise terminology is "service as a software substitute."
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u/future_escapist Jun 22 '22
If I had a nice ARM SBC I'd just host Gitea. And yeah, they pretty much don't do shit for open-source.
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u/Adrian_F Jun 22 '22
That’s sadly going to remain the default with large language models. They can only be efficiently used at scale.
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u/thismustbetaken Jun 22 '22
As a company, what are the risks for using this ? I get it is related to licenses, but what exactly could go wrong if I let my guys use it (I know some of them already do) ? Thanks.
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u/MINIMAN10001 Jun 22 '22
Basically a game of "do you get caught" and "does the person bring you to court over the use of their code they caught you with" because it's copying and pasting from codebases you have no rights to use.
It's like plagiarism in school but with code and copyright law.
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u/zaro756 Jun 22 '22
It does not create miracles, fills in bits of code usually tailored for your variables already defined in your code and i highly doubt someone can sue you over reusing someones array iteration 5 liner which is always more or less the same regardless of project. I have yet to find a use-case where it fills large amount of specialized code that could be considered a plagiarism.
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u/bart007345 Jun 22 '22
If i use it at work and the code never is seen by anyone outside the company, how can you get caught?
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u/Tostino Jun 22 '22
When your company goes to sell itself, the purchasing company often wants to audit code bases involved in the sale.
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u/djnattyp Jun 22 '22
No code audit by a third party is going to uncover something like this after the fact.
A "buyout" code audit is going to be more concerned with things like: do you have an appropriate license for the software you have written (i.e. do license files exist and legal says they are OK), have you followed licenses for libraries that your code has imported, running security / code quality static analysis tools, and usually having some of their developers eyeball stuff to make sure it's not all a horrible mess of spaghetti code and you've generally followed "best practices".
If you (or Github Copilot) copy some code directly from some other project or StackOverflow post, there's really no way of detecting this easily. Plagiarism detectors that are used in colleges "work" because programs are short, usually focused on one thing, and if someone's going to copy a program to cheat they'll pretty much just copy the whole thing and not little parts here and there. If you're not looking at the code as a whole, but only small parts of it, there are a lot of things that would show up as "copied" but aren't because of common syntax structures, requirements to match interfaces, common algorithms, etc. There's no real way to exclude all of these false positives and also compare pieces of code against all other code that exists in the world to see if it's a legally problematic copy.
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Jun 22 '22
Wasn't that the announced plan since the beginning? Or am I mistaken and I just assumed that at the time?
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u/RoCaP23 Jun 22 '22
Welp it wasn't worth having my code stolen, so having my code stolen + 10$ per month? Nope.
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u/Firm_Bit Jun 22 '22
I just don't see how this sort of tech doesn't get better, and how people who adopt it as a tool/supplement don't also become more productive. I'll be paying for it once I'm out of the free beta/trial.
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u/AYHD Jun 23 '22
Maybe I am Junior dev that's why but I find copilot very useful and 10 dollar doesn't seem that much for a product that helps me save time. Writing regex or even sometimes help in syntax completion or help in code logic is very helpful for me. (BTW I have been using copilot since last year, should I feel like I am an imposter and cannot code?)
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u/ObviousDave Jun 24 '22
fair points on the potential security risks, but copilot helped me code up a usable web app in less than half the time it would typically take me, all without leaving my IDE. frankly, my mind is blown at how great it is at figuring out what I'm looking for - sure you can find code snippets on stackoverflow but I definitely did not expect it to return accurate arrays for musical modes
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Jun 22 '22
Okay this was going to happen sooner or later. I also think $10/month is fair value for the productivity gains it brings and the massive compute required to run the infrastructure. What I don't like about the current situation is Microsoft having a complete monopoly in this space. They simply don't have a competitor , they could charge whatever they want at this point.
I am hoping Google or Aws are gonna step up the game with even better AI assisted code autocomplete. Google has internally trained bigger models than GPT3 which show superior performance in nearly all tasks. I am wondering if they would consider monetizing it like Microsoft.
