9 ms·

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works without having to context switch and go Google something. That being said, I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention. Purely from the amount of time I've saved I'd say it's well worth the $10/mo for my employer (it only has to save a few minutes a day to be worthwhile). Very excited to see how they improve it in the future!

dagw 4y ago
I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention. Yea, that is basically my experience as well. On balance I feel I wasted about as much time debugging broken copilot code as I've saved from using it.
croes 4y ago
Maybe they can replace you with copilot and an unexperienced cheaper user.
- progrus 4y ago
  Honestly, that’s the hope. Putting together well-solved combinations of computer functionality ought to become less-skilled work as technology progresses.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    If law - the human language equivalent of programming - hasn’t gotten simpler in past thousands of years as new abstractions and complications have arisen, I hold no hope for programming.
    - anamexis 4y ago
      Maybe they will converge, and all programs will be written in legalese and interpreted by Copilot.
      - falcolas 4y ago
        A'la Ethereum's smart contracts? Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a smart contract work as intended. Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't think that this is the way we want to go.
    - djur 4y ago
      Surely the human language equivalent of programming is recipes and other types of written instructions. Law is far more abstract and subjective than programming.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Law is opposed to these sorts of changes due to the business model of the law firm. In the law firm world billable hours are king. Automation reduces billable hours. No law firm wants to do that.
      - mberning 4y ago
        I think it has more to do with having an adversarial law system. It doesn’t matter what new tool you come up with in the arms race. Your competitor will soon have it as well.
      - oceanplexian 4y ago
        I think this really depends on what kind of firm you're talking about. You could make the same case for contractors i.e. "billable hours are king". Take the example where you need to paint a house. You could hire someone off the street who does it with a paintbrush and rollers or hire a pro with a sprayer and prep knowledge to do it in 1/4 the time and with 10x the quality. In this context automation could be a tool that a law firm uses to enhance the quality of their product. Personally, I would pay more for a tech-savvy law firm that embraces automation, not less.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    That's been the objective of programming languages for 50 years. It hasn't happened yet, because the essential complexity of programming problems isn't in writing the code.
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      I think it definitely has happened. We're creating more things, for cheaper. We're also creating more complex things, that costs more money.
      - lumost 4y ago
        anecdotally, this is where the famous lack of modern skills comes from in engineering culture. If you keep doing the same things you've been doing, you'll look around one day and see that everyone has moved on. The market for simple SMB websites is a great example. This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB offerings. However if you started out making websites in 1993, then there are a vast array of products and services one could move into over the last 3 decades.
    - outside1234 4y ago
      We have just moved up the complexity curve. It's the same with doctors, lawyers, everything.
- zamfi 4y ago
  Or maybe they’ll replace a junior dev with copilot and make the more experienced folks spend more time “fixing” broken copilot code.
lelag 4y ago
I totally agree. If you code professionally in a stack where copilot perform well, 10 usd/month is a steal. Assuming you are just 5% more productive with copilot, that would easily translate into hundreds of dollars of savings. It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally. It would have been nice of them to introduce a free tier where you could use copilot for a few hours a month for free.
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.
  - lelag 4y ago
    I guess that makes sense. It's mostly useful when working on mundane tasks on popular stacks. Experts working on non-trivial use-cases won't see much benefits. Personally, I'm not a in a coding position anymore and only code occasionally on stacks I'm mostly unfamiliar with: copilot is a godsend as it saves me from googling every other lines of code to figure out which api calls I'm suppose to do to accomplish the task at end. I see it as a stackoverflow on steroids. Even if I don't use it much, I guess I'll have to pony up the 10 usd because I would not want to go back to googling basic syntax for everything when I'm coding something.
    - sirsinsalot 4y ago
      Do you think you learn as well or deeply? Is the act of finding a help for learning? Do you retain as much? Do you need to? Is that important? I hope this whole thing ends up like a space saving tool like Google did. I don't need to memorise that API because I can Google the docs. Now maybe that goes a level higher.
  - morelisp 4y ago
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Weird that it prints the error to stdout. I mean not that surprising really, I'd just expect error->stderr to be a pretty low-hanging association
- bombcar 4y ago
  I've seen many many scripts that ignore STDERR and just print everything normally.
  - Slartie 4y ago
    Yes, but that's a perfect illustration for one of copilot's essential flaws: "a lot of flies eat poop" (side note: is that actually a saying? Asking because in German it is, and it fits perfectly here). A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Which may still be of value if you know and can recognize mediocre code. Some code is like a giant pile of dirt; you need someone to pile it up and then you can go in and clean up the edges and make it "good" whereas other code is entirely delicate all the way through. The big question is how much is each one and can it help. I suspect it helps for many, but those who know enough to recognize where it can flaw will have an advantage. But newer programmers may never really "learn" the code the way the older ones do, as they'll just let the computer do the basics.
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      > side note: is that actually a saying? I've never heard it before but i'll be using it now :)
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It's saying "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good" and it's doing it quite well.
morelisp 4y ago
If you don’t quite understand the language, how do you know it doesn’t also have subtle bugs?
omegalulw 4y ago
Holy **. This is exactly the kind of use case ML code generation should NOT be used for. If you don't even understand a language you will probably not be able to debug subtle bugs that are introduced, especially in something like bash. Please don't do this for anything that touches prod.

