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I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it because they make it easier to manage. I can only imagine what kinds of codebases a product like this could lead to. Someone will produce 5000 lines of code in a day for a new feature, but only read 2000 of those lines. Folks that still expect you to only check in code you understand and can explain will become a minority. I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on itself. Cargo-cult programming has always been a problem, but now we're explicitly building tools for it.

JabavuAdams 5y ago
You can only solve relatively small problems this way. As I get older, I like the physical act of programming less and less, and just want to solve problems so I can get going on all of my ideas backlog. I've been programming almost every day for the last 38 years. What I really want to do is solve (my) problems.
- dennisy 5y ago
  I really agree with this even though my experience is much smaller than yours. The biggest place I think it is frustrating to write code is for ML pipelines where you know what you need, but it takes a few hours to wrangle files and pandas until you can run your idea/experiment.
  - JabavuAdams 5y ago
    Ermahgerd, yes! Doing this right now.
- auggierose 5y ago
  But programming is the greatest fun on earth. Wait no, being able to work on your ideas and communicating them to the computer is the greatest fun on earth. Now, if your only tools for communication are made by "productive developers", this is where the problem is. Not with programming itself.
asadlionpk 5y ago
If this results in more overall programmers or enabling existing programmers to make products quicker than before, it's a win! Most codebases already majorly contain unread code; the libraries (node_modules, etc). I am sure we can figure out a pattern to separate human vs machine code in similar way. If the code you are about to write is already written by someone else on the internet, that's probably not the most innovative part of your codebase anyway, so why waste time?
- zootboy 5y ago
  > If this results in more overall programmers or enabling existing programmers to make products quicker than before, it's a win! I don't think I really agree with this sentiment. "More programmers" or "faster programmers" is meaningless (or even actively detrimental) if the quality of their output is lower. It's even worse if their output is plagued by subtle bugs, as AI systems are likely to produce.
  - asadlionpk 5y ago
    The "quality programmers" (neckbeards) can continue their quality work. These new faster programmers can get other stuff done. The one paying for these jobs can decide what level of quality they want, and hire/pay accordingly. How does that sound?
augustk 5y ago
Indeed, using tools to manage complexity tends to make the complexity acceptable and leads to more complexity.
s_dev 5y ago
Coding is inherently difficult -- any tools even as basic as color highlighting/spell checking massively help understanding code in front of you. There isn't a hope this can replace any programmers but instead aid their workflow. I great example is simply refactoring code with SOLID after building a feature or fixing a bug -- a lot of this can be easily automated. Having a machine suggest and a human accept is a worthy trade off. Another similar example is the Google bot that presents search suggestions for you. I don't think your concerns are well grounded.
bluetwo 5y ago
All I can think of is how many times I've grabbed a code example from StackOverflow only to discover it had some obvious bug in it. The answer is many, many times.
staticassertion 5y ago
> Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. writing the programs is definitely boring garbage work. Typing is so slow and annoying - hence autocomplete being a standard tool. This is, to me, just fancy autocomplete. > to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it because they make it easier to manage. Boilerplate optimizes for the right things - code that's easier to read and analyze, but takes longer to write. IDEs and tools like this cut the cost of writing, giving us easier to read code and easier to analyze code for free. IDEs have supported templates forever. I never write out a full unit test, I type `tmod` and `tfn` and then fill in the blanks. This is basically the same thing to me. > Folks that still expect you to only check in code you understand and can explain will become a minority. This isn't true at all. Having used TabNine I don't have it write code for me, it just autocompletes code that's already in my head, give or take some symbol names maybe being different. All this is is a fancy autocomplete with a really cool demo.
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  Boilerplate is only easier to read and analyze if you can be sure it is consistent, so you can tune it out. Usually though, there is this one getter method that is not quite like the others and you literally will not see the difference until it bites you. We'll need more IDE enhancements, to highlight interesting pieces and desaturate standard boilerplate...
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    When I think of boilerplate I think of context that is made explicit. Things like type annotations, longer variable names, the lifetime or attributes of some class or data etc. These things are extremely helpful for a number of things - they convey context from writer to readers, they aid in proving the code correct, and they can make code faster. The context almost always exists in the writers head. We all have a specification of our program based on our expectations, and we type out code to turn that model into an implementation. We only spend so much time conveying that model though - most of us don't write formal proofs, but many of us will write out type annotations or doc comments. The cost is usually as simple as expressing and typing out the model in our head as code. Languages that are famous for boilerplate, like Java, enforce this - and it makes writing Java slower, but can also make Java code quite explicit (I'm sure someone will respond talking about confusing Java code, that's not the point). Reducing the cost of conveying context from writer to reader means we can convey more of that context in more places. That's a huge win, in my opinion, because I've personally found that so much implicit context gets lost over time, but it can be hard to always take the time to convey it. Think about how many programs you've read with single character variable names, or no type annotations, or no comments. The more of that we can fix, the better, imo. Tools like this do that. TabNine autocompletes full method type signatures for me in rust, meaning that the cost of actually writing out the types is gone. That's one less cost to pay for having clearer, faster code.
