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Awesome summary and thanks for trying it for the rest of us! Copilot sounded terrible in the press release. The idea that a computer is going to pick the right

Awesome summary and thanks for trying it for the rest of us! Copilot sounded terrible in the press release. The idea that a computer is going to pick the right code for you (from comments, no less) is really just completely nuts. The belief that it could be better than human-picked code is really way off. You bring up a really important point. When you use a tool like Copilot (or copypasta of any kind), you are introducing the additional burden of understanding that other person's code -- which is worse than trying to understand your own code or write something correct from scratch. I think you've hit the nail on the head. Stuff like Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult, not better and easier.

onion2k 5y ago
Stuff like Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult, not better and easier. Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult if you're aiming for a specific set of coding values and style that Copilot doesn't generate (yet?). If Copilot generates the sort of code that you would write, and it does for a lot of people, then it's definitely no worse (or better) than copying something from SO. The author of a declarative, functional C# framework likely has very different ideas to what code should be than some PHP developer just trying to do their day-to-day job. We shouldn't abandon tools like Copilot just because they don't work out at the more rigorous ends of the development spectrum.
- nightpool 5y ago
  The arguments that the GP makes are not based on a specific style or value of coding. Instead, they're based on the simple truth that it is harder to understand code that somebody else wrote. In some cases the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (such as using a stack overflow answer that's stood the test of time for something you don't know how to do), but with Copilot you don't even get the benefit of upvotes, human intent, or crowdsourced peer review.
- serf 5y ago
  >If Copilot generates the sort of code that you would write, and it does for a lot of people, then it's definitely no worse (or better) than copying something from SO. Disagree. Most SO copy-paste must be integrated into your project -- maybe it expects different inputs, maybe it expects or works with different variables -- whatever, it must be partially modified to work with the existing code-base that you're working with. Copilot does the integration tasks for you. When one might have had to read through the code from SO to understand it enough to integrate it, the person using Copilot need not even invest that much understanding. Because of these workflow differences, it seems to me as if Copilot enables an even more low-quality workflow than offered by copy-pasting from SO and patching together multiple code-styles and paradigms while hoping for the best; Copilot does that without even the wisdom that an SO user might have that 'this is a bad idea.'
  - buu700 5y ago
    I'm not firmly for or against the concept of Copilot, but it's fascinating to me that it will introduce an entirely new class of bugs. Rather than specific mistakes in certain blocks of code and edge case errors in handling certain inputs, now we're going to have lazy/overworked/junior developers getting complacent and committing code they haven't reviewed that isn't even close to their intent. Like you could have a backend method that was supposed to run a database query, but instead it sends the content of an arbitrary variable in a POST request to a third-party API or invokes a shell to run `rm -rf /`.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      To me, the most interesting aspect is the new class of supply chain security vulnerabilities it will create. How people will act to exploit or protect¹ against those will be very interesting. 1 - I don't expect "not using a tool that generates bad code" to be the top option.
- mimixco 5y ago
  I don't think they work out past trivial applications. Any non trivial app requires an understanding of a much larger part of the codebase than a tool like Copilot is looking at at any one time. Copilot does not understand the code in toto and is therefore really useless for debugging (70% of all coding) and probably useless for anything other than very simple parts of an app.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Any non trivial app requires an understanding of a much larger part of the codebase than a tool like Copilot is looking at at any one time. I don't think that's important. Copilot, at least as it's been demo'd so far judging by the examples, is to help you write small, standalone functions. It shouldn't need to know about the rest of the application. Just as the functions that you write yourself shouldn't need to know about the rest of the application either. If your functions need a broad understanding of the codebase as a whole how the heck do you write tests that don't fail the instant anything changes?
    - mimixco 5y ago
      The reality of code is that stuff breaks when connected to other stuff, as it eventually must be for real work to happen. There's no getting around that. Since that's where the work of programming is, debugging connected applications (not writing fresh, unencumbered code, a rare luxury), a tool that offers no help for that is, well, not much help.
petercooper 5y ago
While I accept most of the concerns, it's better than your comment suggests. I see some promise for it as a tool for reminding you of a technique or inspiring you to a different approach than you've seen before. For example, I wrote a comment along the lines of "Find the middle point of two 2D positions stored in x, y vectors" and it came up with two totally different approaches in Ruby - one of which I wouldn't have considered. I did some similar things with SQL, and some people might find huge value in it suggesting regexes, too, because so many devs forget the syntax and a reminder may be all it takes to get out of a jam. I'm getting old enough now to see where these sorts of prompts will be a game changer, especially when dabbling in languages I'm not very proficient in. For example, I barely know any Python, so I just created a simple list of numbers, wrote a "Sort the numbers into reverse order" comment, and it immediately gave me the right syntax that I'd otherwise have had to Google, taking much longer. Maybe to alleviate the concerns it could be sandboxed into a search engine or a separate app of its own rather than sitting constantly in my main editor - I would find that a fair compromise which would still provide value but require users to engage in more reflection as to what they're using (at least to a level that they would with using SO answers, say).
- rob74 5y ago
  Yeah, but... I mean, I guess we all agree that copying code from, let's say StackOverflow without checking if it really does what you want it to do is a bad thing? Now here we have a tool that basically automates that (except it's copying from GitHub, not StackOverflow), and that's supposed to be a good thing? Even if its AI is smarter, you would still have to check the code it suggests, and that can actually be harder than writing it yourself...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    The big boost, that I think parent is alluding to, is for rusty (not Rust!) languages in the toolbox, where you may not have the standard library and syntax loaded into your working memory. As a nudge, it's a great idea. As a substitute for vigilance, it's a terrible idea. I suspect that's why they named it Copilot instead of Autopilot, but it's unfortunately more likely to be used as the latter, humans being humans.
vmception 5y ago
Hm odd takes here. It's really weird for software engineers to judge something by its current state and not by its potential state. To me, it's clearly solvable by Copilot filtering the input code by that repository's license. It should only be certain open source licenses, maybe even user-choosable, or code-creators can optionally sublicense their code to Copilot in a very permissable way. Secondly, a way for the crowd to code review suggestions would be a start.
- slumdev 5y ago
  > It's really weird for software engineers to judge something by its current state and not by its potential state. No, we're not afraid of Copilot replacing us. The thought is ridiculous, anyway. If it actually worked, we would be enabled to work in higher abstractions. We'd end up in even higher demand because the output of a single engineer would be so great that even small businesses would be able to afford us. Yes, we are afraid of Copilot making the entire industry worse, the same way that "low-code" and "no-code" solutions have enabled generations of novices to produce volumes of garbage that we eventually have to clean up.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Sounds like projecting because thats not what I was referring to I’m saying copilot can be better with very simple tweaks
- gpm 5y ago
  Practically every open source license requires attribution, if copilot has a licensing issue, training a model on only repositories with the same license won't fix it except for the extremely rare licenses which do not require attribution.
  - vmception 5y ago
    why not? it can just generate an attribution file or reminder
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
res0nat0r 5y ago
Isn't the entire point of this to suggest code you may use, not to just blindly accept is correct without thinking?

