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Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth

156 points by jmcphers 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Official post: https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-million https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-mill...
mepian 2y ago
I wonder if the name was inspired by Doug Engelbart's system: https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/155/ https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/155/
bix6 2y ago
Anyone tried it?
- s09dfhks 2y ago
  Friend of mine works there and got me access to the VScode plugin. I’ve only used it a handful of times and I have not used copilot. It makes ok suggestions. That’s about all I can say. I don’t expect it to do my job for me but it’s not useless
  - xenospn 2y ago
    Same as copilot, then?
simple10 2y ago
I'm always a bit surprised when startups come out of stealth mode with no product demo videos and only a press release. My guess is they're either wanting to raise more money before official launch, or just wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist. Is there any strategic reason in 2024 to not include more details on the website?
- mooreds 2y ago
  They raised 277M. I hope they don't need to raise more money: https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-million https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-mill...
  - simple10 2y ago
    It's AI. They'll likely end up raising a lot more money if for no other reason than acquisitions and building a financial mote. The AI companies with the most money in the bank will likely win.
  - krainboltgreene 2y ago
    I ask that you look at the last 20 years of venture capital and tell me if they're going to be able to stop.
    - mooreds 2y ago
      Sure, but not right now (since they just raised their B). My guess is it was the second reason: > wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist.
- mritchie712 2y ago
  also, why be in stealth for such an obvious product? There are dozens of recently launched well funded competitors in addition to all the incumbents that have added similar features.
  - silenced_trope 2y ago
    Right? I wonder what this will offer? Marginal improvement over GitHub CoPilot or Cursor?
    - abhyantrika 2y ago
      Is there any product that allows me to plug in my own Open source LLM and run it locally?
russellbeattie 2y ago
If anyone from Augment reads this, the careers@augmentcode.com email address (from the "Apply Now" button on the careers page) is bouncing with a "does not exist" error. Edit: Seems to be fixed now!
- dalmaer 2y ago
  Sorry Russell! Fixing it now...
  - russellbeattie 2y ago
    Hey Dion! No worries! Just thought you guys would like to know sooner than later. Good luck with the launch!
neilv 2y ago
First Eric Schmidt colluded with executives at other large employers to suppress software developer wages and job mobility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... Now he's trying to get into the business of reducing software developer headcount and professionalism, through copyright-theft-laundering LLMs.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
celeritascelery 2y ago
> Even Copilot loses money, to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal Wow. Does that mean that once the VC money dries up that will be the real cost of the products ($30-$90 a month)? That is much less accessible than $10.
- ipsum2 2y ago
  WSJ is wrong. Autocomplete code models are small (5B param) and very cheap. A single inference is roughly $0.000001.
  - acchow 2y ago
    Copilot uses GPT4 now
    - ipsum2 2y ago
      I mentioned autocomplete, not the chat service.
      - SgtBastard 2y ago
        GPT4 isn’t a chat service, friend.
        acka 2y ago
        I think the point that ipsum2 is trying to make is that Copilot's chat service and its code completion service could be using different models, which is not uncommon for coding assistants. Continue[0] for example can use up to 3 different models in a session: a large model such as GPT-4 Turbo for chat and code QA, a smaller low latency model such as StarCoder2-3B for code completion, and yet another model such as all-MiniLM-L6-v2 for generating embeddings. [0] https://www.continue.dev/ https://www.continue.dev/
- dudus 2y ago
  The cost is supposed to go down as LLMs become more efficient and hardware efficiency goes up with time.
krainboltgreene 2y ago
The only thing more hilarious than these articles is how funny it will be when the companies either close because they can't possibly solve "Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile" as a problem set or they don't make enough money to justify the $1B valuation (and rising!). The writers of this article don't even bother doing any introspection into these claims or ideas. Is it important to know that programmers have been using AI for the last 50 years? I'm sure it isn't.
Havoc 2y ago
I really want groq to compete in this space. It’s the obvious application for their ridiculous speed. Quality of suggestions sure but waiting breaks your flow
andrewstuart 2y ago
Even OpenAI can't make a better coding copilot than ChatGPT 3.5. I'll be surprised if this one is better.
vbezhenar 2y ago
