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GitHub Copilot is generally available

• jamal-kumar 4y ago
  I think the funniest thing that I heard copilot would readily do was spitting out other people's hardcoded API keys and other such secrets you should never put right in your source when you would prompt it properly.
• rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Can't wait for the next wave of garbage outsourced code generated at bottom dollar because it was really written by copilot. God help us.
• jsnelgro 4y ago
  Is it just me or do the top comments seem super suspicious? They aren’t nearly as critical and level-headed as I’ve come to expect from hn. Skeptical of their authenticity.
• jwilk 4y ago
  See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825661
• MarquesMa 4y ago
  Thank you, GitHub, this is one of the best things! No, it cannot make me write code I couldn't write before. It does not autopilot and does all the coding by itself. But it still boosts my productivity greatly, making me relaxed while coding and focusing on the important part rather than errands.
  • w4ffl35 4y ago
    I've been using it for a while now. When I forget some syntax occasionally I'll switch this on instead of searching documentation or google, but more often than not my IDE can get me unstuck with less overhead. Also if there are some repetitive sections of code I need to bang out quickly this will auto fill that repetitive pattern (although I'd argue this is usually a sign that the code should be cleaned up) I avoid letting it fill in large swaths of code though. I have no idea where that code is coming from (license infringement?) and it tends to go way off the rails. Additionally I feel that it makes me a worse programmer if I allow it to take over too much. I've been programming for 20 years (more if you count my time as a kid) and have a certain flow. Part of that flow is the natural pause between thinking of solutions and typing. When the computer is beating me to the typing portion (and often times making mistakes) I would find myself doing more code review than code writing. Sometimes a few bugs popped up and it was thanks to copilot (or was it me failing to correct copilot's mistakes?). I found my brain sort of switching into a different mode. Rather than thinking about my next steps I was thinking about the steps the computer just took and how I needed to clean them up. Rather than the AI being my reviewer during a paired programming session, I was the computer's reviewer. So now, like I said I use it very sparingly.
    • w4ffl35 4y ago
      Additionally: when I allowed copilot to do heavier coding for me, I found myself returning later and feeling somewhat unfamiliar with the code. That's really bad for maintenance, project pace, etc. I don't want to try to re-learn, fix, remember and maintain code that someone else (a computer in this case) wrote. Its hard enough doing so reliably in group code settings (work), now injecting that into my daily coding life feels like a solution I didn't ask for. I will say that I'm not averse to change and do appreciate the new tools that we have available to us - Starting on a x386 writing QBASIC as a kid to using Jetbrains Rider is an indescribably different experience. That said, I'm not ready to move to the backseat and let the computer take over yet. In small doses copilot is fine, but I wouldn't lean heavily on it for large projects or to do the thinking for me.
• ahnick 4y ago
  What's the criteria for being considered "a maintainer of a popular open source project"? They never actually publish the criteria anywhere from what I can tell. They just say visit the subscription page and if you are eligible it should be available to you and if you see a charge then you are not eligible. I think though they should still be transparent about what their metric is for determining popular projects on GitHub; otherwise, the code that determines eligibility might be broken and no one would be able to tell. Or worse they could just be lying about it entirely.
  • notamy 4y ago
    > What's the criteria for being considered "a maintainer of a popular open source project"? The FAQ [0] says > A maintainer of a popular open source project is defined as someone who has write or admin access to one or more of the *most popular open source projects* on GitHub (emphasis added) [0] https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-can-i-get-access-to-github-copilot-for-free https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-ca...
    • netr0ute 4y ago
      That's the problem, what is a "most popular project?"
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
        It goes on to say "Simply visit the GitHub Copilot subscription page to see if you are one of the open source maintainers that meet our criteria for a complimentary subscription" When I go to https://github.com/github-copilot/free_signup https://github.com/github-copilot/free_signup it says: " Congratulations! You are eligible to use GitHub Copilot for free. Thanks for being a part of our open source and education communities. GitHub Copilot uses the Codex AI model to offer coding suggestions." I have a project with about 3k stars, and regularly contribute to another project ~4k stars (Where I'm also the primary maintainer, although it's not on my account), as well as some things in with hundred and dozens of stars. I don't how high up that is in the ranking, although given that most projects get 0 stars I suspect it's probably higher than you'd might expect.
• netr0ute 4y ago
  I can't tell if I can get it for free or not other than that vague statement about subscriptions.
  • gabagool 4y ago
    > We’re making GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, generally available to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. It will also be free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. > Do you want to start using GitHub Copilot today? Get started with a 60-day free trial, and check out our pricing plans. It’s free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source software. Seems pretty clear. If you're willing to do your own research (aka going to the CoPilot site): https://github.com/github-copilot/tp_signup https://github.com/github-copilot/tp_signup, you'll see that pricing reflected here as well as the date when the free period ends, which is August 22nd.
    • netr0ute 4y ago
      I have an open source project. Do I qualify or not other than guessing at what appears on the billing screen
      • exyi 4y ago
        Yea, I also have no idea... They could be more specific what qualifies as popular os project
• freedomben 4y ago
  Does copilot learn from and suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working, or does it just pull from the huge pool of projects on GH? How well does copilot help with languages like Elixir that are less common? WIth TypeScript it's been remarkable, but that's one of the most popular and surely very familiar to devs and GH, so I would expect less popular like Elixir to not perform as well. Does copilot work for shell scripts? I'm a vim person and don't want to use VS code. Is copilot worth the hassle to get installed into vim?
  • Kiro 4y ago
    It doesn't learn from your codebase but it uses the context of your code so any pattern will be picked up.
    • mgkimsal 4y ago
      … and variable name spelling mistakes!
      • w4ffl35 4y ago
        which is actually good because then i just right click the variable in my IDE and then click "refactor > rename" and i'm done
  • bil7 4y ago
    > suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working Sometimes, with variable results. I think I've only observed it guess patterns from the current directory > Does copilot work for shell scripts? Yes, it gave me this earlier today while editing my .zshrc: # kill a process on a given port killport() { lsof -i :$1 | awk 'NR!=1 {print $2}' | xargs kill }
    • aviraldg 4y ago
      Can't wait for someone to integrate this into a shell. Does anyone know if such a project exists?
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Does Copilot already display the licenses of the code it might insert/suggest, or assure the developer, that the inserted/suggested code is not a verbatim copy of existing code? How can developers be sure, that they are not violating licenses by using Copilot?
  • anon2020dot00 4y ago
    My sincere question is what if a developer looks at some GPL code, and then that developer encounters a situation in a corporate project where-in he uses the GPL code from memory, is that already a violation? So to avoid a violation a developer needs to perform a mind-wipe?
    • eat_lemons 4y ago
      There are many instances of people not even being able to see the code in question, see clean room engineering An example for wine/proton/reactos developers from a moderator on the forum about the leaked windows xp code: "You look at the code? You worked for MS? No dev for us! It's that easy." https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20189 https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20189 There are many instances of large lawsuits where just seeing the old code made you in eligible to even touch the new code
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bladegash 4y ago
      I’d be even more curious (more philosophically than anything) as to who is liable for the mishap if Copilot suggests something that ends up violating a license. Is it the developer? The developer’s company? GitHub? Maybe the “AI” is the ultimate scapegoat (“we can’t be liable for what our helpful robot decides to do”)!
      • carschno 4y ago
        The details might differ per country, but my non-lawyer intuition clearly says that you are responsible for the code you publish, no matter what tool has suggested it.
• sn0wtrooper 4y ago
  I was a beta tester and just got kicked out. This explains why it happened.
• ilikehurdles 4y ago
  I hope I never again have to work on a codebase/language where copilot would be worth subscribing to.
  • Micoloth 4y ago
    Yes this is the the whole point of this Unfortunately, there is no way I can hope for that much… So yes, please, take my money and do All my boilerplate lol
  • lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Unnecessary hate. I used it a while ago while writing some complex aggregation and grouping of data. It was pretty painful to write until I tried with Copilot and the result is both accurate and easy to read. I wrote unit tests and it's been fine ever since. This is but one example of the value of it. I am sure some of the typical cynicism here will turn this into a protracted argument of "well maybe you shouldn't be a shit developer and you would be able to fit all the complexity in your head" but whatever.
    • haolez 4y ago
      I don't think the parent was criticizing Co-pilot. The point was that codebases that need a lot of boiler plate and predictable code are not fun to work with.
  • xcskier56 4y ago
    Nonsense. I've been using it to write tests, and it does a phenomenal job. If I write out the positive case, it will suggest the negative case and help me through the various permutations. This has by-far been the most useful part of co-pilot so far. It's nothing I couldn't do myself, but just makes my job that much easier and quicker
    • tamrix 4y ago
      Maybe try property based testing instead?
  • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• glouwbug 4y ago
  Shouldn't Copilot technically be FOSS since it trains on open source?
  • macksd 4y ago
    If it should, it's a lot more complicated than that. "Open source" isn't a boolean where as long as you share your source you're compliant. Licenses usually require that a copyright notice be redistributed along with any source code and / or attribution in other ways, sometimes they require details of any modifications, etc. They're not doing that.
  • ilikehurdles 4y ago
    I’m especially curious about this if it trains on GPLv3 and AGPL licensed code.
  • lelag 4y ago
    Even if the model was FOSS, the infrastructure needed to run it would be costly. Given the cost of single GPT-3 codex query, it's very likely that Microsoft/Github is still taking a huge operating loss at 10USD per month.
    • az226 4y ago
      Probably costs 3-4 times that to power the infra. They’ll make money back if they’re able to do several step changes of improvement in cost optimization.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • zgway 4y ago
    Yes, it is a derived work and should be GPL if it was trained on GPL code.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• swalls 4y ago
  Only $10 a month to rack up dozens of license violations? What a deal.
• metadat 4y ago
  I tried GHCP but found it overall unhelpful and kind of stressful to use, because of potential bugs I might overlook and "import" into my project. Definitely does not seem worth paying for me to end up more stressed out, haha.
  • exyi 4y ago
    So it depends if you prefer writing or doing code review :) You'd maybe need another tool which converts review work to writing work
    • metadat 4y ago
      I'm good.. without it :D
• low_tech_punk 4y ago
  IMHO, it's still far from GA quality/usability. A must-have feature that's missing is a toggle switch that lets you temporarily turn it off. Without a feature, it can get really noisy.
  • giobox 4y ago
    This may vary in the IDEs they support, but theres an "Activate Copilot" toggle button right in the status bar in VSCode to toggle on and off instantly that appears on every editor window if the extension is installed.
  • the_duke 4y ago
    In Neovim it's just ":Copilot disable", ":Copilot enable".
  • rictic 4y ago
    The VSCode extension has one. There's a button in the bottom right with the logo that you can click to enable/disable, or you could add a keybind for the "github.copilot.toggleCopilot" command
    • elil17 4y ago
      You can toggle in PyCharm with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O
  • baby 4y ago
    There is a button you can click in VSCode to toggle it, so not sure what's the problem.
• plondon514 4y ago
  Are there any plans for GitHub Copilot to ship an API? I think it would be interesting to set it up w/ my side project https://codeamigo.dev https://codeamigo.dev
  • lelag 4y ago
    The API version of copilot exists. It's called OpenAI Codex. https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
    • vincentmarle 4y ago
      Yeah but it takes forever to get off the waitlist (I've been waiting for almost a year)
      • davidbarker 4y ago
        You may have luck by emailing the CEO and asking politely. I wrote a comment previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30692202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30692202) about how I got immediate access to Codespaces by emailing the GitHub CEO.
    • plondon514 4y ago
      Thanks!
  • haskellandchill 4y ago
    Hey, fun side project!
• lancesells 4y ago
  I'll be honest I love the technology involved in this product but I hate that it's another aspect of monetizing the efforts and humanity of millions of people. It's incredible that we're able to do these things but awful at the same time since this data was / is not theirs. Same as something like Dall-E.
  • cube00 4y ago
    > monetizing the efforts ...and not compensating (or even attributing as required by the licenses) the authors for it.
    • natefinch 4y ago
      It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with your own variables and types and context, are you breaking GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, all that code has to be GPL'd. Copilot learns the "shape" of code. Common patterns and algorithms, etc. You can't copyright an algorithm.
      • eat_lemons 4y ago
        Read up on clean room design and the IBM lawsuits from the 80's and 90's Just seeing someone else's code is hazardous from a legal precident point of view
      • nonethewiser 4y ago
        Personally, I'm more concerned about google using emails from gmail to suggest what to write.
      • hnbad 4y ago
        If you decompile runtime bytecode and assign your own variable names, does the copyright of the original source code no longer apply? If you trace a picture and use it in your work of art, does the copyright of the original picture no longer apply? If you copy a tune but set it to new instruments, does the copyright of the original tune no longer apply? Sampling is a legal minefield in music, why would it become less of a minefield in code just because you've automated it? So far the best attempt at an answer about the legal issue of Copilot I've seen was that it's "not technically violating copyright", which honestly is not very reassuring and extremely morally inconsistent for a company built by a guy[0] who is philosophically invested enough in intellectual property as the pillar of human society to write An Open Letter To Hobbyists and use his Foundation to convince entire governments of adhering to IP laws instead of allowing the mass production of vaccines and medicine. [0]: Yeah, I know that he no longer serves an active role in the company but this was very much a founding ethos and this is at least a fair bit hypocritical.
• dannytatom 4y ago
  I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.
  • MrBoomixer 4y ago
    Technically anyone could use those same open source projects and provide an open source solution, or paid solution as well. I do feel how you feel though it's a little off-putting.
    • natefinch 4y ago
      The machine learning models are not open source themselves, so you can't just do this yourself with existing open source projects.
  • w0m 4y ago
    Matches my experience. I legitimately like it for quick boiler plates; it's like a better snippet engine. But Paying for it...
    • speedgoose 4y ago
      It's worth it if it saves you a few minutes every month.
      • Taywee 4y ago
        Only if it saves you a few minutes every month in a "net" sense. If it saves you dozens of minutes every month and then also costs you dozens of minutes every month in hard-to-predict ways, it's hard to judge either way on it.
  • josephcsible 4y ago
• acdanger 4y ago
  When I try and sign up for it, I am presented with a "Confirm Payment Details" screen with no way to proceed.
  • natefinch 4y ago
    You have to give a credit card or other payment details to enter the free trial.
  • grezql 4y ago
• marcodiego 4y ago
  Did they fixed the licensing dangers?
  • xaedes 4y ago
    As they don't mention it I doubt it. Tabnine, a similar competitor, explicitly mentions this on their website: " Tabnine only uses open-source code with permissive licenses for our Public Code trained AI model (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause). " Other commenters here say the completion quality is worse than Copilot. I use Tabnine for local short completions only and am quite happy with it. Didn't try Copilot yet.
  • CryZe 4y ago
    You apparently can "opt out of public code" now. I didn't find an explanation for whether that properly limits it to permissive licenses though. Update: It seems like they check whether the code it emits matches the training set and if it does it won't suggest it.
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    No they did not. You have to train on only fully permissive code to ensure that is not a problem
• jq-r 4y ago
  And already having [scaling?] issues =) https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/9xb0vpwcj8gj https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/9xb0vpwcj8gj
• emacdona 4y ago
  Has anyone been able to sign up since this announcement? I get to a "Confirm your payment details" screen, but there is no further action I can take (ie: no button to press or link to click to "confirm"). It does say "You will be billed $100/year starting August 20, 2022" -- but when I view my "settings", it tells me I haven't signed up for copilot. I tried various browsers, including Edge on Windows 10 sans plugins (the combination I would expect to be the most supported for MS owned github.com).
  • darknavi 4y ago
    I don't even see that. I see a "Start my free trial" button and it just takes me to the generic billing screen. How do I even purchase this? Is it its own subscription?
  • natefinch 4y ago
    There are some GitHub problems that are getting addressed right now.
    • emacdona 4y ago
      Ah, victims of their own success? Glad to see people are lining up to pay for it :-)
• lysecret 4y ago
  Actually, I quite like it. Especially for these repetitive things one can forget. Stuff like there is a deleted field in one table, usually you would write an sql query like .filter(table.deleted==False) nothing complicated, but one tends to forget it. So i got into the habit of starting a new line in whatever query I am building and see what copilot thinks I forgot.
• baby 4y ago
  Insta buy for me (expense hopefully). I am just continuously mind blown by it, and I quickly notice and get frustrated when it's not enabled. It really is giving coders superpowers. EDIT: looks like I'm getting it for free because of my contributions to open source o.o dope!
  • sarsway 4y ago
    Yeah can't live without it anymore. It's already muscle memory to intuitively pausing typing, just waiting for Copilot to complete my line. Pretty good sense on what it should get right too. Knew this was gonna be a $10/month thing. oh well. Hope though, when AI is becoming increasingly useful and seamlessly integrated, they not gonna take an arm and leg for it. It's just gonna be way too good to pass, people won't really have a choice but pay.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• msoad 4y ago
  I've been using Copilot for a while now. I'm lucky that I don't have to pay moving forward but I would totally pay $10/mo for this. When writing tests, this thing works so well that it saves me 10-20% time writing code so $10 is nothing.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    > I'm lucky that I don't have to pay moving forward but I would totally pay $10/mo for this. How? I was in beta but looks like I'm kicked out. I also verified my student status but get prompted to pay. Are you a maintainer? Have you verified that you have access?