dagw 4y ago

I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention. Yea, that is basically my experience as well. On balance I feel I wasted about as much time debugging broken copilot code as I've saved from using it.

croes 4y ago

Maybe they can replace you with copilot and an unexperienced cheaper user.

progrus 4y ago
Honestly, that’s the hope. Putting together well-solved combinations of computer functionality ought to become less-skilled work as technology progresses.
- falcolas 4y ago
  If law - the human language equivalent of programming - hasn’t gotten simpler in past thousands of years as new abstractions and complications have arisen, I hold no hope for programming.
  - anamexis 4y ago
    Maybe they will converge, and all programs will be written in legalese and interpreted by Copilot.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      A'la Ethereum's smart contracts? Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a smart contract work as intended. Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't think that this is the way we want to go.
  - djur 4y ago
    Surely the human language equivalent of programming is recipes and other types of written instructions. Law is far more abstract and subjective than programming.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Law is opposed to these sorts of changes due to the business model of the law firm. In the law firm world billable hours are king. Automation reduces billable hours. No law firm wants to do that.
    - mberning 4y ago
      I think it has more to do with having an adversarial law system. It doesn’t matter what new tool you come up with in the arms race. Your competitor will soon have it as well.
    - oceanplexian 4y ago
      I think this really depends on what kind of firm you're talking about. You could make the same case for contractors i.e. "billable hours are king". Take the example where you need to paint a house. You could hire someone off the street who does it with a paintbrush and rollers or hire a pro with a sprayer and prep knowledge to do it in 1/4 the time and with 10x the quality. In this context automation could be a tool that a law firm uses to enhance the quality of their product. Personally, I would pay more for a tech-savvy law firm that embraces automation, not less.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  That's been the objective of programming languages for 50 years. It hasn't happened yet, because the essential complexity of programming problems isn't in writing the code.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    I think it definitely has happened. We're creating more things, for cheaper. We're also creating more complex things, that costs more money.
    - lumost 4y ago
      anecdotally, this is where the famous lack of modern skills comes from in engineering culture. If you keep doing the same things you've been doing, you'll look around one day and see that everyone has moved on. The market for simple SMB websites is a great example. This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB offerings. However if you started out making websites in 1993, then there are a vast array of products and services one could move into over the last 3 decades.
  - outside1234 4y ago
    We have just moved up the complexity curve. It's the same with doctors, lawyers, everything.
zamfi 4y ago
Or maybe they’ll replace a junior dev with copilot and make the more experienced folks spend more time “fixing” broken copilot code.

lelag 4y ago

I totally agree. If you code professionally in a stack where copilot perform well, 10 usd/month is a steal. Assuming you are just 5% more productive with copilot, that would easily translate into hundreds of dollars of savings. It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally. It would have been nice of them to introduce a free tier where you could use copilot for a few hours a month for free.

tomtheelder 4y ago
This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.
- lelag 4y ago
  I guess that makes sense. It's mostly useful when working on mundane tasks on popular stacks. Experts working on non-trivial use-cases won't see much benefits. Personally, I'm not a in a coding position anymore and only code occasionally on stacks I'm mostly unfamiliar with: copilot is a godsend as it saves me from googling every other lines of code to figure out which api calls I'm suppose to do to accomplish the task at end. I see it as a stackoverflow on steroids. Even if I don't use it much, I guess I'll have to pony up the 10 usd because I would not want to go back to googling basic syntax for everything when I'm coding something.
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    Do you think you learn as well or deeply? Is the act of finding a help for learning? Do you retain as much? Do you need to? Is that important? I hope this whole thing ends up like a space saving tool like Google did. I don't need to memorise that API because I can Google the docs. Now maybe that goes a level higher.
- morelisp 4y ago

pcthrowaway 4y ago

Weird that it prints the error to stdout. I mean not that surprising really, I'd just expect error->stderr to be a pretty low-hanging association

bombcar 4y ago
I've seen many many scripts that ignore STDERR and just print everything normally.
- Slartie 4y ago
  Yes, but that's a perfect illustration for one of copilot's essential flaws: "a lot of flies eat poop" (side note: is that actually a saying? Asking because in German it is, and it fits perfectly here). A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Which may still be of value if you know and can recognize mediocre code. Some code is like a giant pile of dirt; you need someone to pile it up and then you can go in and clean up the edges and make it "good" whereas other code is entirely delicate all the way through. The big question is how much is each one and can it help. I suspect it helps for many, but those who know enough to recognize where it can flaw will have an advantage. But newer programmers may never really "learn" the code the way the older ones do, as they'll just let the computer do the basics.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    > side note: is that actually a saying? I've never heard it before but i'll be using it now :)
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It's saying "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good" and it's doing it quite well.

morelisp 4y ago

If you don’t quite understand the language, how do you know it doesn’t also have subtle bugs?

omegalulw 4y ago

Holy **. This is exactly the kind of use case ML code generation should NOT be used for. If you don't even understand a language you will probably not be able to debug subtle bugs that are introduced, especially in something like bash. Please don't do this for anything that touches prod.