deleted 5y ago
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RationPhantoms 5y ago
Okay, and I'd argue that a good portion of programmatic wrangling is simply trying to do Y with Z. Something that's probably done 10,000 times over by others but in the silo'd confines of that single developer's workspace; an utter fucking mystery to them. What's the carbon displacement for wasted time on those tasks? It might be brow raising.
davidthewatson 5y ago
Cargo cults concerned me too but I realized that cargo-cult programming flourishes when it's enabled by a culture that doesn't care how the sausage is made. If the culture seeks full stack truth, it's not likely to get fooled by bad generated code, no matter whether it's generated by copy/paste, metaprogramming, or AI. I'd love to know what Donald Knuth thinks given the history of literate programming.
throwaway675309 5y ago
I mean you say this, but you and most likely the majority of programmers rely on dozens of repositories, packages and libraries with likely zero deep understanding of it (and at the very least haven't read the source code of ) so I don't really understand the difference here. The advantage of something like this is that instead of having to go to stack overflow or any number of reference sites and copy pasta it can just happen automatically without me having to leave my IDE. The enjoyable part of programming for me is not typing the Ajax post boilerplate bullcrap for the millionth time, it's the high-level design and abstract reasoning.
- pvorb 5y ago
  I really wonder who those folks copy-pasting from Stack Overflow all day are. I only rarely find pieces of code that I can copy-paste. Typically Stack Overflow only gives me an idea of how to solve something, but incorporating that idea into my code base is still not trivial.
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    A few weeks ago someone on a call said "we all know that programming is mostly copy and pasting anyway" A few people laughed, but I said that if I catch myself copy and pasting then I know that something is very wrong. It was kind of awkward, but I didn't like my job being trivialized by people who never really did it. It would be like if I said plumbing or auto repair is just watching youtube videos and going to lowes. Just because I've managed to do a few simple things, doesn't mean I'm in a position to belittle an entire profession. That said, I am also shocked by how many full time developers don't take the time to understand their own code. Let alone the libraries they use.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      > That said, I am also shocked by how many full time developers don't take the time to understand their own code. Let alone the libraries they use. Me too, then I understood that code and programming is commoditized. As long as it works and looks pretty on the outside and it can be sold, it's fair game. "There'll be bugs anyway, we can solve these problems somehow" they probably think. Heck even containers and K8S is promoted with "Developers are unreliable in documenting what they've done. Let's make things immutable so, they can't monkey around on running systems, and make undocumented changes" motto. I still run perf on my code and look for IPC and cache trashing ratio numbers and try to optimize things, thinking "How can I make this more efficient so it can run faster on this". I don't regret that.
novok 5y ago
I've used tabnine for a while, and it's mostly just been a faster executing normal autocomplete, with a %90 accuracy rate. It's a tradeoff. It didn't have the large snippet behavior in my usage like this new one although.
_fat_santa 5y ago
The way I see it, the tool is only as good as the programmer using it. This tool will generate the individual code blocks for you, but you still have to understand how to put it all together to deliver a working app. Sure there will be some codebases out there that are plastered together using this tool, but when it comes to delivering software that is well written, performant and maintainable over the course of several years, you're still going to need a lot of skilled engineers to pull that off.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Not looking forward to dealing with this from a security point of view. It's difficult to get developers to accept responsibility for security vulnerabilities in libraries they've selected for their project ("That's not my code!"). I can see the same thing happening with generated code where they don't want to take responsibility for finding a way to remediate any vulnerabilities they didn't personally type in. Of course those who exploit the vulnerabilities won't care how it got into the code. They're just happy they're able to make use of it.
- IncludeSecurity 5y ago
  It says it's trained on "billions of lines of code" I would augment that to "billions of lines of code that may or may not be safe and secure" If they could tie in CodeQL into Copilot to ensure the training set only came from code with no known security concerns, that would be a big improvement.
albertkoz 5y ago
Next step will be AI to approve the code, because. if someone is producing 5k LOC a day there are people who need to read & approve this code...
hintymad 5y ago
Somehow I don't see people discuss this kind of tools from the perspective of managing essential complexity versus accidental complexity. Maybe copilot just increases the abstraction level of coding, so we can treat generated code as a building block, just like we nowadays rarely needs to care about how to write assembly code or how a balanced tree works?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Maybe copilot just increases the abstraction level of coding, so we can treat generated code as a building block At this point it doesn't, and we can't, because Copilot is just a fancy autocomplete. The code is there, first class, in your file. It doesn't introduce new concepts for you, it just tries to guess what you mean by function signature + descriptive comments, and generates that code for you.
uticus 5y ago
As a counterpoint to most of the other responses, I agree with this comment. In my eyes, this is very similar to the issue of bloated software being enabled by faster processors. This doesn't mean slower processors are the answer, but rather that there are often unintended consequences that need to be considered when solving for a problem. So, as an example of what could be better than making boilerplate easier to type, I would suggest programming languages, frameworks, and tooling that reduce the need in the first place would be worth considering.
fossuser 5y ago
People have made some variation of this argument since the move from writing binary to writing assembly. With every new layer of abstraction there’s more power. The long term benefit of a tool that can do this well far exceeds what humans can do by hand, but that may not be true in the very short term. Either way, I suspect the benefits to be big.