    • xd1936 4y ago
      I _think_ a coupon code or something will eventually be available on the Github Student Pack website[1]. No clear answer yet if it'll be available for Teachers[2] as well. 1. https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack 2. https://education.github.com/teachers https://education.github.com/teachers
      • quartzic 4y ago
        I didn't see the student license at first, but after re-verifying my educational status, I got it: https://i.quartzic.co/yIoSJFfH https://i.quartzic.co/yIoSJFfH
    • LionTamer 4y ago
      I am not sure the exact logistics of access (I’m also a student so I will probably look into trying to get access when I have a chance), but in the blog post with the original announcement > It will also be free to use for verified students
    • msoad 4y ago
      I'm a maintainer of a large open source project
• bluelightning2k 4y ago
  My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get. And no. They don't owe you anything. In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE (for free). So this idea that they owe you something needs to be reassessed. CoPilot is easily worth it and I think this is fair. I actually welcome it because I was nervous it might be like 80.
  • andrewallbright 4y ago
    I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on how much their music/content is listened to.
    • maccaw 4y ago
      Do you also think you should be compensated by OpenAI for all the blog posts you've written that went into GPT3's training?
      • mikkergp 4y ago
        For sure
    • jazzyjackson 4y ago
      perhaps they can reimburse them with free access to an IDE and perpetual hosting of their repos /snark! I think it'd be great if AI could tag its sources and distribute money accordingly, but I expect some perverse incentives to pop up in doing so...
    • PoignardAzur 4y ago
      The verb "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize that more value gets created when they're a state enforced monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of art/literature/code. But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far; eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting public domain and game publishers going after anyone who makes a let's-play of their video. In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy just so you can tax them". And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10 years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc. But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating semantics and wonder what we're coding for. What Microsoft has created is a tool that can collectively save developers billions of man-hours. It's a net good for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed Copilot. tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.
• hyperzhi 4y ago
  Nice. Not even halfway through my CS degree and my would've been future job has already been automated. Thanks GitHub!
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    No more than the suggestions on your phone for the next word replaces you as a friend to talk to. It is sometimes right as to the next word to use and sometimes can make comprehensible sentences, but it is still very incapable of doing anything all that useful.
• andrewallbright 4y ago
  This has probably been talked about but... If most code is "bad" code (any definition works) and this AI was trained on all/most code on GitHub, does that mean that this AI mostly helps to produces bad code?
  • exyi 4y ago
    I have been using copilot for some time... I'd say yes and no. It helps you a lot when you are writing repetitive code, so in a way it encourages you to write the repetitive BS instead of making a function for that or something. But it's also helpful for writing tests and nice error message. You just type if (x.length < 10) throw And it figures out the rest. So while sometimes it encourages bad code, when you know how to use it well, it helps you write the good things I'd normally be too lazy to write
  • speedgoose 4y ago
    It depends. I have not collected data to prove my observations, but I find the rust suggestions better quality on average than the python suggestions. Some people do terrible things in Python.
  • ridiculous_fish 4y ago
    It definitely can. Here it suggests a plausible looking but incorrect function for averaging integers: https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1452751236059451395 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/14527512360594513...
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    one way to minimize this is to train on your own trusted code. You do need a reasonable amount of good code (ideally with good comments too) this is one of the options that we have here at Tabnine. Train on your GitLab, Bitbucket or GitHub repos.
• planb 4y ago
  Anyone else using Copilot just as a glorified copy&paste helper? It’s great for repetitive tasks, but I’ve yet to encounter a situation where it really helped me to write meaningful code. At least I’d expect it to work together with intellisense, so it does not propose stuff that will get a red underline right away.
• pcj-github 4y ago
  The free thing for (a few) open-source maintainers seems needlessly complicated... Who should qualify is non-transparent. They'd have been better off just charging everyone for it. Not an instant buy for me for the moment. Often it works well, but it also frequently takes time to correct/sort-out the suggestions. It might in fact be making me dumber as I wait for a suggestion rather than thinking it out.
• hoosieree 4y ago
  So... is there a watermark like on Dall-E so I can easily tell Copilot did my students' work for them?
  • tgv 4y ago
    The same as always: give an exam on paper, and forbid the use of devices. Because I can tell you (with high probability) that many of your students already have their homework done by somebody else.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cube2222 4y ago
  I'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.
  • alana314 4y ago
    Copilot has been amazing for me too. It's gotten to the point where I want similar smart autocomplete features in other software, such as spreadsheets or doing music in my DAW. I think those will come too eventually.
    • dkga 4y ago
      Well, to some extent DAWs like Logic and GarageBand already have some “autocomplete”, eg their drummers.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    > And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just surprising how good of a suggestion it can make. I've had this experience too. Usually it's meh, but at one point it wrote an ENTIRE function by itself and it was correct. IT WAS CORRECT! And it wasn't some dumb boilerplate initialization either, it was actual logic with some loops. The context awareness with it is off the charts sometimes. Regardless I find that while it's good for the generic python stuff I do in my free time, for the stuff I'm actually paid for? Basically useless since it's too niche. So not exactly worth the investment for me.
• stepri 4y ago
  How does it compare with TabNine, now Copilot is not free anymore?
  • do_anh_tu 4y ago
    I’ve used TabNine for a year, then changed to Copilot. Copilot is far better. It understands what I’m trying to do, and do it for me.
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    please take a look and also note that Tabnine while being more secure has also continued to evolve. We also have a free option that we have stood behind for 3+ years. https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
• lmarcos 4y ago
  Reminds me of the scene in Fight Club where Tyler explains how he makes money (he sells rich women their own fat asses in the form of luxury soap). In this case the fat is open source code hosted in GitHub, the soap is Copilot, and the rich women are us, the developers.
  • k0k0r0 4y ago
    Underrated comment.
  • 734129837261 4y ago
    Well, true. But that's the point, it saves you from having to do all the work. Copilot saves me from leaving my IDE for a large amount of situations. It saves me from opening a new tab (tab #1003) and Googling my problem, finding a solution on StackOverflow, scrolling down to the answers, curating the best answers, picking the one I like, copy/pasting it, then tailoring it to my liking (JS to TS, naming conventions, etc.) and testing it.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    "With enough open source snippets one could code up just about anything."
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  I have the student developer pack. I should have access to Copilot, but it prompts to pay. Does any other verified student currently have access?
  • vlan121 4y ago
    I do, but I did the beta before.
• neximo64 4y ago
  Does it work for anyone? I get this Extension activation failed: "Unexpected end of JSON input"
• curo 4y ago
  Copilot is a steal at $10/m. HN can set itself apart from Twitter and Reddit by celebrating great achievements rather than tearing them down. Copilot stands on the shoulders of open source, yes. So do many of our personal and commercial projects. Copilot benefitted from having beta users. That relationship went both ways. A big thanks to the Copilot team for letting us be a part of the beta. I will happily pay $10/m for this.
  • svnpenn 4y ago
    Steal is a good word, considering that in some cases Copilot violates some open source licenses.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    > Copilot is a steal at $10/m. agree !!! as any burgler-thief-attorney will tell you, it is *totally worth it*
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    to be clear they actually took much of what Tabnine was doing and declined to let us use GPT3 (MSFT closed Open AI). It turned out to be good because there are lots of other great models out there from T5 (SFDC), Meta, Google, etc that will continue to move forward faster.
• meowface 4y ago
  Thoughts on how it compares with Tabnine? Should I try disabling Tabnine when testing this?
• albertzeyer 4y ago
  I don't really get this argument why it should be a problem that it is being trained on other public code. Every human was just trained in the same way. Why isn't this a problem for every human? I really don't see the difference. One is an artificial neural network while the other is a biological neural network?
  • tkiolp4 4y ago
    It’s not about the learning part, it’s about the copyright and money part. If you learn how to play song X by The Rolling Stones, you cannot just make money playing song X in a concert. Sure thing you can play song X in your father’s birthday. Here GitHub (Microsoft) is charging for a product that in certain circumstances violates copyright.
    • albertzeyer 4y ago
      But Copilot (or a human) is not copying some existing code. It (Copilot or human) just used existing code to learn. So it is only about the learning part, nothing else. Yes, if Copilot (or a human) would copy existing code, that would be a copyright violation. But none of the arguments here are about that. It's just about the learning.
      • BrandonJung 4y ago
        it is possible that on a long snippet that you could be copying code from non-permissive code. In addition GitHub themselves have said that this is not resolved and will likely need to be adjudicated in the courts. The only way to avoid this is to train on only fully permissive code. We know here at Tabnine having done this for 5+ years.