onion2k 5y ago

Stuff like Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult, not better and easier. Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult if you're aiming for a specific set of coding values and style that Copilot doesn't generate (yet?). If Copilot generates the sort of code that you would write, and it does for a lot of people, then it's definitely no worse (or better) than copying something from SO. The author of a declarative, functional C# framework likely has very different ideas to what code should be than some PHP developer just trying to do their day-to-day job. We shouldn't abandon tools like Copilot just because they don't work out at the more rigorous ends of the development spectrum.

nightpool 5y ago
The arguments that the GP makes are not based on a specific style or value of coding. Instead, they're based on the simple truth that it is harder to understand code that somebody else wrote. In some cases the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (such as using a stack overflow answer that's stood the test of time for something you don't know how to do), but with Copilot you don't even get the benefit of upvotes, human intent, or crowdsourced peer review.
serf 5y ago
>If Copilot generates the sort of code that you would write, and it does for a lot of people, then it's definitely no worse (or better) than copying something from SO. Disagree. Most SO copy-paste must be integrated into your project -- maybe it expects different inputs, maybe it expects or works with different variables -- whatever, it must be partially modified to work with the existing code-base that you're working with. Copilot does the integration tasks for you. When one might have had to read through the code from SO to understand it enough to integrate it, the person using Copilot need not even invest that much understanding. Because of these workflow differences, it seems to me as if Copilot enables an even more low-quality workflow than offered by copy-pasting from SO and patching together multiple code-styles and paradigms while hoping for the best; Copilot does that without even the wisdom that an SO user might have that 'this is a bad idea.'
- buu700 5y ago
  I'm not firmly for or against the concept of Copilot, but it's fascinating to me that it will introduce an entirely new class of bugs. Rather than specific mistakes in certain blocks of code and edge case errors in handling certain inputs, now we're going to have lazy/overworked/junior developers getting complacent and committing code they haven't reviewed that isn't even close to their intent. Like you could have a backend method that was supposed to run a database query, but instead it sends the content of an arbitrary variable in a POST request to a third-party API or invokes a shell to run `rm -rf /`.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    To me, the most interesting aspect is the new class of supply chain security vulnerabilities it will create. How people will act to exploit or protect¹ against those will be very interesting. 1 - I don't expect "not using a tool that generates bad code" to be the top option.
mimixco 5y ago
I don't think they work out past trivial applications. Any non trivial app requires an understanding of a much larger part of the codebase than a tool like Copilot is looking at at any one time. Copilot does not understand the code in toto and is therefore really useless for debugging (70% of all coding) and probably useless for anything other than very simple parts of an app.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Any non trivial app requires an understanding of a much larger part of the codebase than a tool like Copilot is looking at at any one time. I don't think that's important. Copilot, at least as it's been demo'd so far judging by the examples, is to help you write small, standalone functions. It shouldn't need to know about the rest of the application. Just as the functions that you write yourself shouldn't need to know about the rest of the application either. If your functions need a broad understanding of the codebase as a whole how the heck do you write tests that don't fail the instant anything changes?
  - mimixco 5y ago
    The reality of code is that stuff breaks when connected to other stuff, as it eventually must be for real work to happen. There's no getting around that. Since that's where the work of programming is, debugging connected applications (not writing fresh, unencumbered code, a rare luxury), a tool that offers no help for that is, well, not much help.