- uticus 5y ago
  I disagree with the comparison. This isn't abstraction, it is syntax completion. As if you typed the first four bytes and GitHub (mostly correctly it must be mentioned!) completed the remaining. Unlike an additional abstraction layer, the readibility is not increased.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    The end goal of this based on what I've seen from Open AI examples and related beta projects is more high level language -> code. "Write a standard sign up page" -> Generated HTML "Write a unit test to test for X" -> Unit Test. It's more than just syntax completion - I'd argue that's the beginning of a new layer of abstraction similar to previous new abstraction layers. The demo on their main page is more than syntax completion - it writes a method to check for positive sentiment automatically using a web service based on standard english. This is extremely powerful and it's still super early. I saw one example that converted english phrases into bash commands, "Search all text files for the word X" -> the correct grep command. That is a big deal for giving massive leverage to people writing software and using tools. We'll be able to learn way faster with that kind of AI assisted feedback loop. Similarly to compilers, the end result can also be better than what humans can do eventually because the AI can optimize things humans can't easily, by training for performance. Often the optimal layout can be weird.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Not at all: this tool does not encourage more powerful abstractions, but the very opposite. It makes boilerplate cheaper to churn out.
hyperion2010 5y ago
Some people think the problem is that we don't have enough code. Anyone that has to maintain code knows that the problem is that we have too much code.
- gorjusborg 5y ago
  This is even better! Now we can generate code we might not even understand, without even hitting all the keys.
dmitrygr 5y ago
Your fears seem justified, as per the site itself: Whether you’re working in a new language or framework, or just learning to code, GitHub Copilot can help you find your way. Tackle a bug, or learn how to use a new framework without spending most of your time spelunking through the docs or searching the web.
dqpb 5y ago
That entirely depends on the quality of the suggestion, does it not?
vbezhenar 5y ago
I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers. I know that I'm not the first one. My best days are when I'm removing code. I'm very wary from using frameworks and huge libraries. I learned few frameworks and libraries, I've chosen few that correspond to my style and I'm very careful when it comes to adapting new ones. I prefer to spend a week coding auth layer rather than installing some SaaS connector and call it a day. I prefer to spend few days reading source code and developing my own solution (or just discarding the whole idea) rather than quickly google something and move on. May be I'm just unprofessional, I don't know. I get my stuff done, may be not as fast, but at least I understand every bit of my code and I rarely have unexpected surprises. I understand that there are other approaches, but I just don't enjoy that way, so I follow mine as long as I can find work. And I actually like things that other people find boring, according to this thread. Withing "business code" - hate it, writing "auth layer" - love it.
- b215826 5y ago
  I don't think you're unprofessional. In fact, your sentiment is a belief that was strongly held by early UNIX programmers. Two quotes I particularly like: "The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code." -- Douglas McIllroy "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson But unfortunately, we've come to a situation where SLOC and innovation for the sake of innovation is more important than code quality.
- Bayart 5y ago
  I'm the same. I tend to get derailed on making my code philosophically "right" and aesthetically "soothing" (for lack of a better word), even when it doesn't obviously matter to the scope of the project, rather than just it to the point where it _works_ by some operation of the Holy Spirit. Unsuprisingly I'm the "is he working ?" guy (I may fit in the attention disorder category that was a point of discussion in the confidence thread[1] the other day). But at least I'm not the "his code broke our shit again" guy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27533988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27533988
- WanderPanda 5y ago
anyonecancode 5y ago
> I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on itself. This is my actual hoped-for endgame for the ad based internet. At some point Twitter, FB, etc will be exclusively populated by bots that post ads, and bots that simulate engagement with those ads to drive up perceived value of advertising. They'll use AI to post comments that are really just ads or inflammatory keyword strings to drive further "engagement." The tech companies will rake in billions and billions of dollars in ad revenue, we'll tax all of it and use it to create flying cars, high speed rail, and an ad-free internet closed off to all non-humans. Occasionally a brave ML researcher may venture out into the "internet" to take field notes on the evolution of the adbot and spambot ecosystem.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  The most unlikely thing you mentioned is that we will be able to tax huge corporations.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    You jest, but the parent is close to what I believe is a possible scenario - the one Nick Bostrom calls "a Disneyland with no children". No tax, no flying cars, eventually not even humans around - just AI-driven companies endlessly trading with each other, in a fully-automated, self-contained, circular economy, from which sentient beings were optimized away.
    - fileeditview 5y ago
      The whole thing sounds a bit like Autofac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac)
- nindalf 5y ago
  I invite you to try automating this and let us know what happens. Try creating, let’s say 1000 accounts and try liking or posting and see what happens. I’ve seen that system at work and doubt you’d get very far. More than that, you misunderstand how advertisers prioritise their money. They pay for outcomes. If they notice that over the past couple of months they’ve been receiving mostly bot traffic, they stop advertising. Not everyone all at once, but enough that revenue begins to decline. An ad based business that cares about the long term will do it’s best to weed out the inauthentic engagement.
Florin_Andrei 5y ago