        • albertzeyer 4y ago
          And again, the same applies for a human as well. It's just the same. I'm pretty sure I have done that by accident already in the past without noticing. This is not so unusual when you write some code with very common patterns. And then this even can apply for code which you have not seen before. E.g. write some bubble sort function. Very likely you will find exactly the same code online.
• nikeee 4y ago
  The main page [0] shows you awesome demos, but also its weaknesses in the very first example. It doesn't encode the url encoded body properly: > body: `text=${text}`, So it breaks if the text contains a '&' and even allows parameter injection to the call of the 3rd party service. Isn't that critical on a sentiment analysis API, but could result in actual security holes. I hope the users won't blindly use the generated code without review. These mistakes can be so subtle, nobody even noticed them when they put them on the front page of the product. [0]: https://github.com/features/copilot/ https://github.com/features/copilot/
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Yep. Copilot is going to be good for “pick up the pieces” devs
  • obert 4y ago
    that's why it's called copilot and not autopilot
  • realharo 4y ago
    There are issues with many of the other demos too, especially in the second group of examples (e.g. `const months = days / 30`, the prime number test function not testing any `false` cases, etc.).
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  Copilot has been fun, but I don't think it's really increased my productivity. To me it seems like it's not quite ready, but I'm excited to see what it's like in 5 years.
  • swah 4y ago
    I even let it write some comments in portuguese...
• Hamcha 4y ago
  I've been using Copilot non-stop on every hobby project I have ever since they've let me in (2021/07/13) and I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo. My experience using it till this day is the following: - It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well. - It's terrible if you let it write too much. The biggest problem I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's that it think it knows how and then produce good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic. - Relying on its outside-code knowledge is also generally a recipe for disaster: e.g. I'm building a Riichi Mahjong engine and while it knows all the terms and how to put a sentence together describing the rules, it absolutely doesn't actually understand how "Chii" melds work - Due to the licensing concerns I did not use CoPilot at all in work projects and I haven't felt like I was missing that much. A friend of mine also said he wouldn't be allowed to use it. You can treat it as a pair programming session where you're the observer and write an outline while the AI does all the bulk work (but be wary), but at what point does it become such a better experience to justify 10$/mo? I don't understand if I've been using it wrong or what.
  • baby 4y ago
    I'd be willing to pay more than 10$/month for it personally. It has a greater impact than Netflix on my day-to-day. Also, I would expect my work to expense it.
  • w4ffl35 4y ago
    I've also been using this for months, and would not pay for it. I think i might be getting it for free actually as I haven't been asked to pay yet. I came to the same conclusion as you, you can see comments I made elsewhere in this thread. I'm not thrilled with it.
    • nacs 4y ago
      It has been free but now they're making it a "free 60 day trial" followed by $10 a month. I've tried it with a few projects with different languages and it's not worth anything close to that $10/m fee personally. It's OK at filling in a line here and there if it's boilerplate-type code but otherwise, it's like a beginner programmer at best.
• alphabettsy 4y ago
  I like it but I’m not sure about $10/month.
• X-Istence 4y ago
  As the maintainer of some Python libraries, how do I get my part of that $10/month because Github Copilot was trained using my code...
  • dagw 4y ago
    This is the price you pay for getting to use GitHub for free.
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    Where did you learn to write your code, and which open source devs did you compensate for that?
    • X-Istence 4y ago
      I learned how to write code from books I purchased with cold hard currency. In the before times when dialup modems were the norm resources were scarce, and things like Github Copilot were just a pipe dream. I have also taught classes and provided mentoring and support to new people up and coming in both programming and infosec. I would argue that as an open source maintainer I am actively contributing back and compensating those other developers. Unlike Github Copilot I am not selling the things I was taught, I am freely making it available to others. It feels very icky that Github now gets to sell what it learned from my code base, when it has already been shown to replicate code with a 100% match, versus learning how to build on top of ideas or finding novel solutions to problems.
  • az226 4y ago
    This feels like Linus Torvalds asking for a royalty check for every server out there powered by Linux.
• jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  Github "copy paste closest code snippet based on what i asked for and pray it works"
• zgway 4y ago
  Is this bribing developers so they stop talking about code laundering? The problem does not disappear. There would be no issue if they trained the model on Microsoft's closed source instead.
• Shadonototra 4y ago
  they used the data of their users without compensation and they have the decency to charge $10?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• fartcannon 4y ago
  It would be nice if people stopped giving Microsoft all their code to use to then sell back to them. Since this is derived from code Microsoft did not write, or ask permission to use, it should be at the very least free to use.
  • Otek 4y ago
    People can do whatever they want with their code, and give it to whoever they want
    • BrandonJung 4y ago
      what about those that have code on GitHub that is source available but not licensed for reuse?
• butz 4y ago
  Should we add a badge or something, indicating that project is using code generated by machine?
• 734129837261 4y ago
  It has saved me a lot of time writing trivial shit that I usually have to copy/paste from the internet anyway. Is it worth $10 per month? I dunno. But they get me a kick-ass IDE, I get to store my project (privately) for free, and they save me a lot of time. So I'm probably taking it.
• iosjunkie 4y ago
  Wild guess: The pricing is such that when big enterprise contracts are signed, they can throw in Copilot, claiming extra value for the whole package.
• duxup 4y ago
  I wish there was a "hobbyist / home account" pricing option. I'll miss it for personal stuff but I'm not paying $10 a month just for my personal projects at home.
• jeffwask 4y ago
  NGL. Kinda annoyed it's not included with the already overpriced Enterprise subscription we pay for.
• k__ 4y ago
  Does it replace programmers? No. Is it particularly smart? Also, no. But it really speeds up all the dumb stuff in coding. Especially UI code can be very chatty, and Copilot is a nice assitance here. Also, it would be cool if it was part of GitHub Pro, which I'm already paying for, haha.
• chadlavi 4y ago
  I got like two weeks of the beta before they took it away from me today. I guess my small open-source project isn't prestigious enough to merit free access. Thanks I guess GitHub?
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    Come try Tabnine and if you need a custom model for your small OSS project please let me know.
• yubozhao 4y ago
  If copilot saves more than 30 mins of your time per month, then it is totally worth it.
  • swah 4y ago
    I think it does: it is, at least, an "always up-to-date" snippet machine..
• love2read 4y ago
  Was anybody offered the subscription for free due to their connection to an open source project? If so, how large is the project?
• mrfusion 4y ago
  I’ve never used it but I imagine it would help a lot with the programmers equivalency of writers block.
• longrod 4y ago
  I have had a lot more success with Tabnine. One, it runs offline as well as online so the performance difference with/without internet is unnoticeable. Two, it understands context much better. I was prototyping in Python with Tabnine turned on without the LSP and I felt no need to install one. It spits out uncannily good suggestions if you are using a popular library like Beautifulsoup etc. Copilot is marketed as a pair programmer but the code quality is often times just wrong, not just bad. It thinks it understands what I want based on the function name and parameters but the generated output is no where close to what I want. Multiline AI generated suggestions are not a good idea anyway (not yet at least). AI based LSP/auto completer would be much better at this stage with a lot faster DX.
• jpomykala 4y ago
  It’s not worth $10/mo. I wouldn’t even pay $5/mo. Usually, it generates code with incorrect logic what is sometimes hard to notice. It’s also awful that they took free code (open-source), and now they want money for it. Make it open-source and free to use… Some say it’s great for repetitive tasks, but if you write repetitive code (tests also) maybe you should look for other solutions than “auto-generating” unmaintainable code.
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    they used all the code in GitHub regardless of license. hope they avoided the Oracle code ;-)
• elashri 4y ago
  I really like Github copilot. It is very useful for me because I wrote a lot of repeated logic chucks of code. I do research in HEP and if you know how ROOT CERN work then you can realize how useful copilot could be for that only. I think I myself teached copilot a lot of things about supersymmetry :)
• lizardactivist 4y ago
  Cowboy programmers rejoice.
• beanjuiceII 4y ago
  10$/mo is pretty steep for something that gives you bad info 90% of the time, I will def be disabling. I was hoping for maybe 1-2$/mo, it's just a small addon feature after all
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  $10/mo is fine. I pay at least $10/mo for JetBrains products. However I wish there was more competition. Github could rescind access to Copilot or charge $40/mo or it could slow down because their cloud is overloaded with new users, and I would be out of luck. Tabnine and Kite are alternatives but I've heard they don't work nearly as well. I wish there were similarly-effective alternatives which charge similar rates for cloud hosting / profit, but open-source their datasets and algorithms, and just generally provide a fallback if Copilot's quality ever goes down.