Hopefully copilot will compete. I mean, it's not exactly new product already and it still: - tries to insert triple backquote in my code for some weird reason - does not do continuous code review, highlighting likely errors and typos - does not do any code edit or delete, only code insert I want AI to work along with me. I feel that Copilot has huge potential, but this limited UI keeps that potential untapped.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Interesting, and I was about to say "I hope this rival will compete with Copilot". Copilot is still winner from everything I can tell. I've tried a few open source ones with local models and they aren't as good yet, I've tried paying for Cody but I keep coming back to Copilot. If it matters: I don't use the chat features of any of these plugins. It's just not muscle memory, I use Copilot as fancy auto-complete and I open ChatGPT for longer or more detailed or specific code snippets. I also use Claude 3 Opus but I'll probably drop it, I just like ChatGPT more, the UI and the results. That said, I agree with many of your points as things I would also like to have.
  - sqs 2y ago
    Why do you go back to Copilot after trying Cody? (I’m the Sourcegraph CEO, and we make Cody.) We added Claude 3 Opus editor chat and also support GPT-4 Turbo. Curious, why don’t you use in-editor chat? If you find those models helpful, then having in-editor chat with code context seems like it’d be useful to you.
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      The Cody plugin (Intellij) threw multiple errors for me, over multiple days, with a paid account. When it didn't throw errors it either didn't suggest anything or suggested something I thought was worse than Copilot. I even toggled both plugins a few times and tested with Copilot and it always gave me what I expected. I tested over a span of about 5 days of coding. I kept feeling limited and wanting to switch back to Copilot, which, to be fair, has had a handful of outages/errors but not this many in this short of a time. I'm not sure if you write code, and I don't want to assume either direction, but if you don't and/or don't use these tools, let me share my experience. I now have a "sense" for when Copilot will have a good suggestion and I pause while writing code waiting for it to spit something out. Copilot earned this "respect", for lack of a better word, because it has shown me time and time again that it "knows" what I want. With Cody, I would reach a point where I wanted to wait for a suggestion, I'd wait, and I'd wait, then my focus is broken because I'm wondering why I'm not getting a suggestion, I look in the bottom status bar, and Cody has some red symbol on it. When I did get something back from Cody, I just felt the results were equal to or worse than Copilot. I only paid for Cody to get Claude 3 Opus and that's all I tried. In addition to bugs that caused Cody to not work, I had multiple plugin crashes reported to me by my IDE. Here [0] is one of the bugs I saw, it was the last one I got before I uninstalled Cody and canceled my Pro subscription. The last thing I'll say is that the purchase/activation process was not good. I signed up for an account, installed the plugin, logged in, realized if I wanted Claude 3 Opus I'd need a "Pro" account, bought a Pro account, went back to the plugin and had to log out and back in for it to realize I was a pro member. A "check membership status" button/option would be nice. I looked in the preferences and everything on the sidebar panel I could click on. I also tried opening/closing the panel and some other things I thought might trigger an account update call, no dice. It's whatever and I did eventually get it working (by logging out/in) but I wouldn't want that to be the user experience for someone who just gave me money so I thought I'd mention it. [0] https://github.com/sourcegraph/jetbrains/issues/1306 https://github.com/sourcegraph/jetbrains/issues/1306
brevitea 2y ago
Hope it's not another Devin situation...
linsomniac 2y ago
Just to clarify, this is augmentcode.com , not augment.co ("Personal AI assistant")
rayxi271828 2y ago
While it's clear that AI coding assistants still have a long way to go in general, I wonder how yet another startup, presumably based on the same technology at the back, is going to differentiate itself in a material way? There are only so many axes along which improvements can be made in this domain, aren't there? What are the bottlenecks that, if solved, will produce a true breakthrough, exactly? Doesn't the current approach have an upper limit that's inherent in the whole architecture, nay, even the whole foundational theoretical aspect of it? Would love to hear from anyone who has come across one AI coding assistant that's obviously head and shoulders above everything else. I've tried Copilot, CodeWhisperer, and Ghostwriter.
- mulmen 2y ago
  With emerging technology both capital and product follow the Monte Carlo method.
- jerrygoyal 2y ago