In the (now not very) long run, programming was a job meant for computers, anyway. The future will look back at "programming" the way we now look at Charles Dickens characters toiling in soot-filled factories. It's not what people are best at, and it looks like soon there will be better ways to accomplish this job.
- rablackburn 5y ago
  I don’t know if I agree with this, but I think it depends what you mean when you say “programming”. I use programming as one of the examples of intrinsically human work. You have a (general computing) machine that can do anything(), it only has meaning and utility from humans thinking about problems they have and how to solve them. The hard part of programming is analysing what problems you have, and what you want to do about them. This is why one of the distinguishing features between junior and senior programmers is that seniors tend to think about the (human) problem they’re solving a lot more. Tools like copilot help with the physical interfacing between programmer and machine, but they don’t eliminate programming. But a recurring worry people are expressing in this thread is: some people think they _do_, and how insidious that idea is. The tool is great, the managers deciding that time spent thinking about its output, or developing their staff’s skills, is a waste because “just use what the AI says”, are the danger. As long as people and computers exist, there will be programming. not actually “anything”
hbosch 5y ago
If we didn't need programmers to do the programming, that would be a perfect world.
- slver 5y ago
  This is inevitably leading to the moment where we don't need humans, but I'm fine with that.
kbenson 5y ago
I think the mistake you might be making is assuming that any tool adopted is always used all the time. Even professional race car drivers probably opt for an automatic transmission over the manual on the mini-van if they get one. Different choices for different needs. There will always be a place for meticulous consideration of exactly what's being done, and many levels of that as well. For the same reason people reach for python to mock up a proof of concept or throw something together that is non-essential but useful to have quickly, even meticulous programmers might use this to good effect for small things they don't care to spend a lot of time on because it's not as important as something else, or the language they're using for this small task isn't one they feel as proficient in.
quek 5y ago
> As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. Absolutely true. If your code is so repetitive that can be correctly predicted by an AI, you are either using a language that lacks expressiveness or have poor abstraction. The biggest problem in the software world is excessive complexity, excessive amounts of (poor) code and reinventing the wheel.
- slver 5y ago
  You're underestimating the sophistication of said AI.
rPlayer6554 5y ago
The first thing that comes to mind is the recent article on the front page about the docker footgun/default that allowed a hacker to wipe a website's database.
TheRealPomax 5y ago
This ignores the ladder of abstraction, which you apparetly need to be reminded of exists. Not all programmers need to work at the same level of abstraction: some programmers need to write original code all day long because their subject field is close to the metal and there are no premade solutions. For those folks, the idea of copy-pasting from SO is pretty ridiculous, although SO might have questions and answers that allow them to write their own code solutions based on the insights of others. Because we're not going to dismiss highly respected experts in our fields just because they helped answer good questions with good detailed answers on Stackoverflow, are we? A few rungs up on the ladder we still have programmers but now the kind whose job it is to write as little code as possible, where their worth comes from knowing exactly how little code glue is needed to, necessarily and sufficiently, make other people's libraries work together to functionality that is larger than the sum of its parts. These folks aren't solving unique problems, they make things work with as little code as possible, and copy-pasting from SO for problems that have been solved countless times already by others is 100% fine: their expertise is in knowing how to judge other people's code to determine whether that's the code they need to copy-paste. And then, of course, there all the folks in between those two levels of abstraction. The biggest mistake would be to hear "programming" and think "only my job is real programming, all those other people are just giving me a bad name". Different horses and different courses, and different courses for different horses.
slver 5y ago
You sound afraid you'll be replaced by software.
- eggsmediumrare 5y ago
  Are you not?
  - slver 5y ago
    Nah.
z3t4 5y ago
If we exclude the VM the code is running on, and the OS layer, and the kernel, and the micro-code, and the standard lib, then people also like to include library code, and also like to depend on third party PaaS and SaaS aka the "cloud"... If you do know what all bits of your code does you can send me a PM. cough All software is shit, with few exceptions. Not necessary because the developers don't know their stuff, but likely because of business priorities, politics, and layers of management. Software is a "people problem". So if we remove the "people" we might get better software ;)
vanusa 5y ago
Cargo-cult programming has always been a problem, but now we're explicitly building tools for it. I get what you're saying, but I'm not worried. At the end of the day, the programmer has to understand the code they're submitting, both the fine grain and the holistic context. If they don't know how to, or can't be bothered at least curate the suggestions the tool is making... then your organization has much bigger problems than can be helped by reading a Dijkstra paper or two.
karmasimida 5y ago
> Someone will produce 5000 lines of code in a day for a new feature, but only read 2000 of those lines. Shouldn't the one who has produced this code be responsible for making sure the integrity of it? 5k LOC in a day without test cases, then that is no code, it is a disaster. I think the marketing here is about right. This is no AI programmer, but Copilot. It is an intelligent assistant that does some mundane things for you with probability of failing some of that even, but when the stars align, you are in luck. I see this as INCREDIBLY useful for certain niche of programming: 1. Front end. Some components are really trivial but still requires some manual rewiring and stuff, this could be the life saver. 2. Templates for devops. Those are as soul crushing as possible, and I couldn't think of a better domain to apply Copilot to it. Overall, this is a huge win for programmer productivity, with reasonable compromises.
rokkit 5y ago
Thank you. If one trains an AI on a corpus of mediocrity, one should expect a mediocre result.