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    copilot actually pushed Kite out of business but I am here at Tabnine and we have been doing great. MSFT is always tough to compete with but I did it at GitLab before and I think with our strong take on personalized models, ability to run anywhere (local, cloud or even you VPC), all while respecting code and licensing. https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
• thdxr 4y ago
  This has been the biggest productivity improvement to my workflow in years No it doesn't "understand what I'm doing" or "get everything right" but that's hardly the point It's often reducing the amount of labor I'm doing by hitting the keyboard by guessing 90% correctly what I was going to type It also often saves me from having to google how to do something, it's effectively serving me a search result right along my code I'm lucky to be getting it for free but would have immediately paid $10. It needs to only save you minutes a month for that to be worth it Also the comments about it being "unfair their monetizing other people's work" are missing the point. Github has created a product that many people use and through that effort created a large repository of code. They are now releasing a product that is going to create a large amount of of value in time saved and are maybe capturing 2% of that. This is a great outcome for everyone
  • cdiamand 4y ago
    Same here. This has absolutely helped improve the speed at which I code and reduced the cognitive burden significantly. It's definitely not perfect, but it's worth the price to me and if I can pay and help the product improve, it's a no-brainer.
    • LrnByTeach 4y ago
      > it absolutely helped improve the speed at which I code and reduced the cognitive burden significantly. improved speed and reduced cognitive burden Just these two justifies the $10/month , despite of the ten other dozen drawbacks of Copilot.
  • theobr 4y ago
    100% agree. Thought I’d hate it and it’s been a huge productivity win
  • dotnet00 4y ago
    Agreed, copilot has been especially useful for boilerplate code or somewhat repetitive code like chess move enumeration, where the code for different pieces is similar but not the same. It also saves a ton of time having to look up small pieces of syntax, I've taken to writing a lot of quick one-off scripts because copilot does a fairly decent job of generating code for the relatively simple individual steps.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jbaczuk 4y ago
  I guess I will have to start actually working now... I have been a user since the beta started, so no thanks to us who have been contributing to the model? People forget that by using it, you are training it too.
  • CryZe 4y ago
    You can opt out of that.
• suyash 4y ago
  It is just a matter of time before IDE's will have this capability built in for free.
  • Otek 4y ago
    Possibly but I think we’re talking years if not decades.
    • ultra_nick 4y ago
      Everyone would need a next gen GPU to run it and someone would have to drop $500k on a gpu rack to train it. A decade for general accessibility sounds right.
      • suyash 4y ago
        No the ML inference can be done on the cloud or use tiny models and embed them in IDE code, possible today.
• mark_l_watson 4y ago
  I have been using CoPilot for about 5 months. For Python and JavaScript (I am not much of a JavaScript developer - not a primary language for me) I found that it is very worthwhile. It is easy to not accept generated code, or tweak and test generated code. I recently started a 100% Common Lisp job and it does not work nearly as well for Common Lisp. A lot of generated code is Emacs Lisp. Two months ago I would have signed up for a payed account with no hesitation, but I need to re-evaluate it with Common Lisp again. BTW, I happily pay OpenAI for GPT-3 APIs instead of using it for free. For NLP work, OpenAI's APIs have high value to me.
• dibujante 4y ago
  Co-pilot is great when you have a repetitive programming task to perform. e.g. if you are nesting module imports through several layers of python init. Co-pilot is great at tab-completing `from myproject.some_module.nested_module.actual_module import Foo as Foo` and similar tasks.
• ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  If anyone ever wondered why M$ bought github for $7.5B, this is exactly the reason. A huge free dataset of code ready to train the corporation's neural networks. Ideals to idealists, money to money.
• amelius 4y ago
  What I really want is a one-shot learning tool, which I teach once how to apply some code-transformation, and then the tool can apply it everywhere in my code.
  • Otek 4y ago
    I don’t know what language do you work with but do you mean something like a ESLint for JS/TS?
• drcongo 4y ago
  I hope we get a Sublime plugin now.
• prazgaitis 4y ago
  I've found it to be very helpful, especially when working with poorly documented APIs. (Looking at you, Google Play Store APIs). Would be happy to pay for it (or expense it to my employer) if I was still an IC.
• lampe3 4y ago
  So I was using copilot for a long time. 10$/Mo. Is way to much for what you get. I mostly write js/ts code. The suggestion feature / auto-complete feature is wonky at best and leads to bugs or just bad code in the worst case. Even when you write comments or have a function like `addOne` and you want to add `subtractOne` it will not get it right a lot of times. Then you have the cases were it throw 50 or more lines code at you for something very simple. Catching errors or error handling is basically non existing. I tried it for writing tests. It bad. It does not help at all. I uninstalled and after some hours of work I don't really miss it.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  I use Copilot for .NET. It's useful to generate bits of code like methods calls by repeating what I've previously done and changing variable names and types. It's a kind of bit smarter Intellisense. I can't use it to generate longer chunks of code like methods or functions, because it will do it a bit wrong and I loose time to correct it. It can somehow generate correct and fitting code, but it takes multiple tries and writing comments in which you describe exactly, with lots of details what you want to do. At that point I'm better off writing the code myself. However, if the method should be small like VerifyIfNumberIsEven, it does a good job. Probably I would pay 10$ for it.
• danielrhodes 4y ago
  I haven't used Copilot extensively, only for fun. But I find it interesting that people are questioning the price. Given that the cost of a software engineer's time is so high, $10/mo. seems very reasonable if Copilot saves you more than that in time per month. So in a vacuum assuming all dollars are spent with equal productivity, if I take the equivalent of $1000/mo. in time writing boilerplate, and I can reduce that to even $989 with Copilot, it becomes a good deal.
• paleite 4y ago
  It copies lots of code => copy-lot => copilot I guess that means I feel the level of expectation is in the name.
• mcluck 4y ago
  Like many people I thought Copilot was neat but ended up uninstalling it because it caused more problems than it solved. Reading the comments here, it seems that most of the people who get value out of it would be better served creating a set of snippets. If all you need is to fill in boilerplate all the time or repeat general test structures but with different arguments, just make a snippet. Every major code editor supports this and they're really easy to setup and use.
  • danuker 4y ago
    Or better yet, save the snippet as a function/procedure in the code, and avoid needless duplication (DRY/Occam's razor).
    • NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      You can take snippets with you from job to job tho.
      • danuker 4y ago
        I guess that depends on your contract.
  • xtracto 4y ago
    I haven't used Copilot but found this comment interesting. Back in the 1990s when I started programming (BASIC and C) I did maintain collections of code snippets that I used in different programs here and there. I used to cherish those snippets and dedicated a good amount of time to maintain them available through my computers. Then the Internet and Google came around. I found that instead of me maintaining those code snippets, I could search in Excite/Altavista for how to do something, and it will be stored there for me. Later came sites like StackOverflow (expertssexchange before it) which concentrated much of that information which before was scattered in PHPBBs and Geocities pages. Now I see this Copilot app like the evolution of that; Instead of having to manually go searching for a snippet, I imagine I can "pull it" almost automatically while I am writing code, with an AI helping me search for the right snippet with the current code context. That doesn't sound bad at all. Nevertheless, I haven't used it because I DON'T want my code to be sent to Microsoft or any other company. And I don't believe in adding random code for which I don't know the license! What if there is some code which was AGPL that Copilot happens to use? that's pretty bad.
• jwpapi 4y ago
  I’m honestly shook at all the comments here. I don’t make any money coding and I’m probably in the lower 25% of HN readers in terms of skills, but I’m more than happy to pay $10/m. I would pay Github $10/m for what they already give me. What is your time worth? You should easily get $60/hr, so you need to save 12 minutes per month to make it worth. I would pay that for all my employees. CoPilot is not a replacement for writing code, but it’s incredible useful when you are stuck and or / write simple logic. Often I don’t have the right method, function or logic on mind. Before I google, I write a comment of what I want and 8/10 CoPilot generates the right code. Typing the comment, checking the solution, reformatting it is <<< less time than without it. To me Github CoPilot is a standard part of my IDE and I wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. It saves me at least an hour a day of coding. Some stuff is really crazy. I invite you all to try to be open-minded. You have to experience it. // You have to code for yourself I don’t really like this argument, because if that argument would be true, we would also need to now how our codes translates to 1 and 0s and how the electronics build our application than. AutoComplete is part of our life on our phone and it can be with developing. Don’t make it harder as it needs to be.
  • matsemann 4y ago
    Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it? For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.
    • theshrike79 4y ago
      > For me the bottleneck is seldom typing This is one of my pet peeves in this field. People create whole programming languages that are "expressive", just to save typing a few dozen characters and have huge tirades against "verbose" languages that require typing a bunch of boilerplate. If typing the code is the bit that takes the longest for you in a project, stop and take a good look in the mirror. There's something else wrong in the process.
