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Another reason to switch from GitHub, I don't want to strengthen this ecosystem. AI-generated description for PR? gg. IMHO it will drastically reduce real produ

Another reason to switch from GitHub, I don't want to strengthen this ecosystem. AI-generated description for PR? gg. IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform (but still increasing whatever fake metric [accepted pull requests? stars?] people love to check)

sebzim4500 4y ago
>IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.
- BratishkaErik 4y ago
  sorry if i was unclear, by "real productivity" i meant something that requires more creativity than copypasting stackoverflow/copilot to your code, not measured in "lines of code" but rather in how much it is unique. Highly subjective, yes...
  - elil17 4y ago
    Right, but the idea is that copilot frees up more of your time for the creative part. That is what I have found in practice.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    > rather in how much it is unique IRL a lot of what people do is rehashing or gluing together things as others may have done before. We all stand on the shoulder of giants - code is a tool to enable an outcome. I don’t agree with your definition of “code uniqueness is productivity”.
  - jwhiles 4y ago
    What's the reason to think that it reduces the amount of creative code that's written. Doesn't it just let you get through the copypastable stuff faster - all things being equal I'd assume it means you spend more time on the creative parts.
  - dagw 4y ago
    Copilot lets me get the 'boring' scaffolding work out of the way quicker so I can spend more time on the parts of my project that actually are hard and 'unique'.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Not everyone - me and quite a few others I know tried it and turned it off. It might be better now they've improved it, but for the sort of work I do (maintain a mature Kotlin codebase) the prior version wasn't a productivity upgrade, it was a downgrade because the type system and IDE generated more accurate suggestions that I don't have to double check for errors. Copilot and ChatGPT both seem to have error rates too high for this sort of work. I can see though, that once I switch to some other sort of work it might be more valuable.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  I have used it for 2 months and disabled it. So there is your exception. The code it suggests is always highly suspect and writing raw code never was the problem in the first place (for me). I was “discussing” with it for far longer than it was making me “productive”. I give it -5%. I do however love occasionally using GPT directly for converting some weird list of values to JSON or coming up with plausible test data. Sometimes some text or ideas for emails (especially English, which is not my mother tongue). Sort of a secretary of sorts.
  - hellcow 4y ago
    Copilot definitely makes me much less productive, since it breaks my flow on every line. I give it a -50%. It is both very dumb and very loud. It feels like I'm pair programming with a 1st year CS student who pipes up on _every single line_ trying to predict what I will type next and getting 95% of it wrong. I found ChatGPT however outputs good code when I want it do simple things. Writing unit tests is tedious, and ChatGPT is pretty good at that. Optimizing a SQL query, etc. Things that used to take some time are now either instantaneous or get me 90% of the way there, and I can do the final edits.
_bohm 4y ago
Could you explain your reasoning? You expect that these tools will create more work to get from point A to point B rather than less?
- BratishkaErik 4y ago
  In short: because there will be "current junk pull requests" (see microchanges for readme) but increased x100, if you want to use AI at least write description by yourself, orelse there os no point in your pr as authors might make it themselves
  - _bohm 4y ago
    I see. My impression based on this press release is that GitHub is planning on marketing this more to teams using their paid plan though. It seems like this would be a non-issue for organizations using private repositories?
    - BratishkaErik 4y ago
      > As we continue to design, test, and build features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also taking the time to determine the best way to provide them to our customers, which may include changes to Copilot for Business and Copilot for Individuals. so we'll see :)
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect just that. Overall, producing code quicker is probably not something we need. It's plenty quick to type code. What's slow is finding good designs. I think more often than not, we jump to the coding part too early and build things too soon. This creates problems that are hard to fix after the fact. The easier it is to produce code, the more code will be produced. The more code is produced, the more complex and short-sighted the architecture will be as a result. This is much older than AI. You can take a one-person task that takes two weeks to perform, assign it to a five person team, and they'll solve it by producing 25 times the code. We create abstractions to cope with the noise of a large code base, but in doing so, we also create a noisier and more complex code base that needs more abstractions.
mrcwinn 4y ago
The non-fake metric is the accepted pull request itself, ie, work done in service of the objective.
blibble 4y ago
personally I cleared out all my highly starred projects and filled them all with randomly generated crap that happens to compile and will never contribute to public open source again (I guess MS have finally managed to kill open source)

sebzim4500 4y ago

>IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.