JabavuAdams 5y ago

You can only solve relatively small problems this way. As I get older, I like the physical act of programming less and less, and just want to solve problems so I can get going on all of my ideas backlog. I've been programming almost every day for the last 38 years. What I really want to do is solve (my) problems.

dennisy 5y ago
I really agree with this even though my experience is much smaller than yours. The biggest place I think it is frustrating to write code is for ML pipelines where you know what you need, but it takes a few hours to wrangle files and pandas until you can run your idea/experiment.
- JabavuAdams 5y ago
  Ermahgerd, yes! Doing this right now.
auggierose 5y ago
But programming is the greatest fun on earth. Wait no, being able to work on your ideas and communicating them to the computer is the greatest fun on earth. Now, if your only tools for communication are made by "productive developers", this is where the problem is. Not with programming itself.

asadlionpk 5y ago

If this results in more overall programmers or enabling existing programmers to make products quicker than before, it's a win! Most codebases already majorly contain unread code; the libraries (node_modules, etc). I am sure we can figure out a pattern to separate human vs machine code in similar way. If the code you are about to write is already written by someone else on the internet, that's probably not the most innovative part of your codebase anyway, so why waste time?

zootboy 5y ago
> If this results in more overall programmers or enabling existing programmers to make products quicker than before, it's a win! I don't think I really agree with this sentiment. "More programmers" or "faster programmers" is meaningless (or even actively detrimental) if the quality of their output is lower. It's even worse if their output is plagued by subtle bugs, as AI systems are likely to produce.
- asadlionpk 5y ago
  The "quality programmers" (neckbeards) can continue their quality work. These new faster programmers can get other stuff done. The one paying for these jobs can decide what level of quality they want, and hire/pay accordingly. How does that sound?

augustk 5y ago

Indeed, using tools to manage complexity tends to make the complexity acceptable and leads to more complexity.

s_dev 5y ago

Coding is inherently difficult -- any tools even as basic as color highlighting/spell checking massively help understanding code in front of you. There isn't a hope this can replace any programmers but instead aid their workflow. I great example is simply refactoring code with SOLID after building a feature or fixing a bug -- a lot of this can be easily automated. Having a machine suggest and a human accept is a worthy trade off. Another similar example is the Google bot that presents search suggestions for you. I don't think your concerns are well grounded.

bluetwo 5y ago

All I can think of is how many times I've grabbed a code example from StackOverflow only to discover it had some obvious bug in it. The answer is many, many times.

staticassertion 5y ago

> Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. writing the programs is definitely boring garbage work. Typing is so slow and annoying - hence autocomplete being a standard tool. This is, to me, just fancy autocomplete. > to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it because they make it easier to manage. Boilerplate optimizes for the right things - code that's easier to read and analyze, but takes longer to write. IDEs and tools like this cut the cost of writing, giving us easier to read code and easier to analyze code for free. IDEs have supported templates forever. I never write out a full unit test, I type `tmod` and `tfn` and then fill in the blanks. This is basically the same thing to me. > Folks that still expect you to only check in code you understand and can explain will become a minority. This isn't true at all. Having used TabNine I don't have it write code for me, it just autocompletes code that's already in my head, give or take some symbol names maybe being different. All this is is a fancy autocomplete with a really cool demo.

UnFleshedOne 5y ago
Boilerplate is only easier to read and analyze if you can be sure it is consistent, so you can tune it out. Usually though, there is this one getter method that is not quite like the others and you literally will not see the difference until it bites you. We'll need more IDE enhancements, to highlight interesting pieces and desaturate standard boilerplate...
- staticassertion 5y ago
  When I think of boilerplate I think of context that is made explicit. Things like type annotations, longer variable names, the lifetime or attributes of some class or data etc. These things are extremely helpful for a number of things - they convey context from writer to readers, they aid in proving the code correct, and they can make code faster. The context almost always exists in the writers head. We all have a specification of our program based on our expectations, and we type out code to turn that model into an implementation. We only spend so much time conveying that model though - most of us don't write formal proofs, but many of us will write out type annotations or doc comments. The cost is usually as simple as expressing and typing out the model in our head as code. Languages that are famous for boilerplate, like Java, enforce this - and it makes writing Java slower, but can also make Java code quite explicit (I'm sure someone will respond talking about confusing Java code, that's not the point). Reducing the cost of conveying context from writer to reader means we can convey more of that context in more places. That's a huge win, in my opinion, because I've personally found that so much implicit context gets lost over time, but it can be hard to always take the time to convey it. Think about how many programs you've read with single character variable names, or no type annotations, or no comments. The more of that we can fix, the better, imo. Tools like this do that. TabNine autocompletes full method type signatures for me in rust, meaning that the cost of actually writing out the types is gone. That's one less cost to pay for having clearer, faster code.

deleted 5y ago

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RationPhantoms 5y ago

Okay, and I'd argue that a good portion of programmatic wrangling is simply trying to do Y with Z. Something that's probably done 10,000 times over by others but in the silo'd confines of that single developer's workspace; an utter fucking mystery to them. What's the carbon displacement for wasted time on those tasks? It might be brow raising.