  give Cody a try.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  I tried Copilot and another one whose name I forgot (TabNine?). They didn't stick. What stuck is the new single line model JetBrains shipped recently in IntelliJ: • It runs locally. • It is extremely fast. • It is not overly aggressive. It only shows up sometimes and when it does I nearly always accept its suggestion. • It's a native part of the IDE so doesn't interfere with autocompletion. I gotta say, JetBrains nailed it with this one. Single line mode is a much better way to think about AI driven autocomplete. That said, it's also obviously much more limited. It helps and is pleasant, but isn't revolutionary. The other AI assistant I use sometimes is aider.chat, it's an open source tool. You type what you want and it generates git commits for the requested change. This is clearly the direction to go in long term and is much more revolutionary, but there are still problems with it. > What are the bottlenecks that, if solved, will produce a true breakthrough, exactly? There's a lot of "low hanging fruit" here (not that low), because the big AI labs aren't focusing on code gen AI right now. I can think of at least 4 or 5 paper-sized research directions to make improvements. The challenge is that right now the only models any good at coding are GPT-4/Opus level models, so doing anything with them is impossible unless you're working at a tiny number of labs. I don't work there so the "obvious" ideas I have aren't of much use. That leaves explorations of whether you can take a great open source model and boost its coding skills a lot. I think you probably can, especially if you have the resources to do a Mixtral or a Llama 3 yourself. Most smaller labs seem to be focussing on general performance optimizations rather than trying to reach GPT-4 level skills so the number of labs capable of doing these experiments should go up with time. From talking to people there's also a general fear I think that there's not much point working on some sorts of ideas because what if OpenAI come out with GPT-5 and everyone gets taught another Bitter Lesson (http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)? Better to just wait things out and see where model capabilities stabilize. From all the noise about licensing deals it's starting to sound like we're data constrained even for the companies that are pushing the boundaries of what fair use means, so maybe we'll see appetite to do smarter things with coding models next year.
moneywoes 2y ago
how did they raise so much?
- heyoni 2y ago
  Eric Schmidt. It’s in the title.
nsagent 2y ago
> Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows. I'm really curious about this. I honestly don't see a case where I would use a coding assistant and everyone I have spoken to that does, hasn't been a strong coder (they would characterize themselves this way and I certainly agree with their assessment). I'd love to hear from strong coders — people whom others normally go to when they have a problem with some code (whether debugging or designing something new) who now regularly use AI coding assistants. What do you find useful? In what way does it improve your workflow? Are there tasks where you explicitly avoid them? How often do you find bugs in the generated code (and a corollary, how frequently has a bug slipped in that was only caught later)?
- pennomi 2y ago
  I’m a strong coder. AI assistants can effectively be considered a really smart autocomplete. It simply saves time to insert the characters I was going to type anyway. If it suggests something other than what I want, I just simply don’t press tab.
- rpbiwer2 2y ago
  I was skeptical at first - tried the copilot beta, got annoyed by it, and quickly turned it off. Later I tried it again and haven't looked back. For the most part it's not that I'm ceding the thinking to the machine; more often it suggests what I was going to type anyway, which if nothing else saves typing. It's especially helpful if I'm doing something repetitive. Beyond that, it can save some cognitive load by auto completing a block of code that wouldn't have necessarily been very difficult, but that I would've had a stop to think about. E.g an API I'm not used to, or a nested loop or something. The other big advantage that comes to mind is when I'm doing something I'm not familiar with, e.g. I recently started using Rust, and copilot has been a major help when I vaguely know what I _want_ to do but don't quite know how to get there on my own. I'm experienced enough to evaluate whether the suggested code does what I want. If there's anything in the output I don't understand, I can look it up. > Are there tasks where you explicitly avoid them? Not necessarily that I can think of, but after having copilot on for a little while it's gotten easier to tune it out when I'm not interested in its suggestions or when they're not helpful. > How often do you find bugs in the generated code (and a corollary, how frequently has a bug slipped in that was only caught later)? 90% of the time I'm only accepting a single line of code at a time, so it's less a question of "is there a bug here" and more "does this do what I want or not?" Like, if I'm writing an email and gmail suggests an end to my sentence, I'm not worried about whether there's a bug in the sentence. If it's not what I want to say, I either don't take the suggestion, or I take the suggestion and modify it. If I do accept larger chunks of suggested code, I review it thoroughly to the point where it's no longer "the AI's" code -- for all intents and purposes it's mine now. Like I said before, most of the time it's basically the code I was going to write anyway, I just got there faster.
hipadev23 2y ago
I look forward to anything better than Github Copilot. The implementation in VSCode is horribly slow, constantly injects a lightning bolt icon near my cursor, and interferes with intellisense-style LSP language hints/docs. I’ve found it mostly helpful for saving time on obvious boilerplate code, but the annoyances above plus the occasional inexplicable errors it introduces in said boilerplate code, I’ve just cancelled the entire thing.
