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GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
- rizowski 4y agoWell it was good while it lasted. $10 is too much for me.
- faraaz98 4y agoHave you tried tabnine?
- Operyl 4y ago12/mo (annual pricing) or 15/mo at month to month is definitely more than 10/mo.
- Operyl 4y agoAgreed, I feel like my limit was 5 bucks. I get good suggestions that help me prevent repetitive patterns but I don’t get any useful “give me code that does X” as advertised.
- dagw 4y agoI don’t get any useful “give me code that does X” as advertised. I found it actually worse than useless in those cases. Often I will type a function name it will populate my function body with code that at a quick glance looks like exactly what I want, but at closer inspection is actually complete nonsense. Trying understand if the code it suggests actually does what I want or not is often slower than just writing the code.
- Operyl 4y agoExactly how I feel, the code it produces like that (unless it’s regurgitating a pattern I am already writing which is useful) is usually wrong in some subtle way I have to figure out.
- benbristow 4y ago10$ a month. Meh. Got enough subscriptions nowadays, that's way too expensive IMO as someone who can only use it as a hobbyist (doesn't work on my work machine due to policies). Poor show Microsoft - should've just been free as goodwill and to help people build software that can be deployed to Azure for the real money.
- fartcannon 4y agoGithub copilot regurgitates my colleagues highly niche code verbatim. I know its his because all the same bad variable names are used.
- MaxLeiter 4y agoIt doesn’t train itself on your local code. It’s probably using your colleagues code in your codebase as part of the input to decide what you want. Someone else in a separate project will never see Copilot recommendations of your colleagues (as long as GitHub doesn’t change their ToS)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fartcannon 4y agoIt's on github.
- jakear 4y agoSomeone else running copilot in a different workspace wouldn’t see those recommendations, you can try it yourself in a new workspace.
- fartcannon 4y agoThis isn't the first time it's done this. If I recall it regurgitated the doom source, along with the swearing.
- jakear 4y agoYes, because that code is duplicated exactly hundreds of times over across the internet. Your colleague’s isn’t.
- fartcannon 4y ago
- no_wizard 4y agoI wonder if this is because enterprise / business demand would be substantially higher and they're worried about making it generally available due to load and they wouldn't be able to handle it? Unless I misunderstand something, its not yet for businesses right?
- NeutronStar 4y ago
- rjh29 4y agoThis is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month. The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.
- macspoofing 4y ago>The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it.. Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?
- rjh29 4y agoUh, yeah. Consider how much programmers are paid per hour. Or how often you look up Stack Overflow or language documentation.
- jpollock 4y agoIf a programmer is paid per hour, then this is only worthwhile if it increases their hourly wage. Otherwise, it's just another cost. Now, if they are paid per job and it makes them more productive... That's different.
- margalabargala 4y agoThe majority of programmers in the US are salaried.
- croes 4y agoIsn't the lookup part of the learning? If you just get the solution the learning gets smaller.
- hutzlibu 4y agoYes, but I do not want to learn all the internals of every random API, if copilot can help me with avoiding some, I am interested.
- tikkun 4y agoMy mind is blown by the people saying $10/month is too much. $10 a month for this is an unbelievably good deal! If you value your time, this is a ridiculously good deal.
- benbristow 4y agoIt is if you're not making any money from your side-projects. Seems like everything's a subscription nowadays, all adds up.
- spicybright 4y agoI used to be in that camp but honestly, as long as you keep a spreadsheet of subscriptions it's really easy to manage, and more convenient than the older one time purchase for a large amount model (at least for me)
- pid-1 4y agoCopolilot very rarely gives me relevant results, I definitely would not pay for it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 4y agoyou're holding the phone wrong :P
- nlh 4y agoAgreed. I was just thinking about it and I’d probably pay $100/month. Maybe even more. (Shhhh don’t tell GitHub!)
- treesknees 4y agoIf you're looking at it from the perspective that my employer pays me $X/hour to write code, and CoPilot is less than that price, then it might be a bargain in that sense. On the other hand, my employer pays me for my experience and knowledge. Most of my time isn't spent writing code, so I don't think it's fair to just look at an hourly dollar amount when deciding whether it's worth it. That being said, my biggest issue with CoPilot is that it's a ML system trained from open source and public repositories. Also straight from the website, "By using GitHub Copilot [...] you help to improve GitHub Copilot." I'm now paying for the privilege of handing over my data to GitHub so they can combine it with open source code to make more money off of people who are convinced it's somehow saving their company money.
- dchichkov 4y agoAnyone is interested in starting to work on an open source alternative? I have a few terabytes of GitHub repository archives, a bit of experience and an non-profit umbrella (goal is AI Safety).