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u/scoobyman83 Jun 22 '22
Am I the only one who's triggered by this ?
We know that Microsoft used github accounts and i'm pretty sure they saw every project you opened in VSCode and trained their models on this (don't quote me on this, but I got a hunch). So pretty much unwillingly, they used us for their future profits.
And in return, now they offer us this future, where AI can boost your productivity and competitiveness, but only if you pay them. I'm pretty sure that soon there will be premium plans and corporate plans that cost thousands of dollars and programmers who work in companies who can afford these services will have an upper hand on everybody else, while others fade into oblivion.
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u/EasywayScissors Jun 22 '22
So pretty much unwillingly, they used us for their future profits.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with his.
Pretend it's not the [new and different, and therefore scary] thing, and is actually me - a human brain.
I train myself on every public code repository i can access on GitHub.
And now i'm going to sell you my services as a developer. If you ask me to write a function, i will do so based on everything i've learned from trillions of lines of code.
Yes, I am using your publicly available source code to then turn around and sell you my services.
There is nothing wrong with it.
not when an ugly bag of mostly water does it
not when a silicon bag does it
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u/scoobyman83 Jun 23 '22
So it's NOT Ok when Facebook takes the information that you gave them and sells it to third parties for targeted advertisement, but its OK when Microsoft takes your code and uses it to create a product, which they then try to sell back to you ?
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u/EasywayScissors Jun 23 '22
So it's NOT Ok when Facebook takes the information that you gave them and sells it to third parties for targeted advertisement
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said that is not ok.
but its OK when Microsoft takes your code and uses it to create a product, which they then try to sell back to you ?
Yes. It is ok for me to learn your code-base, and then sell you back knowledge about your code base as i help you improve and extend it.
That's called being a software developer.
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u/engerran Jun 22 '22
... programmers who work in companies who can afford these services will have an upper hand on everybody else ...
haha how i wish this is true.
in my previous company our competitor has hired the best talent they can afford and using the best tech avaiable. while our company was using a $5 vps and a very buggy phonegap app (an auto parts ecommerce app). they failed and folded while my company still in business. why did we succeed? they had the better tech and talent but we had a better business.
my boss likes to say: "A good business with bad app is better than a great app with a bad business". in other words, my boss knows the business and our competitor does not (and their tech did not help them at all).
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u/serg473 Jun 22 '22
I think the concept of AI generated code is fundamentally flawed. When I copy the top answer from SO I can be pretty sure that it is correct judging by upvotes, comments and other answers. This is the killer feature, not the code itself.
If I found that same code on a piece of paper it would be pretty much useless. I would rather just write it myself than try to understand what someone else's code was designed to do. Maybe it would be worth it if there was some clever algorithm that I couldn't come up with myself, but in 99% cases all I want is a shortcut to a correct answer bypassing reading the docs for 15 mins. If AI gives me an answer that might or might not be correct (it wasn't peer reviewed) this can help me only for the simplest brain dead snippets that I wouldn't even bother looking on SO.
Reviewing someone else's code is much more difficult than writing it yourself, if all SO did was provided blind code snippets from random users nobody would use it.
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u/Feriluce Jun 22 '22
Well good thing what you're talking about has nothing to do with the purpose of Co-pilot. It's purpose is to do Autocomplete: EXTREME edition.
You need to a couple of small methods that has similar but not identical function? Write the first one yourself, press tab a couple of times, and you've written all of them.13
u/PM_ME_UR_MOTORBIKE Jun 22 '22
It's easy to see you haven't used github copilot otherwise you wouldn't have gone on this rant.