- cal85 2y ago
  I agree with you on Copilot’s clunky integration in VS Code, but I never really thought of it as slow, maybe because I have no other code assistant AI to compare it to. Are others faster?
  - onel 2y ago
    I read that for supermaven speed is one of the big pluses. That and the 300,000 context. Haven't tried it though
budududuroiu 2y ago
Does anyone here get genuinely useful suggestions from Copilot? I found it amazing for 1 thing: filling up verbose configuration like Terraform or Kubernetes manifests. For code, it’s horrible, to the degree that I spend more time rejecting Copilot suggestions or having to extensively modify the ones I accept. I stopped using it couple months ago
- zarzavat 2y ago
  This is not my experience at all. How are you using it? And in what programming language? The technique to using Copilot (as with any auto-completion) is to keep typing until you get a completion that is equal to what you were going to type. So yes you have to keep rejecting things but the rejection doesn’t take any more effort than normal auto completion.
  - budududuroiu 2y ago
    Had this experience across statically typed languages and not. I do admit if your type system is set up correctly, Copilot improves greatly. For me I didn’t find the value I got out of typing 90% of the code I wanted for 10% completion to be worth the $20/month subscription.
    - zarzavat 2y ago
      The reason I ask is that it’s going to perform better if the language you use is well-represented in the training set. Much of the value of Copilot is that it helps you navigate new things that you are not familiar with. For example, I use scipy/numpy a few times a month, so I am competent but not an expert by any means. Copilot is incredibly useful to suggest ways of doing things that are more idiomatic than what I was planning to write. Another way that it is useful is that it massively reduces logical bugs such as off-by-one errors that aren’t caught by typechecking, since it’s unlikely that both me and copilot will make the same off-by-one error at the same time. If only copilot makes an off-by-one error then I will catch it because the suggestion will be different to what I expected. If I am about to make an off-by-one error then copilot will suggest something contrary to my expectation and that forces me to reconsider what I was about to write.
electriclove 2y ago
Is Eric Schmidt still relevant?
- aborsy 2y ago
  He has some government roles apparently! Care to clarify?
- khazhoux 2y ago
  In what sense? He funds many companies, so in that sense he is still relevant. He can opine on how he grew the biggest company that launched today’s web, so in that sense he is still relevant. And let’s not forget, you know his name but he doesn’t know yours, so in that sense also he is relevant.
aborsy 2y ago
I haven’t used copilot. Isn’t it collecting a lot code from the Internet and combining to make auto complete suggestions? I just don’t see how it could think and write new code like a human developer would. Any feedback from copilot users?
- esalman 2y ago
  The magic is in how it combines the code based on context.
khazhoux 2y ago
It's hard to imagine how a company raised a quarter-billion dollars off the same idea everyone had --and many already acted on-- after we all saw chatgpt in 2022. There's how many copilots already?
- flanked-evergl 2y ago
  Is there any other service that does what GitHub copilot does? I have looked, and they are all just ChatGPT like things branded copilot, maybe I have not looked hard enough.
  - geepytee 2y ago
    Lots of them. Check out https://double.bot https://double.bot for example.
fdschoeneman 2y ago
They collected my email when I signed up to try and then told me I couldn't try it. Unethical.
peter_d_sherman 2y ago
>"Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers. Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent). Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together?" Well, we don't know! We do know however that there are a lot of AI coding assistants, and there will probably be many more in the years to come... The excerpted text above -- makes for a reasonably good list as to what's available as of the current date... Related: https://github.com/sourcegraph/awesome-code-ai https://github.com/sourcegraph/awesome-code-ai
chubs 2y ago
The article says "Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort" - correct me if i'm wrong (happens often! :) ) - but does this mean that they're using some open model from huggingface, wrapping some UI around it, and voila they're worth a billion dollars? Hmm.
0xfedbee 2y ago
Just another blow of air into the AI bubble. Can’t wait to see all these stupid companies and their VCs go bankrupt.
htrp 2y ago
>In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify. The other problem is they may have built a solution that was state of the art at the time but the SOTA has passed them by. A lot of AI codegen/completion solutions were inspired by general transformer (Bert or GPT2) approaches without any type of chat tuning models.... and then OpenAI dropped ChatGPT. So what was a revolutionary demo in 2022 is now just a couple of CoT prompts in the latest openAI api call.
tom_vidal 2y ago
What on earth is the point of doing “stealth”? This just sounds to me like a way to burn money and scale before finding product-market fit.