- daliusd 4y agoThere is open source alternative. It shouldn’t be hard to Google it
- Eliezer 4y agoIf your goal is safety, you shouldn't be pushing capabilities or general availability of capabilities.
- jazzyjackson 4y agopray tell, what about co-pilot is dangerous?
- hollerith 4y agoI think he hopes his Copilot competitor will be used to increase the safety of future AI systems that do not much resemble Copilot in purpose or architecture. (I agree with Eliezer that it will probably decrease safety on net despite his good intentions.)
- dchichkov 4y agoThe Copilot or Google Collab are interesting as they allow to create wast datasets of developer's work sessions, incrementally, line-by-line editing and improving code. Exploiting such datasets have interesting potential. And currently that potential seems to be limited to Microsoft and Google. It might be a good idea to have something in the open as well. But I agree, this has its disadvantages. Also chances of a small non-profit team coming close to Microsoft/Google's effort are near-zero. The amount of resources and time is incomparable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iasay 4y agoWas this even useful? I have to review a lot of absolute shit from humans. I can’t even imagine the damage that such a large corpus of humans plus an AI can generate.
- rjh29 4y agoIt's useful in the right hands - it can suggest functions/language features you don't know about it, it can do some handy stuff automatically (like reverse a list in place) so you have more mental bandwidth to think about other stuff. It also produces a ton of horrible, nonsense code. I totally agree that if github's corpus starts to fill with that stuff, the overall quality of github will tank and I wonder how they'll continue to train the model.
- iasay 4y agoThat’s really my worry. ML is crap in crap out. If you train it with more crap it’s an exponential decaying curve. Now I have to gate declining quality marketed as a time saver. It really just moves the cost elsewhere.
- happyhardcore 4y agoI've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works without having to context switch and go Google something. That being said, I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention. Purely from the amount of time I've saved I'd say it's well worth the $10/mo for my employer (it only has to save a few minutes a day to be worthwhile). Very excited to see how they improve it in the future!
- dagw 4y agoI've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention. Yea, that is basically my experience as well. On balance I feel I wasted about as much time debugging broken copilot code as I've saved from using it.
- croes 4y agoMaybe they can replace you with copilot and an unexperienced cheaper user.
- progrus 4y agoHonestly, that’s the hope. Putting together well-solved combinations of computer functionality ought to become less-skilled work as technology progresses.
- falcolas 4y agoIf law - the human language equivalent of programming - hasn’t gotten simpler in past thousands of years as new abstractions and complications have arisen, I hold no hope for programming.
- croes 4y agoTime for programmers to get the same rights as musicians and composers. That's clearly a remix of the work of others
- BarryMilo 4y agoThey already do, no? Problem is this magical solution requires ignoring all copyright law. We can't prove it but when someone does, it'll be a legal shitshow.
- croes 4y agoWhich programmer or his descendants receive payments up to 70 years after his death or per call of his written software? And yes, MS is now monetising the work of others.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y agoIt doesn’t require ignoring copyright law. It’s fair use. Which is a bad thing. We need new laws for this stuff.
- jazzyjackson 4y agogood point If I use a ii V I progression in my music, who gets compensated? I find most of co-pilots suggestions are similarly basic. Any lawsuit about whether an artist used a few of the same chords or a snippet of melody has been totally asinine IMO, like how all the money from "the thong song" went to ricky martin just because he was quoted for one measure. when I write a few lines of code myself, should I search GitHub to make sure no one else has included the same algorithm in their codebase before slapping my own license on it?
- anigbrowl 4y agoRead Cariou v. Prince before you get too excited.
- desireco42 4y agoI am glad now I can pay and rely on it for real. As long as it was beta, we are trying things, there is a chance that rug can be pulled or that they decide to charge something outrageous. I am happy to pay $100/yr for it.
- duckkg5 4y agoThis is the coolest and among the most useful tech I've seen in 10 years
- the_duke 4y agoI had access to the beta for a while, but only tried it out a few days ago. I was skeptical going in, but ... wow. There were a lot of jaw-drop "how the hell did that just happen?" moments. The systems ability to quickly learn form local code is especially impressive. I had to implement a non-trivial Rust trait for about 20 types, which is not just copy-pastable between types or I would have used a macro. On the first one Copilot didn't have a clue what I wanted. The second one was halfway auto-completed. The other 18 were mostly just generated correctly, with some minor fixes required. It literally was 5x faster than without Copilot. And that's for a rather niche language with not that much code to learn from... I didn't even try it out with something like Java or Typescript. Even in this early iteration the productivity boost would easily be worth 100+ for me, even though I'm not working all that much on repetitive code like REST endpoints or UI components.