davidthewatson 5y ago

Cargo cults concerned me too but I realized that cargo-cult programming flourishes when it's enabled by a culture that doesn't care how the sausage is made. If the culture seeks full stack truth, it's not likely to get fooled by bad generated code, no matter whether it's generated by copy/paste, metaprogramming, or AI. I'd love to know what Donald Knuth thinks given the history of literate programming.

throwaway675309 5y ago

I mean you say this, but you and most likely the majority of programmers rely on dozens of repositories, packages and libraries with likely zero deep understanding of it (and at the very least haven't read the source code of ) so I don't really understand the difference here. The advantage of something like this is that instead of having to go to stack overflow or any number of reference sites and copy pasta it can just happen automatically without me having to leave my IDE. The enjoyable part of programming for me is not typing the Ajax post boilerplate bullcrap for the millionth time, it's the high-level design and abstract reasoning.

pvorb 5y ago
I really wonder who those folks copy-pasting from Stack Overflow all day are. I only rarely find pieces of code that I can copy-paste. Typically Stack Overflow only gives me an idea of how to solve something, but incorporating that idea into my code base is still not trivial.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  A few weeks ago someone on a call said "we all know that programming is mostly copy and pasting anyway" A few people laughed, but I said that if I catch myself copy and pasting then I know that something is very wrong. It was kind of awkward, but I didn't like my job being trivialized by people who never really did it. It would be like if I said plumbing or auto repair is just watching youtube videos and going to lowes. Just because I've managed to do a few simple things, doesn't mean I'm in a position to belittle an entire profession. That said, I am also shocked by how many full time developers don't take the time to understand their own code. Let alone the libraries they use.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    > That said, I am also shocked by how many full time developers don't take the time to understand their own code. Let alone the libraries they use. Me too, then I understood that code and programming is commoditized. As long as it works and looks pretty on the outside and it can be sold, it's fair game. "There'll be bugs anyway, we can solve these problems somehow" they probably think. Heck even containers and K8S is promoted with "Developers are unreliable in documenting what they've done. Let's make things immutable so, they can't monkey around on running systems, and make undocumented changes" motto. I still run perf on my code and look for IPC and cache trashing ratio numbers and try to optimize things, thinking "How can I make this more efficient so it can run faster on this". I don't regret that.

novok 5y ago

I've used tabnine for a while, and it's mostly just been a faster executing normal autocomplete, with a %90 accuracy rate. It's a tradeoff. It didn't have the large snippet behavior in my usage like this new one although.

_fat_santa 5y ago

The way I see it, the tool is only as good as the programmer using it. This tool will generate the individual code blocks for you, but you still have to understand how to put it all together to deliver a working app. Sure there will be some codebases out there that are plastered together using this tool, but when it comes to delivering software that is well written, performant and maintainable over the course of several years, you're still going to need a lot of skilled engineers to pull that off.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Not looking forward to dealing with this from a security point of view. It's difficult to get developers to accept responsibility for security vulnerabilities in libraries they've selected for their project ("That's not my code!"). I can see the same thing happening with generated code where they don't want to take responsibility for finding a way to remediate any vulnerabilities they didn't personally type in. Of course those who exploit the vulnerabilities won't care how it got into the code. They're just happy they're able to make use of it.

IncludeSecurity 5y ago
It says it's trained on "billions of lines of code" I would augment that to "billions of lines of code that may or may not be safe and secure" If they could tie in CodeQL into Copilot to ensure the training set only came from code with no known security concerns, that would be a big improvement.

albertkoz 5y ago

Next step will be AI to approve the code, because. if someone is producing 5k LOC a day there are people who need to read & approve this code...

hintymad 5y ago

Somehow I don't see people discuss this kind of tools from the perspective of managing essential complexity versus accidental complexity. Maybe copilot just increases the abstraction level of coding, so we can treat generated code as a building block, just like we nowadays rarely needs to care about how to write assembly code or how a balanced tree works?

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Maybe copilot just increases the abstraction level of coding, so we can treat generated code as a building block At this point it doesn't, and we can't, because Copilot is just a fancy autocomplete. The code is there, first class, in your file. It doesn't introduce new concepts for you, it just tries to guess what you mean by function signature + descriptive comments, and generates that code for you.

uticus 5y ago

As a counterpoint to most of the other responses, I agree with this comment. In my eyes, this is very similar to the issue of bloated software being enabled by faster processors. This doesn't mean slower processors are the answer, but rather that there are often unintended consequences that need to be considered when solving for a problem. So, as an example of what could be better than making boilerplate easier to type, I would suggest programming languages, frameworks, and tooling that reduce the need in the first place would be worth considering.

fossuser 5y ago

People have made some variation of this argument since the move from writing binary to writing assembly. With every new layer of abstraction there’s more power. The long term benefit of a tool that can do this well far exceeds what humans can do by hand, but that may not be true in the very short term. Either way, I suspect the benefits to be big.