156 points by jmcphers 2y ago

Official post: https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-million https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-mill...

mepian 2y ago

I wonder if the name was inspired by Doug Engelbart's system: https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/155/ https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/155/

bix6 2y ago

Anyone tried it?

s09dfhks 2y ago
Friend of mine works there and got me access to the VScode plugin. I’ve only used it a handful of times and I have not used copilot. It makes ok suggestions. That’s about all I can say. I don’t expect it to do my job for me but it’s not useless
- xenospn 2y ago
  Same as copilot, then?

simple10 2y ago

I'm always a bit surprised when startups come out of stealth mode with no product demo videos and only a press release. My guess is they're either wanting to raise more money before official launch, or just wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist. Is there any strategic reason in 2024 to not include more details on the website?

mooreds 2y ago
They raised 277M. I hope they don't need to raise more money: https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-million https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-mill...
- simple10 2y ago
  It's AI. They'll likely end up raising a lot more money if for no other reason than acquisitions and building a financial mote. The AI companies with the most money in the bank will likely win.
- krainboltgreene 2y ago
  I ask that you look at the last 20 years of venture capital and tell me if they're going to be able to stop.
  - mooreds 2y ago
    Sure, but not right now (since they just raised their B). My guess is it was the second reason: > wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist.
mritchie712 2y ago
also, why be in stealth for such an obvious product? There are dozens of recently launched well funded competitors in addition to all the incumbents that have added similar features.
- silenced_trope 2y ago
  Right? I wonder what this will offer? Marginal improvement over GitHub CoPilot or Cursor?
  - abhyantrika 2y ago
    Is there any product that allows me to plug in my own Open source LLM and run it locally?

russellbeattie 2y ago

If anyone from Augment reads this, the careers@augmentcode.com email address (from the "Apply Now" button on the careers page) is bouncing with a "does not exist" error. Edit: Seems to be fixed now!

dalmaer 2y ago
Sorry Russell! Fixing it now...
- russellbeattie 2y ago
  Hey Dion! No worries! Just thought you guys would like to know sooner than later. Good luck with the launch!