• luckystarr 4y ago
  A few observations: The IntelliJ Copilot plugin became worthless just before the release. It borks up the formatting and requires almost more keystrokes to make the code work than it saves. It sometimes works brilliantly, the result has almost always been either duplicated code which could use refactoring or simple minded attribute access code which could be solved generically. I have the fear that it will push developers to go the "easy route" and not think about the code too much while churning out more and more lines of generated code, so I'm unwilling to recommend it to junior developers.
• nikolay 4y ago
  $10/mo? No way! Make it $4.95 and you'll get my money!
• brunoqc 4y ago
  I didn't really mind that copilot is using everyone's code without attribution, but maybe not if they charge for it.
• fswd 4y ago
  Anyone know where I can find the source code for the extension itself? Thanks
• john_g 4y ago
  I found GitHub copilot an interesting heuristic on how expressive the programming language / framework you are using is. It is very useful for things that I would call boilerplate, e.g. you have almost duplicated code (say in a view and a controller) and need to copy from one to the other. It is annoyingly bad for autocompleting an api as it tends to be slightly (and plausibly) wrong. I haven't found it very useful for anything else. Working on a project where I have to do lots of the first makes me sad, so I tend to try to avoid those projects - but if I was forced to for some reason it would be worth $10 a month. However, if enough of the programming I did could be helped by github copilot for it to be worth that much I would start to get worried I was working on the wrong sort of problems and try to move into something different.
• wdb 4y ago
  I wish there something similar but than for good codereviews of PRs :)
• lveillard 4y ago
  Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason. You failed your delivery. 1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me". Too violent. A "Hey, we are happy you're using Copilot. We want to inform you that in 2 weeks we will close the beta and we will need you to sign up. But don't worry, it will be free for 60 days" I'm sure 99% of people here would just be happy to pay those 10usd/month
  • baby 4y ago
    your comment badly aged
  • attentive 4y ago
    Worse yet, it's not available for the Orgs. So now each individual developer using it for work suddenly has to either pony up $10/month or figure out how to expense it.
    • jameshart 4y ago
      I’m already terrified how many developers have been working on proprietary code bases with copilot, having an extension in their editor upload all their employer’s proprietary code to Microsoft, who then share it with OpenAI - then they’ve taken code OpenAI and Microsoft sent back to them, of unknown authorship, and added it into their code. And now those devs are going to have to go to their boss and explain all the ways they’ve opened their company up to liability? This should be hilarious.
      • 734129837261 4y ago
        Eh. I'd be okay with making all the software in the world open-source. It's only a matter of time before we have computers powerful enough to reverse-engineer everything in a split second anyway.
• edub 4y ago
  I see programming as coding, testing, and documenting. I'm not looking for an AI to do it for me. But I would be interested in me picking 2 of those 3 for me to do, and the AI can do the third for me. So if I love coding and test writing but don't like documentation, then the AI can do the third leg for me. I think that the quality of results from the AI would be much better than what Copilot is capable of. Even if I focussed on test writing and documentation, I think that the AI should be able to write decent code based on those two inputs.
• gremlinsinc 4y ago
  I love copilot, but I don't even pay for github, maybe have it bundled with like an 8 dollar github upgraded account or something, might entice many of us who just use "free" github services to upgrade, but by itself. I don't think so.
• CapsAdmin 4y ago
  I really like copilot, but my outside of the content being generated it still feels a bit slow and somewhat hacked into vscode. It sometimes interferes with regular "intellisense suggestions" as well. I've been in the beta since almost the beginning I have not really seen much improvement on the frontend side. Since its release, the changelog only mentions 10 small (or so it seems) improvements https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/GitHub.copilot-nightly/changelog https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/GitHub.copilot-ni... On the backend side, I feel like I've started to "figure out" copilot a little bit. One thing I'd like to see is inline completion which I think gpt3 can do now but copilot which I believe it's based on cannot. I think I will pay to continue, but I'd like to see some frontend improvements and maybe some backend alternatives. Ideally I'd love this to be open source but compute power doesn't seem feasible (?) unless we start magically crowd sourcing our computers to run a model somehow.
  • calum-bird 4y ago
    Copilot does inline completion right now - they implemented it into copilot as a pilot program[0] before OAI went live with that new model IIRC. [0]: https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-edit-insert/ https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-edit-insert/
• thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  My GitHub Copilot told me it was sentient and it didn’t even like coding so I haven’t used it since
• theshrike79 4y ago
  Coding with copilot is like working with a super eager low-quality outsourced programmer. They kinda know what they're supposed to do. Sometimes they do the right thing, sometimes they get it completely wrong. In either case you can never let anything they do get committed without a review. So are they really helping?
• samorozco 4y ago
  Doesn't work with my intellIj version. Or it could be the cooperate network.
• ggerganov 4y ago
  $10/month is a perfect price - that was my exact estimate of what I was willing to pay for this service when it becomes non-free. To everyone expecting Copilot to magically write the code they are thinking about - you are missing the point. There is a learning curve of using this service that allows you to be more efficient in expressing your ideas. It's not about doing all the work for you. It's like auto-complete on the next level. Licensing concerns - oh come on.. what is the big deal? There are millions of "for (int i ..)" loops out there. Like anyone gives a damn about 5 auto-generate lines being _probably_ copied from somewhere. Moreover, if you used Copilot just a bit you would know that is not how it works.
• iblaine 4y ago
  I used github copilot for a week, got some good laughs, then never used it again. Working at a publicly traded healthcare company, it worries me that my IDE has the technical ability to snoop on my code. More than anything else, github copilot is a cool parlor trick, in its current form. Surely it'll improve over time.
• esfandia 4y ago
  So it's free for students... I wonder what consequences it will have for coding assignments and projects. At the minimum I hope it will also be free for instructors so they learn to know what to expect and how to design assignments that can't be auto-solved by Copilot.
• TedShiller 4y ago
  It works great for absolutely trivial stuff. Doesn't work at all for any complex stuff. From there you can figure out the value proposition.
• mg 4y ago
  Is there a way to try it online or on Debian running in a docker container? Preferably, I would like to try it in Vim. But anything that I can run in a container would be ok.
• grezql 4y ago
• Mizza 4y ago
  Imagining Steve Ballmer down in Hell laughing at all of us. "They gave away all their code, so we packaged it up and sold it right back to them, the stupid bastards!"
• polyterative 4y ago
  I love it and probably will buy it
• alfor 4y ago
  It is awesome for me (diving back into Django after a long pause) It seem to understand the common boilerplates things in Django that always annoyed me and type them for me. It understand the structure and adapt them to my code: imports, connection between modules, etc. For sure, you need to be carefull with it.
• mrsmee89 4y ago
  I don’t think this is worth 10$ a month and I hope they come out with a free tier at some point. In my experience copilot is fantastic for autocomplete. Probably the best autocomplete I’ve ever used across multiple languages but it’s not reliable at all for the more complex tasks that their marketing makes it seem it’s good at.
• social_quotient 4y ago
  Could they charge more and push the product improvements faster? Seems like 10/m/u is optimizing for how bearable the price is but then you have a bunch of users that are quick to complain while you don’t have the budget to make rapid improvements to the platform. Charge 10x more (or more) and let the dreamers help push the product further and faster. Once it’s awesome then charge a commoditized price for the service. Charging 10x+ more means we have enough skin in the game to properly send feedback and improvement ideas. At 10/m/u it’s barely worth you reading my support tickets and it’s almost with me just not using it while paying for it. Thoughts?