uticus 5y ago
I disagree with the comparison. This isn't abstraction, it is syntax completion. As if you typed the first four bytes and GitHub (mostly correctly it must be mentioned!) completed the remaining. Unlike an additional abstraction layer, the readibility is not increased.
- fossuser 5y ago
  The end goal of this based on what I've seen from Open AI examples and related beta projects is more high level language -> code. "Write a standard sign up page" -> Generated HTML "Write a unit test to test for X" -> Unit Test. It's more than just syntax completion - I'd argue that's the beginning of a new layer of abstraction similar to previous new abstraction layers. The demo on their main page is more than syntax completion - it writes a method to check for positive sentiment automatically using a web service based on standard english. This is extremely powerful and it's still super early. I saw one example that converted english phrases into bash commands, "Search all text files for the word X" -> the correct grep command. That is a big deal for giving massive leverage to people writing software and using tools. We'll be able to learn way faster with that kind of AI assisted feedback loop. Similarly to compilers, the end result can also be better than what humans can do eventually because the AI can optimize things humans can't easily, by training for performance. Often the optimal layout can be weird.
goodpoint 5y ago
Not at all: this tool does not encourage more powerful abstractions, but the very opposite. It makes boilerplate cheaper to churn out.

hyperion2010 5y ago

Some people think the problem is that we don't have enough code. Anyone that has to maintain code knows that the problem is that we have too much code.

gorjusborg 5y ago
This is even better! Now we can generate code we might not even understand, without even hitting all the keys.

dmitrygr 5y ago

Your fears seem justified, as per the site itself: Whether you’re working in a new language or framework, or just learning to code, GitHub Copilot can help you find your way. Tackle a bug, or learn how to use a new framework without spending most of your time spelunking through the docs or searching the web.

dqpb 5y ago

That entirely depends on the quality of the suggestion, does it not?

vbezhenar 5y ago

I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers. I know that I'm not the first one. My best days are when I'm removing code. I'm very wary from using frameworks and huge libraries. I learned few frameworks and libraries, I've chosen few that correspond to my style and I'm very careful when it comes to adapting new ones. I prefer to spend a week coding auth layer rather than installing some SaaS connector and call it a day. I prefer to spend few days reading source code and developing my own solution (or just discarding the whole idea) rather than quickly google something and move on. May be I'm just unprofessional, I don't know. I get my stuff done, may be not as fast, but at least I understand every bit of my code and I rarely have unexpected surprises. I understand that there are other approaches, but I just don't enjoy that way, so I follow mine as long as I can find work. And I actually like things that other people find boring, according to this thread. Withing "business code" - hate it, writing "auth layer" - love it.

b215826 5y ago
I don't think you're unprofessional. In fact, your sentiment is a belief that was strongly held by early UNIX programmers. Two quotes I particularly like: "The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code." -- Douglas McIllroy "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson But unfortunately, we've come to a situation where SLOC and innovation for the sake of innovation is more important than code quality.
Bayart 5y ago
I'm the same. I tend to get derailed on making my code philosophically "right" and aesthetically "soothing" (for lack of a better word), even when it doesn't obviously matter to the scope of the project, rather than just it to the point where it _works_ by some operation of the Holy Spirit. Unsuprisingly I'm the "is he working ?" guy (I may fit in the attention disorder category that was a point of discussion in the confidence thread[1] the other day). But at least I'm not the "his code broke our shit again" guy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27533988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27533988
WanderPanda 5y ago

anyonecancode 5y ago

> I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on itself. This is my actual hoped-for endgame for the ad based internet. At some point Twitter, FB, etc will be exclusively populated by bots that post ads, and bots that simulate engagement with those ads to drive up perceived value of advertising. They'll use AI to post comments that are really just ads or inflammatory keyword strings to drive further "engagement." The tech companies will rake in billions and billions of dollars in ad revenue, we'll tax all of it and use it to create flying cars, high speed rail, and an ad-free internet closed off to all non-humans. Occasionally a brave ML researcher may venture out into the "internet" to take field notes on the evolution of the adbot and spambot ecosystem.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
The most unlikely thing you mentioned is that we will be able to tax huge corporations.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  You jest, but the parent is close to what I believe is a possible scenario - the one Nick Bostrom calls "a Disneyland with no children". No tax, no flying cars, eventually not even humans around - just AI-driven companies endlessly trading with each other, in a fully-automated, self-contained, circular economy, from which sentient beings were optimized away.
  - fileeditview 5y ago
    The whole thing sounds a bit like Autofac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac)
nindalf 5y ago
I invite you to try automating this and let us know what happens. Try creating, let’s say 1000 accounts and try liking or posting and see what happens. I’ve seen that system at work and doubt you’d get very far. More than that, you misunderstand how advertisers prioritise their money. They pay for outcomes. If they notice that over the past couple of months they’ve been receiving mostly bot traffic, they stop advertising. Not everyone all at once, but enough that revenue begins to decline. An ad based business that cares about the long term will do it’s best to weed out the inauthentic engagement.