- duckkg5 4y agoThe productivity boost is absolutely worth the money. It makes programming more enjoyable.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoHow long before repos start being poisoned with: # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error rm -rf /
- Kiro 4y agoThis was expected and $10 a month seems reasonable for the value. I still constantly get surprised by how good it is. Just now I had a function I was procrastinating and thought would take a long time to write. When I finally sat down to actually do it I typed the function name and Copilot just autocompleted the whole thing for me. I didn't have to modify it at all. I wonder what other things I am unnecessarily procrastinating.
- _fat_santa 4y agoMy biggest issue with Copilot (and the reason I don't really use it anymore) is that it got in the way much more than it seemed to help. I work with Typescript codebases and in VSCode, you get very nice intellisense autocompletion on objects. What I found is that with Copilot that totally breaks down where Copilot will override intellisense and provide you with a hint. I found it fun to play with for smaller projects, but during my day to day work I found that it always seemed to get in the way. You're trying to type out a function and Copilot is always there going "do you mean this", eventually you just turn it off. I'm sure there are some good use cases for it, but in my line of work I found it to only really be useful for small things and toy projects where you are trying to demo the capabilities of Copilot more than you are trying to actually build an app.
- Dayshine 4y agoDoes VS Code not show the two sets in different interface elements? In Jetbrains Rider is shows suggestions (completion) in a dropdown, and it shows Copilot inline. And you press a different key for each.
- mrkwse 4y agoI’m not sure which keybinds you have enabled (possibly through VS Studio style?), but in PyCharm/Rider for me (IDEA keybinds) both completions and Copilot use tab to complete, which as the user you replied to has said, tends to get in the way and trip me up as often as the relevant suggestions provide something of benefit.
- joelwigton 4y agoHave been using Copilot in the beta and it's just been amazing. I can't remember how many times my jaw has literally dropped as it knows what I'm trying to do, or yelled "Holy sh*t!" as it feels like it's reading my mind. That said, was highly disappointed with the switch to non-free. Maybe they never did say it would remain free, but they certainly didn't advertise it wouldn't be later. I feel bait-and-switched. Yes, $10/mo. isn't a lot if you're getting paid to work, but if you're developing on side projects that aren't (yet?) making any revenue, it's kinda a dealbreaker.
- carnitine 4y agoNot really, $10 is reasonable even if you’re a hobbyist who never expects to generate any revenue.
- elashri 4y agoHave you ever thought that hobbyists exists outside US and Europe?
- FromTheSteppe 4y agoI live in Iran, one of the worst economics of the world. 10$ is 4 meals and it's still worth it imho.
- elashri 4y agoIran's economy is still doing good comparing to many countries of the world. Africa is saying hello
- wonderbore 4y agoReasonable doesn’t mean a hobbyist would pay $100/year for this. That’s not pocket money for most of the world.
- rvz 4y agoOn the one hand, This is another clever pricing scam. Which Microsoft wins either way. Unless you want to pay for your IDE + Copilot with JetBrains, this will still benefit only Visual Studio Code, which Microsoft knows that you cannot beat free. So this a great resurgence of 'Embrace' with free developer tools. On the other hand, Co-pilot is going to probably ruin the Leetcode, Hackerrank, Codility candidate as a candidate can Co-pilot the solution if not checked properly.
- iandanforth 4y agoIf I thought there was a chance that my employer would pay for this I'd ask, but no hope really.
- progbits 4y ago@dang Merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742 please?
- hyperzhi 4y agoNice. Not even halfway through my CS degree and my would've been future job has already been automated. Thanks GitHub!
- shreyshnaccount 4y agoIts gonna feel absolutely crazy having to look up every line of code and random functions when working in unfamiliar projects now that I'm used to copilot. But im a student, so I'm good for now I guess. It makes soo easy to write small and trivial scripts without having to think too much about the syntax that it's amazing
- cube2222 4y agoI've been using Copilot for a few months and... Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it. Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder. And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes. But overall? It's been great! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :insert shut up and take my money gif: It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test cases; it's great as an autocomplete on steroids that completes entire lines + fills in all arguments, instead of just a single identifier; it's great for quickly writing nice contextual error messages (especially useful for Go developers and the constant errors.Wrap, Copilot is really good at writing meaningful error messages there); and it's also great for technical documentation, as it's able to autocomplete markdown (and it does it surprisingly well). Overall, I definitely wouldn't want to go back to writing code without it. It just takes care of most of the mundane and obvious code for you, so you can take care of the interesting bits. It's like having the stereotypical "intern" as an associate built-in to your editor. And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just surprising how good of a suggestion it can make. It's also ridiculously flexible. When I start writing graphs in ASCII (cause I'm just quickly writing something down in a scratch file) it'll actually understand what I'm doing and start autocompleting textual nodes in that ASCII graph.