neilv 2y ago

First Eric Schmidt colluded with executives at other large employers to suppress software developer wages and job mobility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... Now he's trying to get into the business of reducing software developer headcount and professionalism, through copyright-theft-laundering LLMs.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

celeritascelery 2y ago

> Even Copilot loses money, to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal Wow. Does that mean that once the VC money dries up that will be the real cost of the products ($30-$90 a month)? That is much less accessible than $10.

ipsum2 2y ago
WSJ is wrong. Autocomplete code models are small (5B param) and very cheap. A single inference is roughly $0.000001.
- acchow 2y ago
  Copilot uses GPT4 now
  - ipsum2 2y ago
    I mentioned autocomplete, not the chat service.
    - SgtBastard 2y ago
      GPT4 isn’t a chat service, friend.
      - acka 2y ago
        I think the point that ipsum2 is trying to make is that Copilot's chat service and its code completion service could be using different models, which is not uncommon for coding assistants. Continue[0] for example can use up to 3 different models in a session: a large model such as GPT-4 Turbo for chat and code QA, a smaller low latency model such as StarCoder2-3B for code completion, and yet another model such as all-MiniLM-L6-v2 for generating embeddings. [0] https://www.continue.dev/ https://www.continue.dev/
dudus 2y ago
The cost is supposed to go down as LLMs become more efficient and hardware efficiency goes up with time.

krainboltgreene 2y ago

The only thing more hilarious than these articles is how funny it will be when the companies either close because they can't possibly solve "Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile" as a problem set or they don't make enough money to justify the $1B valuation (and rising!). The writers of this article don't even bother doing any introspection into these claims or ideas. Is it important to know that programmers have been using AI for the last 50 years? I'm sure it isn't.

Havoc 2y ago

I really want groq to compete in this space. It’s the obvious application for their ridiculous speed. Quality of suggestions sure but waiting breaks your flow

andrewstuart 2y ago

Even OpenAI can't make a better coding copilot than ChatGPT 3.5. I'll be surprised if this one is better.

vbezhenar 2y ago

Hopefully copilot will compete. I mean, it's not exactly new product already and it still: - tries to insert triple backquote in my code for some weird reason - does not do continuous code review, highlighting likely errors and typos - does not do any code edit or delete, only code insert I want AI to work along with me. I feel that Copilot has huge potential, but this limited UI keeps that potential untapped.

joshstrange 2y ago
Interesting, and I was about to say "I hope this rival will compete with Copilot". Copilot is still winner from everything I can tell. I've tried a few open source ones with local models and they aren't as good yet, I've tried paying for Cody but I keep coming back to Copilot. If it matters: I don't use the chat features of any of these plugins. It's just not muscle memory, I use Copilot as fancy auto-complete and I open ChatGPT for longer or more detailed or specific code snippets. I also use Claude 3 Opus but I'll probably drop it, I just like ChatGPT more, the UI and the results. That said, I agree with many of your points as things I would also like to have.
- sqs 2y ago
  Why do you go back to Copilot after trying Cody? (I’m the Sourcegraph CEO, and we make Cody.) We added Claude 3 Opus editor chat and also support GPT-4 Turbo. Curious, why don’t you use in-editor chat? If you find those models helpful, then having in-editor chat with code context seems like it’d be useful to you.
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    The Cody plugin (Intellij) threw multiple errors for me, over multiple days, with a paid account. When it didn't throw errors it either didn't suggest anything or suggested something I thought was worse than Copilot. I even toggled both plugins a few times and tested with Copilot and it always gave me what I expected. I tested over a span of about 5 days of coding. I kept feeling limited and wanting to switch back to Copilot, which, to be fair, has had a handful of outages/errors but not this many in this short of a time. I'm not sure if you write code, and I don't want to assume either direction, but if you don't and/or don't use these tools, let me share my experience. I now have a "sense" for when Copilot will have a good suggestion and I pause while writing code waiting for it to spit something out. Copilot earned this "respect", for lack of a better word, because it has shown me time and time again that it "knows" what I want. With Cody, I would reach a point where I wanted to wait for a suggestion, I'd wait, and I'd wait, then my focus is broken because I'm wondering why I'm not getting a suggestion, I look in the bottom status bar, and Cody has some red symbol on it. When I did get something back from Cody, I just felt the results were equal to or worse than Copilot. I only paid for Cody to get Claude 3 Opus and that's all I tried. In addition to bugs that caused Cody to not work, I had multiple plugin crashes reported to me by my IDE. Here [0] is one of the bugs I saw, it was the last one I got before I uninstalled Cody and canceled my Pro subscription. The last thing I'll say is that the purchase/activation process was not good. I signed up for an account, installed the plugin, logged in, realized if I wanted Claude 3 Opus I'd need a "Pro" account, bought a Pro account, went back to the plugin and had to log out and back in for it to realize I was a pro member. A "check membership status" button/option would be nice. I looked in the preferences and everything on the sidebar panel I could click on. I also tried opening/closing the panel and some other things I thought might trigger an account update call, no dice. It's whatever and I did eventually get it working (by logging out/in) but I wouldn't want that to be the user experience for someone who just gave me money so I thought I'd mention it. [0] https://github.com/sourcegraph/jetbrains/issues/1306 https://github.com/sourcegraph/jetbrains/issues/1306