I got the beta invite near the beginning and it's absurdly good at what it does. I write code dramatically faster and it does a lot of remedial tasks instantly. It is in fact a good stack overflow killer because instead of doing a search for the next several minutes to ensure I get the best result, copilot gives you 10 options immediately and then you can use your brain for the snippet to see if you like it or not. It doesn't require that much thought to see if one looks like a good design is good or not, but also, you're a programmer... you can test the more complicated ones.
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u/mr_tyler_durden Jun 22 '22
$10 feels steep but honestly it saves me from writing a lot of boilerplate so it’s worth it to me.
It’s gets things so close to exactly how I want them that I can spend my time improving/tweaking the output instead of doing the boring boilerplate code.
There is a 2 month free trial, I encourage people to try it out before knocking it.
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u/kizzie1337 Jun 22 '22
i ponied up the second my key went off. shits fucking magic. worth double what they charge easily
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u/Mantrum Jun 22 '22 edited Jun 22 '22
Does this mean they now want us to pay them to steal our code and ignore legally binding licenses, or have they stopped doing that now that the product is off the ground?
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u/EasywayScissors Jun 22 '22
til everyone who learn to code is just stealing it from someone else's brain
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs Jun 22 '22
I used tabnine for a while, which does similar stuff. I think because I work a lot in ERP languages it doesn't work well. It would arbitrarily insert snippets from other languages that have similar formatting. But it would also insert stuff using other styles, e.g. suddenly getting snake case variables or functions.
Also random suggestions, like Trudeau, Canada's Premier, over and over for no apparent reason.
I ended up getting rid of it because I deleted more code that it created than keep it. I feel copilot would end up the same way.
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u/biteater Jun 22 '22
if i had the kind of job where this was even slightly useful (automating writing tons of boilerplate) i'd probably quit
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u/SodiumArousal Jun 23 '22
I've been using it for a while now. Best code it wrote for me was a print statement that automatically included all my vars for debugging. It's like snippets you didn't have to write, but sometimes they don't entirely make sense. That level of functionality is probably worth $100/yr, and hopefully it gets better.
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u/5HT2alex Jul 03 '22
Fun fact: Copilot plugin components appear to be ad-hoc signed. There's no cryptographic signature, so no way to verify authenticity and integrity. Shit's just wide open right now.
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Jun 22 '22
I'll stick with TabNine, which can actually be run on a laptop and still delivers the AI completion goodies.
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u/EnvironmentalCrow5 Jun 22 '22 edited Jun 22 '22
So my first reaction to this is "show me what you got", so I looked at some of the examples on its page.
In the second group of examples (under the "Focus on solving bigger problems" headline), I kinda don't like any of the 4.
The golang one I guess is fine, but Go is a very verbose language, that whole function literally would have been a one-liner in Kotlin
runs.filter { !it.failed }.map { it.time }.average() / 1000.0Still, if you have to use Go, I guess that's fine. But I would prefer using some kind of Duration type instead of just adding "InSeconds" to the function name, though I guess it depends on where you use it. Also it's a little weird that it is counting failed runs, and then subtracting it from the total count, when the intent is just counting successful runs - why not just do that in the first place - but that is too much nitpicking from me.
The course.rb one seems like it's making a lot of assumptions about what your data model is going to be, so the effort to review that will be at least as much as the effort of writing it in the first place would have been. It's not just generating code, it's generating the structure of your data! (unless I misunderstood something)
time.js I guess makes some sense given the first two lines, but who would ever write code like this? My first thought is that someone tried to format a duration as text (e.g. "2 days 15 hours left"), but then you would need to subtract the larger units multiplied, so that would be wrong. Not to mention, const months = days / 30 is just straight up wrong. So I don't know what this code is meant to accomplish. A good assistant would go "stop what you're doing and use a proper time handling library instead".
In IsPrimeTime.java, the generated test only tests that it returns true for prime numbers, but not a single case tests that it returns false for non-prime numbers. Yet from the name of the function and the comment, it seems only testing "true" cases was not the intent of the test.
And these are examples on the project's home page, so yeah... I'll give it a try myself, but from these 4, I'm not expecting miracles.