petercooper 5y ago

While I accept most of the concerns, it's better than your comment suggests. I see some promise for it as a tool for reminding you of a technique or inspiring you to a different approach than you've seen before. For example, I wrote a comment along the lines of "Find the middle point of two 2D positions stored in x, y vectors" and it came up with two totally different approaches in Ruby - one of which I wouldn't have considered. I did some similar things with SQL, and some people might find huge value in it suggesting regexes, too, because so many devs forget the syntax and a reminder may be all it takes to get out of a jam. I'm getting old enough now to see where these sorts of prompts will be a game changer, especially when dabbling in languages I'm not very proficient in. For example, I barely know any Python, so I just created a simple list of numbers, wrote a "Sort the numbers into reverse order" comment, and it immediately gave me the right syntax that I'd otherwise have had to Google, taking much longer. Maybe to alleviate the concerns it could be sandboxed into a search engine or a separate app of its own rather than sitting constantly in my main editor - I would find that a fair compromise which would still provide value but require users to engage in more reflection as to what they're using (at least to a level that they would with using SO answers, say).

rob74 5y ago
Yeah, but... I mean, I guess we all agree that copying code from, let's say StackOverflow without checking if it really does what you want it to do is a bad thing? Now here we have a tool that basically automates that (except it's copying from GitHub, not StackOverflow), and that's supposed to be a good thing? Even if its AI is smarter, you would still have to check the code it suggests, and that can actually be harder than writing it yourself...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The big boost, that I think parent is alluding to, is for rusty (not Rust!) languages in the toolbox, where you may not have the standard library and syntax loaded into your working memory. As a nudge, it's a great idea. As a substitute for vigilance, it's a terrible idea. I suspect that's why they named it Copilot instead of Autopilot, but it's unfortunately more likely to be used as the latter, humans being humans.

vmception 5y ago

Hm odd takes here. It's really weird for software engineers to judge something by its current state and not by its potential state. To me, it's clearly solvable by Copilot filtering the input code by that repository's license. It should only be certain open source licenses, maybe even user-choosable, or code-creators can optionally sublicense their code to Copilot in a very permissable way. Secondly, a way for the crowd to code review suggestions would be a start.

slumdev 5y ago
> It's really weird for software engineers to judge something by its current state and not by its potential state. No, we're not afraid of Copilot replacing us. The thought is ridiculous, anyway. If it actually worked, we would be enabled to work in higher abstractions. We'd end up in even higher demand because the output of a single engineer would be so great that even small businesses would be able to afford us. Yes, we are afraid of Copilot making the entire industry worse, the same way that "low-code" and "no-code" solutions have enabled generations of novices to produce volumes of garbage that we eventually have to clean up.
- vmception 5y ago
  Sounds like projecting because thats not what I was referring to I’m saying copilot can be better with very simple tweaks
gpm 5y ago
Practically every open source license requires attribution, if copilot has a licensing issue, training a model on only repositories with the same license won't fix it except for the extremely rare licenses which do not require attribution.
- vmception 5y ago
  why not? it can just generate an attribution file or reminder

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

res0nat0r 5y ago

Isn't the entire point of this to suggest code you may use, not to just blindly accept is correct without thinking?