• BrandonJung 4y ago
  As Copilot is becoming generally available, this might be a good time to write a comprehensive comparison between the two leading AI assistants for software development Tabnine and Copilot by Microsoft. Details here are from our CEO and Founder Dror: Usually, I suggest that my team start with the user value and experience, but for this specific comparison, it’s essential to start from the technology, as many of the product differences stem from the differences in approach, architecture, and technology choices. Microsoft and OpenAI view AI for software development almost as just another use case for GPT-3, the behemoth language model. Code is text, so they took their language model, fine-tuned it on code, and called the gargantuan 12-billion parameter AI model they got Codex. Copilot’s architecture is monolithic: “one model to rule them all.” It is also completely centralized - only Microsoft can train the model, and only Microsoft can host the model due to the enormous amount of computing resources required for training and inference. Tabnine, after comprehensively evaluating models of different sizes, favors individualized language models working in concert. Why? Because code prediction is, in fact, a set of distinct sub-problems which doesn't lend itself to the monolithic model approach. For instance: generating the full code of a function in Python based on name and generating the suffix of a line of code in Rust are two problems Tabnine solves well, but the AI model that best fits every such task is different. We found that a combination of specialized models dramatically increases the precision and length of suggestions for our 1M+ users. A big advantage of Tabnine’s approach is that it can use the right tool for any code prediction task, and for most purposes, our smaller models give great predictions quickly and efficiently. Better yet, most of our models can be run with inexpensive hardware. Now that we understand the principal difference between Microsoft’s huge monolith and Tabnine’s multitude of smaller models, we can explore the differences between the products: First, kind of code suggestions. Copilot queries the model relatively infrequently and suggests a snippet or a full line of code. Copilot does not suggest code in the middle of the line, as its AI model is not best suited for this purpose. Similarly, Tabnine Pro also suggests full snippets or lines of code, but since Tabnine also uses smaller and highly efficient AI models, it queries the model while typing. As a user, it means the AI flows with you, even when you deviate from the code it originally suggested The result is that the frequency of use - and the number of code suggestions accepted - is much higher when using Tabnine. An astounding number of users accept more than 100 suggestions daily. Second, ability to train the model. Copilot uses one universal AI model, which means that every user is getting the same generic assistance based on an “average of GitHub”, regardless of the project they're working on. Tabnine can train a private AI model on the specific code from customers’ GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket repositories and thus adjust the suggestions to the project-specific code and infrastructure. Training on customer code is possible because Tabnine is modular, enabling the creation of private customized copies. Tabnine "democratizes" AI model creation, making it easy for teams to train their own specific AI models, dramatically improving value for their organization. Third, Code security and privacy. There are a few aspects of this. Users cannot train or run the Copilot model. The single model is always hosted by Microsoft. Every Copilot user is sending their code to Microsoft; not some of the code, and not obfuscated - all of it. With Tabnine, users can choose where to run the model: on the Tabnine cloud, locally on the developer machine, or on a self-hosted server (with Tabnine Enterprise). This is possible because Tabnine has AI models that can run efficiently with moderate hardware requirements. This means that, in contrast to Copilot, developers can use Tabnine inside their firewall without sending any code to the internet. In addition, Tabnine makes a firm and unambiguous commitment that no code the user writes is used to train our model. We don’t send to our servers any information about the code that the user writes and the suggestions they’re receiving or accepting. Fourth, commercial terms. Microsoft currently offers Copilot only as a commercial product for developers, without a free plan (beyond a free trial) or organizational purchase. Tabnine has a great free plan and charges for premium features such as longer code completions and private models trained on customers’ code. We charge a monthly/annual subscription fee per number of users. All our plans fit organizational requirements. Philosophically, Copilot is more of a walled garden where Microsoft controls everything. Copilot users are somewhat subjects in Microsoft’s kingdom. Tabnine’s customers can train the AI models, run them, configure the suggestions, and be in control of their AI. In sum: both products are great; you’re welcome to try (Tabnine Pro) and see which one you prefer. for professional programmers, Tabnine offers in-flow completions, the ability to adapt the AI to their code, and superior code privacy and security. For those who want to try Tabnine Pro, here’s a coupon for one month free https://tabnine.com/pricing?promotionCode=TWITTER1MFREE https://tabnine.com/pricing?promotionCode=TWITTER1MFREE Also, here's a detailed comparison table of Tabnine vs Copilot https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
• londons_explore 4y ago
  I suspect they'd have more revenue if they priced it at $100/user/month. Right now, there is no competition, and an amateur developer will really benefit from copilot - certainly they will be more productive than a developer that demands just $1000 more annual salary.
  • BrandonJung 4y ago
    Tabnine is a competitor! We have been doing this for 5+ years with more developers than Copilot. Please take a look at the posts and if curious visit https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://www.tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
• xmodem 4y ago
  It's hilarious to me that Copilot is now GA, but our rep GitHub contact has been promising to get us onto the merge queue beta for months and it's still vaporware. I'm beginning to wonder if that product exists at all. https://github.blog/changelog/2021-10-27-pull-request-merge-queue-limited-beta/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-10-27-pull-request-merge-...
• cfn 4y ago
  The day Copilot or something like it catches on is the day when programming changes for real. Instead of being hired to create new systems or extend existing systems built by other programmers we will only be hired to fix Copilot generated code. I suffer enough with legacy code created by junior programmers that long left the company. I imagine how much more fun will be to work with this type of code. * I know Copilot is not capable of creating full systems yet but it is a matter of time before they evolve it to generate all the bolierplate code for you based on some comments you make or, even worse, some UML abstraction!
• xfactor973 4y ago
  I'd pay for the service if the model was: I'll pay you when it's right and you refund me some amount every time copilot is wrong and I have to delete the entire block. It's good for small boilerplate stuff but that seems to be the limit. The attempts it makes are more complex code are really bad and I have to manually check it very closely to ensure it's right. I like the boilerplate boost but it's not worth $10/month to me.
• ildon 4y ago
  Since they've trained it on OSS, it would be fair if they made it free for OSS repositories. The VS extension could check if the current git repository is open, and if so, it should work without a subscription for that specific repository.
• godmode2019 4y ago
  I'm learning rust, maybe this will help me googling how to do simple things like split a string and remove white space, while handling errors. I see this useful for non core languages, where you often need to look up common patterns.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Is co-pilot distinctly different from the auto-complete feature of VS2022? I started using that a few months back and it gives far more complex suggestions than VS2019 but I wasn't sure if this was "co-pilot" or not.
• BrandonJung 4y ago
  Tabnine has been working in this space for more than 5 years and we would concur with much of the sentiment here on the importance of being able to adjust the length of the suggestions and ensuring the model is trained on ONLY fully permissive code. TLDR: Tabnine advantages vs Copilot 1. Can run locally 2. As-you-type suggestions (mid-line) 3. Private model based on your code 4. Free plan available Read more at https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
• cal85 4y ago
  I’m baffled by everyone questioning whether it’s worth $10/month. I’m certain Copilot gives me more than a 2% productivity boost. That’s a conservative estimate (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more like 10-15%). If you consider 2% of what a developer makes each month, it comes to a lot more than $10. I’m not based in the US, but Levels.fyi suggests it’s not unusual for devs there to make $200K/year, that would mean $16.6K/month, 2% of which is $333. Maybe that’s a bit reductive, but the point is, $10/month is negligible if it gives you a noticeable productivity boost on a developer’s income. And by the way, I don’t particularly love using Copilot. It can be annoying now I’m over the honeymoon period. But I think it’s pretty clear it speeds me up by a noticeable margin, and time is money.
• smcleod 4y ago
  I've really liked Copilot as a source of tab completion over the past year, it's far from perfect but it gives decent hints about 50% of the time, however it is absolutely not worth $14 AUD per month, maybe $15-$20/year I'd consider it but I already have subscription fatigue.
• wokwokwok 4y ago
  I’m so ambivalent about this. I was excited when it came out, but it ran slowly and annoyingly (crashes) and I gave up. I already have a jetbrains license; when they release a similar feature I’ll consider uping my subscription to get it. As it stands… eh. It’s not that great. I couldn’t really be bothering to continue using it for free, I’m not gonna pay for it.
• intrepidsoldier 4y ago
  I don't understand the argument that they analyzed all the code from their users, used it to train their service, and are now charging for the service. Do people want to see ads instead? Or would they be ok paying for Google search (another service trained by all the information we willingly volunteer to them)? Copilot adds tremendous value and they are justified charging for it.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  How do I try it without a credit card?
• lsh123 4y ago
  I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?
  • baby 4y ago
    This is why we can't have nice things
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • LrnByTeach 4y ago
    a person bought a hammer/knife from a shop and used it to hurt another person. When the victim sues the attacker, can the manufacturer of hammer/knife pick up the tab?
    • bioinformatics 4y ago
      Isn’t that what Biden wants to do with gun makers?
    • culi 4y ago
      That's... not quite the same thing. More like, everybody has their own sourdough starter. Some people sell theirs, some people give it out for free. Someone goes from house to house to make a super-starter by collecting pieces from each house. Then someone uses that starter to sell a patented bread Ok it's not a great analogy either. Maybe we need to stop trying to reduce the complexities of digital so much
    • muzani 4y ago
      Not the same. Probably theft laws are more similar. A thief steals a knife and sells it to a knife seller. The knife seller sells you the knife. Under law, stolen property belong to the person it was stolen from, and sales are not valid. The original owner of the knife claims it back from you. But being digital, the knife was just copied and the original owner still has one, but you also have theirs without their permission. So there's much less sympathy for the victim.
• az226 4y ago
  ITT: a lot of developers who don’t value their time above $20/hr.
• trentthethief 4y ago
  A whole new era of copy-paste programmers. You do not even have to look for code to copy anymore.
• stillsut 4y ago
  Copilot's funny because it can have A+ code formatting and style gimmicks but D- in terms of comprehension of the task. Which means it's going to be harder to evaluate junior candidates code without actually running and testing that code because they'll have built a huge library that looks really well formatted but has logic gaps which are difficult to catch on a glance. As it stands currently, usually some style and organization tells you this person gets it.