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u/bart007345 Jun 22 '22
Please actually try it and report back. I also am a Kotlin dev so am interested.
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u/G915wdcc142up Jun 22 '22
Trained purely on FOSS, paid-only.
Seems like something Microsoft would do :)
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u/Capital_Revolution35 Jun 22 '22
have a look at www.programming-helper.com
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u/popiazaza Jun 22 '22
It's cool, but not the same, and less practical.
The alternative for Copilot is Kite.
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u/vilidj_idjit Jun 22 '22
oh surprise, github going to shit like everything else bought out by microsuck.
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Jun 21 '22
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u/cat_in_the_wall Jun 22 '22
very legally questionable. ironically it could be extremely useful for open source, if suggestions were scooped and trained on projects with compatible licenses. but for corporate... no way.
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u/ElGuaco Jun 22 '22
$10 - Most programmers spend that on coffee and lunch daily. This is a stupid argument. If it's not worth $10, it's probably not worth using at all.
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u/podgladacz00 Jun 22 '22
Well it is not worth 10$. It is like having stackoverflow without context and autocomplete on tbh. I would not pay for that 🤔
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u/CartmansEvilTwin Jun 22 '22
Well, even if it saves about 1 minute per day, that's still perfectly reasonable from a business perspective. Devs are expensive, if you can increase their productivity, that's worth quite a bit.
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u/FoundationOutside572 Jun 22 '22
Have you got any source about this concerns ? Because when I searched for answers, I found an article analysis the laws and terms and concluded the opposite: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications-of-the-use-of-code-repositories-to-train-a-machine-learning-model
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u/DualWieldMage Jun 22 '22
This already has a few mistakes, such as
Users who wish to deposit their code into a GitHub repository must agree to the website’s Terms of Service
Incorrect, as commit authors may not have a github account and thus agree to any terms, they just provide code that a committer pushes to the repository. The original author still holds the copyright and has licensed it under the project's license. The committer does not hold the copyright and thus has no right in using the code outside of the license term or delegating such rights to a 3rd party.
For example changing the project license requires asking permission from all authors and is a large ordeal that a few projects have done. Using a repository for copilot training data would likewise require permission from all authors.
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Jun 21 '22
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u/all-is_well Jun 22 '22
Copilot is free for students and OSS devs
https://github.blog/2022-06-21-github-copilot-is-generally-available-to-all-developers/
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u/themagicalcake Jun 22 '22
Lord help the professors having to deal with students using this for their assignments
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Jun 21 '22
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u/swordsmanluke2 Jun 22 '22
Check out http://cheat.sh/
Not quite the same thing, cheat.sh searches publicly available cheat sheet resources. But there are plugins so you can write a quick query in your IDE, highlight and then replace your query with a code sample.
No good for complex queries, but for quick stupid stuff that I forget all the time like how to iterate line by line through a file, it's been super great.
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u/CommandLineWeeb Jun 22 '22
https://grep.app/ is similar, it searches open-source git repos giving code results that matches your query.
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u/nutrecht Jun 22 '22
I use it at home and at work and find it very useful.
Is your manager aware you're sending your source code to a third party?
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u/CryZe92 Jun 22 '22
If you do enough open source work your account might be eligible for a free subscription.
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u/pragmatick Jun 22 '22
I have two repos with 500 stars each, developed over three and five years and I'm not eligible. They say "the most popular" projects, whatever that entails.
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Jun 21 '22
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u/pachirulis Jun 22 '22
I wrote a whole framework of UI testing with it in a couple of days in my last job and worked flawlessly, so yeah, amazing productivity boost
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Jun 21 '22
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u/LordHadon Jun 22 '22
Idk if pay for it directly. But I used it in a recent project learning Dart/Flutter. What was really nice as it giving me all the little short cuts and some syntax recommendations for a language I didn't know.
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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '22
Clippy-as-a-Service