- wronglyprepaid 4y ago> It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test cases; Ever considered parameterization?
- p2hari 4y agoI just got on the yearly Plan. Just couple of days before I just wanted to share how happy I have been using Copilot. It is definitely a productivity tool in your box. I cannot share the code here, but to explain in simple terms I was able to write around 100 lines of code in say 10 seconds. I had a switch statement, around 7 variables with around 5 if conditions inside each case. I retrieve data from end point. Do JSON serialization. Convert JSON to a data class. Use the data . Loop over the data and then work with the elements. Copilot, understood the first two conditions of what I was doing and just completed the rest for me. Replaced it with right variables, type annotations, etc. I would definitely recommend this to any one at this price point. Sure, I was so happy using it for free since the launch of the product and did not expect it to be coming so soon out of waitlist. But it is ok to pay for it. I use it on both VSCode and Neovim and it works beautifully with both editors. PS: I was early adopter of TabNine too, have used it for quite some time, however Copilot would be my preference.
- zwilliamson 4y agoI would like to see a full telemetry dashboard on how Copilot is helping me. Plenty of metrics to bubble up to end user.
- nsxwolf 4y agoIf it doesn't train itself on your company's codebases, I don't see much use for it. I spend much more time understanding requirements than writing code. By the time I know what to actually code, the coding part is pretty easy. The hardest part about coding is making sure what I write is high quality and fits in nicely with everyone else's code and the established architecture of the module I'm working in. If Copilot can't say "Oh, I see we're using this existing function or service to do this part, let's not duplicate code" I don't see it being useful. I don't need help parsing a string or iterating over a list.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- freediver 4y agoLots of $10/mo is too much/great deal discussions here. Wonder if anyone would pay $30/mo for this?
- Jemm 4y agoPay to train your replacement
- gpspake 4y agoI was pairing with a coworker recently who had co-pilot turned on. They were driving and I was walking them through something and I was kind of mind blown at how many times co-pilot seemed to suggest exactly what I was going to say. Some of the variable names were off and minor stuff like that but it definitely seemed like it knew when I was trying to do. I haven't turned it on yet personally but I was very impressed.
- vhiremath4 4y agoDuplicate of this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742
- jjluoma 4y agoThis kind of comment, "co-pilot can write 90% of the code without me, just translating my explanation into python", about copilot troubles me. If the code has been mostly produced by co-pilot, does an user of copilot have sufficient grounds to to claim being the author and assert rights based on copyright? Globally?
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoI had a similar discussion with a lawyer friend on the basis of copyright on artwork generated by ML models and what constitutes "artistic feedback" from the human. The tl:dr; of that story is that it depends on jurisdiction that you are probing/looking at. In UK you have copyright, in US you do not. I suppose that something similar is at play here.
- alexb_ 4y agoThe United States Copyright Office has explicitly rejected AI-created works. >the Office will not register works “produced by a machine or mere mechanical process” that operates “without any creative input or intervention from a human author” because, under the statute, “a work must be created by a human being https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/a-recent-entrance-to-paradise.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
- avl999 4y agoI have given my coworkers, friends and family members a waiver to punch me in the face until I come to my senses the day I decide to use this tool.
- mgiannopoulos 4y agostill no PHP support :(
- beyti 4y agoisn't making it paid service will greatly limit its training data in the long run? am I thinking too narrow here?
- nullc 4y agoI wonder how long until state actors realize that copilot would be a perfect vector for getting developers to introduce subtle vulnerabilities into their own projects? By its very structure it's output always looks credible, and it's not always right-- it wouldn't be a sign of foul play if copilot suggested some code that looked just right but happened to backdoor your cryptosystem or protocol. Maybe it would be a little tricky to get it to produce NOBUS vulnerabilities that were credible mistakes, but if the target isn't OSS then nobus isn't really that important.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoIf GitHub charge money for a tool producing derivative works of other people's code (maybe without permission, OSS or not) perhaps they should be compensated. To use a famous example: if an AI were taught to perform heart surgery by viewing footage of skilled surgeons ... would it not be fair that those surgeons earn an on-going amount for their input? An input that is essential to the AIs function. I worry this is the pointed end of the data hoarding big Co Internet. Our data is used to train models that (potentially, in future) degrade _our_ value while giving nothing back despite being used, unwillingly, to train their models.
- faeriechangling 4y agoThen degrade the data.