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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 y

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
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- 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.
toss1 5y ago
Right, so it might occasionally be useful as a search tool for divergent ideas of different approaches to a problem, and your suggestion to sandbox it in a separate area works for that. But that does not seem to be it's advertised or configured purpose, sitting in your main editor.
mimixco 5y ago
This is good stuff. As a search engine, it could very well be useful. As another poster pointed out, if some context or explanation were provided along with the source suggestions, its utility as a reference would really grow. I totally agree with you that prompted help is a big deal and just going to get bigger. We have developed a language for fact checking called MSL that works exactly this way in practice -- suggesting multiple options rather than just inserting things. One of the things that interests me about this thread is the whole topic of UI vs. AI and how much help really comes from giving the user options (and a good UI to discover them) vs how much is "AI" or really intelligence. I think the intelligence has to belong to the user, but a computer can certainly sift through a bunch of code to find a search engine result and, those results could be better than you get now from Google &Co.
- osmarks 5y ago
  If they're using something like GPT-3 on the backend, which they probably are, it probably can't provide any explanations or context (unless the output is memorized training data, like this); the output can be somewhat novel code not from any particular source, and while it might be possible to find relevant information on similar code, this would be a hard problem too. EDIT: they appear to be interested in making it look for similar code, see here: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...

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
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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.

toss1 5y ago

Right, so it might occasionally be useful as a search tool for divergent ideas of different approaches to a problem, and your suggestion to sandbox it in a separate area works for that. But that does not seem to be it's advertised or configured purpose, sitting in your main editor.

mimixco 5y ago

This is good stuff. As a search engine, it could very well be useful. As another poster pointed out, if some context or explanation were provided along with the source suggestions, its utility as a reference would really grow. I totally agree with you that prompted help is a big deal and just going to get bigger. We have developed a language for fact checking called MSL that works exactly this way in practice -- suggesting multiple options rather than just inserting things. One of the things that interests me about this thread is the whole topic of UI vs. AI and how much help really comes from giving the user options (and a good UI to discover them) vs how much is "AI" or really intelligence. I think the intelligence has to belong to the user, but a computer can certainly sift through a bunch of code to find a search engine result and, those results could be better than you get now from Google &Co.

osmarks 5y ago
If they're using something like GPT-3 on the backend, which they probably are, it probably can't provide any explanations or context (unless the output is memorized training data, like this); the output can be somewhat novel code not from any particular source, and while it might be possible to find relevant information on similar code, this would be a hard problem too. EDIT: they appear to be interested in making it look for similar code, see here: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...