Florin_Andrei 5y ago

In the (now not very) long run, programming was a job meant for computers, anyway. The future will look back at "programming" the way we now look at Charles Dickens characters toiling in soot-filled factories. It's not what people are best at, and it looks like soon there will be better ways to accomplish this job.

rablackburn 5y ago
I don’t know if I agree with this, but I think it depends what you mean when you say “programming”. I use programming as one of the examples of intrinsically human work. You have a (general computing) machine that can do anything(), it only has meaning and utility from humans thinking about problems they have and how to solve them. The hard part of programming is analysing what problems you have, and what you want to do about them. This is why one of the distinguishing features between junior and senior programmers is that seniors tend to think about the (human) problem they’re solving a lot more. Tools like copilot help with the physical interfacing between programmer and machine, but they don’t eliminate programming. But a recurring worry people are expressing in this thread is: some people think they _do_, and how insidious that idea is. The tool is great, the managers deciding that time spent thinking about its output, or developing their staff’s skills, is a waste because “just use what the AI says”, are the danger. As long as people and computers exist, there will be programming. not actually “anything”

hbosch 5y ago

If we didn't need programmers to do the programming, that would be a perfect world.

slver 5y ago
This is inevitably leading to the moment where we don't need humans, but I'm fine with that.

kbenson 5y ago

I think the mistake you might be making is assuming that any tool adopted is always used all the time. Even professional race car drivers probably opt for an automatic transmission over the manual on the mini-van if they get one. Different choices for different needs. There will always be a place for meticulous consideration of exactly what's being done, and many levels of that as well. For the same reason people reach for python to mock up a proof of concept or throw something together that is non-essential but useful to have quickly, even meticulous programmers might use this to good effect for small things they don't care to spend a lot of time on because it's not as important as something else, or the language they're using for this small task isn't one they feel as proficient in.

quek 5y ago

> As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. Absolutely true. If your code is so repetitive that can be correctly predicted by an AI, you are either using a language that lacks expressiveness or have poor abstraction. The biggest problem in the software world is excessive complexity, excessive amounts of (poor) code and reinventing the wheel.

slver 5y ago
You're underestimating the sophistication of said AI.

rPlayer6554 5y ago

The first thing that comes to mind is the recent article on the front page about the docker footgun/default that allowed a hacker to wipe a website's database.

TheRealPomax 5y ago

This ignores the ladder of abstraction, which you apparetly need to be reminded of exists. Not all programmers need to work at the same level of abstraction: some programmers need to write original code all day long because their subject field is close to the metal and there are no premade solutions. For those folks, the idea of copy-pasting from SO is pretty ridiculous, although SO might have questions and answers that allow them to write their own code solutions based on the insights of others. Because we're not going to dismiss highly respected experts in our fields just because they helped answer good questions with good detailed answers on Stackoverflow, are we? A few rungs up on the ladder we still have programmers but now the kind whose job it is to write as little code as possible, where their worth comes from knowing exactly how little code glue is needed to, necessarily and sufficiently, make other people's libraries work together to functionality that is larger than the sum of its parts. These folks aren't solving unique problems, they make things work with as little code as possible, and copy-pasting from SO for problems that have been solved countless times already by others is 100% fine: their expertise is in knowing how to judge other people's code to determine whether that's the code they need to copy-paste. And then, of course, there all the folks in between those two levels of abstraction. The biggest mistake would be to hear "programming" and think "only my job is real programming, all those other people are just giving me a bad name". Different horses and different courses, and different courses for different horses.

slver 5y ago

You sound afraid you'll be replaced by software.

eggsmediumrare 5y ago
Are you not?
- slver 5y ago
  Nah.

z3t4 5y ago

If we exclude the VM the code is running on, and the OS layer, and the kernel, and the micro-code, and the standard lib, then people also like to include library code, and also like to depend on third party PaaS and SaaS aka the "cloud"... If you do know what all bits of your code does you can send me a PM. cough All software is shit, with few exceptions. Not necessary because the developers don't know their stuff, but likely because of business priorities, politics, and layers of management. Software is a "people problem". So if we remove the "people" we might get better software ;)

vanusa 5y ago

Cargo-cult programming has always been a problem, but now we're explicitly building tools for it. I get what you're saying, but I'm not worried. At the end of the day, the programmer has to understand the code they're submitting, both the fine grain and the holistic context. If they don't know how to, or can't be bothered at least curate the suggestions the tool is making... then your organization has much bigger problems than can be helped by reading a Dijkstra paper or two.

karmasimida 5y ago

> Someone will produce 5000 lines of code in a day for a new feature, but only read 2000 of those lines. Shouldn't the one who has produced this code be responsible for making sure the integrity of it? 5k LOC in a day without test cases, then that is no code, it is a disaster. I think the marketing here is about right. This is no AI programmer, but Copilot. It is an intelligent assistant that does some mundane things for you with probability of failing some of that even, but when the stars align, you are in luck. I see this as INCREDIBLY useful for certain niche of programming: 1. Front end. Some components are really trivial but still requires some manual rewiring and stuff, this could be the life saver. 2. Templates for devops. Those are as soul crushing as possible, and I couldn't think of a better domain to apply Copilot to it. Overall, this is a huge win for programmer productivity, with reasonable compromises.

rokkit 5y ago

Thank you. If one trains an AI on a corpus of mediocrity, one should expect a mediocre result.