brevitea 2y ago

Hope it's not another Devin situation...

linsomniac 2y ago

Just to clarify, this is augmentcode.com , not augment.co ("Personal AI assistant")

rayxi271828 2y ago

While it's clear that AI coding assistants still have a long way to go in general, I wonder how yet another startup, presumably based on the same technology at the back, is going to differentiate itself in a material way? There are only so many axes along which improvements can be made in this domain, aren't there? What are the bottlenecks that, if solved, will produce a true breakthrough, exactly? Doesn't the current approach have an upper limit that's inherent in the whole architecture, nay, even the whole foundational theoretical aspect of it? Would love to hear from anyone who has come across one AI coding assistant that's obviously head and shoulders above everything else. I've tried Copilot, CodeWhisperer, and Ghostwriter.

mulmen 2y ago
With emerging technology both capital and product follow the Monte Carlo method.
jerrygoyal 2y ago
give Cody a try.
mike_hearn 2y ago
I tried Copilot and another one whose name I forgot (TabNine?). They didn't stick. What stuck is the new single line model JetBrains shipped recently in IntelliJ: • It runs locally. • It is extremely fast. • It is not overly aggressive. It only shows up sometimes and when it does I nearly always accept its suggestion. • It's a native part of the IDE so doesn't interfere with autocompletion. I gotta say, JetBrains nailed it with this one. Single line mode is a much better way to think about AI driven autocomplete. That said, it's also obviously much more limited. It helps and is pleasant, but isn't revolutionary. The other AI assistant I use sometimes is aider.chat, it's an open source tool. You type what you want and it generates git commits for the requested change. This is clearly the direction to go in long term and is much more revolutionary, but there are still problems with it. > What are the bottlenecks that, if solved, will produce a true breakthrough, exactly? There's a lot of "low hanging fruit" here (not that low), because the big AI labs aren't focusing on code gen AI right now. I can think of at least 4 or 5 paper-sized research directions to make improvements. The challenge is that right now the only models any good at coding are GPT-4/Opus level models, so doing anything with them is impossible unless you're working at a tiny number of labs. I don't work there so the "obvious" ideas I have aren't of much use. That leaves explorations of whether you can take a great open source model and boost its coding skills a lot. I think you probably can, especially if you have the resources to do a Mixtral or a Llama 3 yourself. Most smaller labs seem to be focussing on general performance optimizations rather than trying to reach GPT-4 level skills so the number of labs capable of doing these experiments should go up with time. From talking to people there's also a general fear I think that there's not much point working on some sorts of ideas because what if OpenAI come out with GPT-5 and everyone gets taught another Bitter Lesson (http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)? Better to just wait things out and see where model capabilities stabilize. From all the noise about licensing deals it's starting to sound like we're data constrained even for the companies that are pushing the boundaries of what fair use means, so maybe we'll see appetite to do smarter things with coding models next year.