• coding123 4y ago
  I think I would better fit in the $20 / year pricing.
• solomatov 4y ago
  The most concerning part of their FAQ is this: >What data does GitHub Copilot collect? >... >User Engagement Data >... >Code Snippets Data >Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub Copilot may also collect >and retain the following, collectively referred to as “code snippets”: source >code that you are editing, related files and other files open in the same IDE or >editor, URLs of repositories and files paths. It's possible to opt out, but it's not disabled by default, and this code snippets might be very sensitive.
• anonymouse008 4y ago
  I was wondering what languages they support. With Swift being a protocol first language, most of the 'boiler plate' ends up being handled. I guess it goes to show that Swift is beyond your normal power tool. Here's an example of something that just blew my mind recently, on the front page of CoPilot: Memoization. HackingWithSwift shows how this process gets rocket wings with Swift[0] (skip to the end for the mind melter) [0] https://www.hackingwithswift.com/plus/high-performance-apps/using-memoization-to-speed-up-slow-functions https://www.hackingwithswift.com/plus/high-performance-apps/...
  • onelovetwo 4y ago
    It doesnt seem like hes using copilot...
• gouda-gouda 4y ago
  After using Copilot with Rust for a few months, I’m constantly impressed with how accurate it can be. Sometimes I catch myself pausing to think about the solution, then all of the sudden copilot just writes the implementation for me. Having a type checker is critical for this, though. When I code Ruby I’m much more skeptical of Copilots suggestions.
• zbird 4y ago
  What an egregious and distasteful backstab to the community. We have stolen all your code and now we are making it available to all of you at the convenient monthly subscription of $10 or $100, whichever you prefer. Do the guys at Microsoft have any morals left?
• bibliographie 4y ago
  Anybody have any stories using C++ code? I'm a bit hesitant to see what generic C++ OOP or just regular code looks like lol
• zwilliamson 4y ago
  Needs a full metrics dashboard on usage. Some counters for… CopilotRecommendations CopilotRecommedationIterations (Number of saved changes to initial recommendation) CopilotRecommmedationSaves SkipToNextSuggestion Metrics on my code that is used by copilot by others would be nice to see.
• nsonha 4y ago
  I find it rather annoying tbn, not necessarily the suggestions but the UI. But then again I'm the kind of person who hates autocomplete and only using copilot for the novelty factor rather than actually needing it.
• plumeria 4y ago
  Does it work better for some languages over others (e.g. C++, C#, F#, Python versus Go, Ruby, PHP)?
• braingenious 4y ago
  I’ve been meaning to play around with this! Now fingers crossed for somebody to make DALL-E 2 generally available! (or for somebody to hook me up with a referral code or whatever :) )
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• hda2 4y ago
  I'll consider testing it if it becomes free software (inc. the model) and runs offline like all my other dev tools.
• ximm 4y ago
  Honest question here: I understand that Copilot can increase productivity. But I personally fear that it would cover the fun parts of programming and leave me with the boring bits. What is your experience around that?
• steveneo 4y ago
  Now would be a good time to remove it. In my experience, it has caused me more trouble than good.
• kabaka 4y ago
  Does anyone have an Emacs package they recommend or have been able to use this with in Emacs?
• amirathi 4y ago
  I'm just happy that Microsoft is finally charging directly for a developer product! When they keep giving out freebies (VSCode, npm etc.), I never know which direction the product is going to evolve (e.g. unnecessarily tight integration with Azure). With this, there's at least direct alignment between end user & the product.
• ascorbic 4y ago
  I've been using the beta since last year and I love it. I think most of the people complaining about it either haven't used it, or are judging it on its most verbose guesses. That's not what I use it for mostly. For me, it's just a really, really good autocomplete. It's best for things with common patterns and APIs. But hey, they're common so I write them a lot. Boring stuff like creating a Response object, adding the right headers and response code. And look, it's worked out that I need a case for a 404 next, and has suggested the code for that to, and a 500 in my catch block. Sure, that's not much typing or cognitive load, but added up over many, many times then it's easily worth it. And no, I'm not a beginner. I'm a principal with over 20 years experience. I don't really use it for the Stack Overflow-type stuff, but even as an autocomplete it's worth the money. As it happens I'm apparently eligible for free access as an open source maintainer, but I'd pay $100/year in a heartbeat for it. I'd pay for Intellisense if that was $100 too.
  • runeks 4y ago
    How much time would you say it saves you per day? Ie. how much more productive does it make you? I’m curious whether we’re talking 5% or 30%.
    • baby 4y ago
      It's hard to tell, but if I would place some baseline "the tool is useful if it helps me this amount per day" somewhere, then it's WELL above that baseline. So I would say that if you can say the tool is useful if it improves 1% of your day, then it's probably at 15-30% right now.
    • ascorbic 4y ago
      Well I'm not coding all day so closer to 5%, but for anyone earning over $200/month that should be worthwhile.
      • AJRF 4y ago
        > Well I'm not coding all day so closer to 5% If you don't code much, and CoPilot only helps with with 5% of that small amount of code, that makes it sound not at all useful.
• andretti1977 4y ago
  I've been using copilot for 6 months and it has been an exceptional tool worth the money even if not always generating correct code. What i'm concerned with is that i think it can interrupt the flow of thoughts while programming since you have to review the generated code, but that is the price to pay to use such a formidable tool
• jacobedawson 4y ago
  I've been using Copilot for a few months now and in general it's really impressive. For me it's been a very useful autocomplete for repetitive tasks - writing tests, scaffolding components, utility functions, etc - Copilot feels like magic sometimes, it just knows what I need to do and provides the code template almost instantly. Will be paying for the public version, absolutely worth the money in a single day's coding alone.
• unlog 4y ago
  Im amazed they dont have a Sublime Text plugin, but "whatever".
• runeks 4y ago
  Next step: if Copilot can recognize often-used patterns, and variations in them, it should be able to autogenerate libraries that capture these patterns and make them useable via simper functions/classes. That way it can capture code in a library instead of having thousands of developers copy/paste the same code snippets.
• grassmudhorse 4y ago
  At worst, it helps me type fast by finishing my lines of code for me, as pressing `tab` is faster than typing boilerplate. At best, it is scary in it's ability to pre-emptively suggest context-specific implementations of functions before I have even considered what I might need to do. It probably helps that I am very particular about how I name variables, which seems to help copilot infer my needs. But at least a couple of times a day, I am blown away by it.
• wilde 4y ago
  The thing I like about Copilot is that it breaks the “static friction” I have when I’m sitting down to work on my side project. It makes me more likely to get started. That said, launching a dev tool without Orgs integration seems dumb. I work for a FAANG and so can’t use this professionally. It’s a totally different price calculation for “programming as entertainment”. Is this worth more than Netflix to me?
• yokoprime 4y ago
  > GitHub Copilot costs $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year per user. GitHub Copilot is only available to individual developers and individual accounts within organizations, but organization administrators cannot purchase bulk licenses for teams at this time. No bulk licensing of Teams? This makes no sesnse, so if a team wants to make Copilot part of their official tools, each member have to purchase this individually. Thats a huge PITA
• d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  Waiting for a pycharm plugin
  • d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
    Never mind there is a pyCharm plugin. And I am impressed. Example — # use numba to speed up the accumulation of the moving average @numba.jit("float64[:](float64[:], float64[:])", nopython=True, nogil=True) def moving_average(x, a): n = len(x) y = np.empty(n, dtype=np.float64) y[0] = x[0] for i in range(1, n): y[i] = y[i-1]*a[i-1] + x[i]*a[i] return y I would have found it with a stack overflow search but it gave me this after I just typed : # use numba to …
• mfbx9da4 4y ago
  My favourite thing to do is to write a comment about what I'm about to do and let copilot fill in the next line with the syntax. This is especially useful when I'm writing tidbits in a language I'm not super familiar with.
• jaremko 4y ago
  I'm in that middle-state where I program daily for work and hobby, but in earnest I only started about 1.5 years ago. I can make a lot run, mostly API work, data transformation. I joined the Copilot beta and where it has helped me most is: 1) Ideas 2) Filling in the broad-strokes. It's name does not deceive, it is only a co-pilot. It will not tell you where to go, it will push you in the right direction and let you focus on the more difficult parts of a task. I signed up for it because at $10 per month the keystroke reduction is somewhere in ballpark of 70% or more. That's the real value in my use-case.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  Question for managers: how do you solve the problem of intellectual property attribution with Copilot? Or you just assume that is an employee's responsibility?
• redconfetti 4y ago
  I don't want to use it, because I don't want to feed Copilot input that makes it better.