BratishkaErik 4y ago
sorry if i was unclear, by "real productivity" i meant something that requires more creativity than copypasting stackoverflow/copilot to your code, not measured in "lines of code" but rather in how much it is unique. Highly subjective, yes...
- elil17 4y ago
  Right, but the idea is that copilot frees up more of your time for the creative part. That is what I have found in practice.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > rather in how much it is unique IRL a lot of what people do is rehashing or gluing together things as others may have done before. We all stand on the shoulder of giants - code is a tool to enable an outcome. I don’t agree with your definition of “code uniqueness is productivity”.
- jwhiles 4y ago
  What's the reason to think that it reduces the amount of creative code that's written. Doesn't it just let you get through the copypastable stuff faster - all things being equal I'd assume it means you spend more time on the creative parts.
- dagw 4y ago
  Copilot lets me get the 'boring' scaffolding work out of the way quicker so I can spend more time on the parts of my project that actually are hard and 'unique'.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Not everyone - me and quite a few others I know tried it and turned it off. It might be better now they've improved it, but for the sort of work I do (maintain a mature Kotlin codebase) the prior version wasn't a productivity upgrade, it was a downgrade because the type system and IDE generated more accurate suggestions that I don't have to double check for errors. Copilot and ChatGPT both seem to have error rates too high for this sort of work. I can see though, that once I switch to some other sort of work it might be more valuable.
SanderNL 4y ago
I have used it for 2 months and disabled it. So there is your exception. The code it suggests is always highly suspect and writing raw code never was the problem in the first place (for me). I was “discussing” with it for far longer than it was making me “productive”. I give it -5%. I do however love occasionally using GPT directly for converting some weird list of values to JSON or coming up with plausible test data. Sometimes some text or ideas for emails (especially English, which is not my mother tongue). Sort of a secretary of sorts.
- hellcow 4y ago
  Copilot definitely makes me much less productive, since it breaks my flow on every line. I give it a -50%. It is both very dumb and very loud. It feels like I'm pair programming with a 1st year CS student who pipes up on _every single line_ trying to predict what I will type next and getting 95% of it wrong. I found ChatGPT however outputs good code when I want it do simple things. Writing unit tests is tedious, and ChatGPT is pretty good at that. Optimizing a SQL query, etc. Things that used to take some time are now either instantaneous or get me 90% of the way there, and I can do the final edits.

_bohm 4y ago

Could you explain your reasoning? You expect that these tools will create more work to get from point A to point B rather than less?

BratishkaErik 4y ago
In short: because there will be "current junk pull requests" (see microchanges for readme) but increased x100, if you want to use AI at least write description by yourself, orelse there os no point in your pr as authors might make it themselves
- _bohm 4y ago
  I see. My impression based on this press release is that GitHub is planning on marketing this more to teams using their paid plan though. It seems like this would be a non-issue for organizations using private repositories?
  - BratishkaErik 4y ago
    > As we continue to design, test, and build features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also taking the time to determine the best way to provide them to our customers, which may include changes to Copilot for Business and Copilot for Individuals. so we'll see :)
marginalia_nu 4y ago
It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect just that. Overall, producing code quicker is probably not something we need. It's plenty quick to type code. What's slow is finding good designs. I think more often than not, we jump to the coding part too early and build things too soon. This creates problems that are hard to fix after the fact. The easier it is to produce code, the more code will be produced. The more code is produced, the more complex and short-sighted the architecture will be as a result. This is much older than AI. You can take a one-person task that takes two weeks to perform, assign it to a five person team, and they'll solve it by producing 25 times the code. We create abstractions to cope with the noise of a large code base, but in doing so, we also create a noisier and more complex code base that needs more abstractions.

mrcwinn 4y ago

The non-fake metric is the accepted pull request itself, ie, work done in service of the objective.

blibble 4y ago

personally I cleared out all my highly starred projects and filled them all with randomly generated crap that happens to compile and will never contribute to public open source again (I guess MS have finally managed to kill open source)