moneywoes 2y ago

how did they raise so much?

heyoni 2y ago
Eric Schmidt. It’s in the title.

nsagent 2y ago

> Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows. I'm really curious about this. I honestly don't see a case where I would use a coding assistant and everyone I have spoken to that does, hasn't been a strong coder (they would characterize themselves this way and I certainly agree with their assessment). I'd love to hear from strong coders — people whom others normally go to when they have a problem with some code (whether debugging or designing something new) who now regularly use AI coding assistants. What do you find useful? In what way does it improve your workflow? Are there tasks where you explicitly avoid them? How often do you find bugs in the generated code (and a corollary, how frequently has a bug slipped in that was only caught later)?

pennomi 2y ago
I’m a strong coder. AI assistants can effectively be considered a really smart autocomplete. It simply saves time to insert the characters I was going to type anyway. If it suggests something other than what I want, I just simply don’t press tab.
rpbiwer2 2y ago
I was skeptical at first - tried the copilot beta, got annoyed by it, and quickly turned it off. Later I tried it again and haven't looked back. For the most part it's not that I'm ceding the thinking to the machine; more often it suggests what I was going to type anyway, which if nothing else saves typing. It's especially helpful if I'm doing something repetitive. Beyond that, it can save some cognitive load by auto completing a block of code that wouldn't have necessarily been very difficult, but that I would've had a stop to think about. E.g an API I'm not used to, or a nested loop or something. The other big advantage that comes to mind is when I'm doing something I'm not familiar with, e.g. I recently started using Rust, and copilot has been a major help when I vaguely know what I _want_ to do but don't quite know how to get there on my own. I'm experienced enough to evaluate whether the suggested code does what I want. If there's anything in the output I don't understand, I can look it up. > Are there tasks where you explicitly avoid them? Not necessarily that I can think of, but after having copilot on for a little while it's gotten easier to tune it out when I'm not interested in its suggestions or when they're not helpful. > How often do you find bugs in the generated code (and a corollary, how frequently has a bug slipped in that was only caught later)? 90% of the time I'm only accepting a single line of code at a time, so it's less a question of "is there a bug here" and more "does this do what I want or not?" Like, if I'm writing an email and gmail suggests an end to my sentence, I'm not worried about whether there's a bug in the sentence. If it's not what I want to say, I either don't take the suggestion, or I take the suggestion and modify it. If I do accept larger chunks of suggested code, I review it thoroughly to the point where it's no longer "the AI's" code -- for all intents and purposes it's mine now. Like I said before, most of the time it's basically the code I was going to write anyway, I just got there faster.

hipadev23 2y ago

I look forward to anything better than Github Copilot. The implementation in VSCode is horribly slow, constantly injects a lightning bolt icon near my cursor, and interferes with intellisense-style LSP language hints/docs. I’ve found it mostly helpful for saving time on obvious boilerplate code, but the annoyances above plus the occasional inexplicable errors it introduces in said boilerplate code, I’ve just cancelled the entire thing.

cal85 2y ago
I agree with you on Copilot’s clunky integration in VS Code, but I never really thought of it as slow, maybe because I have no other code assistant AI to compare it to. Are others faster?
- onel 2y ago
  I read that for supermaven speed is one of the big pluses. That and the 300,000 context. Haven't tried it though

budududuroiu 2y ago

Does anyone here get genuinely useful suggestions from Copilot? I found it amazing for 1 thing: filling up verbose configuration like Terraform or Kubernetes manifests. For code, it’s horrible, to the degree that I spend more time rejecting Copilot suggestions or having to extensively modify the ones I accept. I stopped using it couple months ago

zarzavat 2y ago
This is not my experience at all. How are you using it? And in what programming language? The technique to using Copilot (as with any auto-completion) is to keep typing until you get a completion that is equal to what you were going to type. So yes you have to keep rejecting things but the rejection doesn’t take any more effort than normal auto completion.
- budududuroiu 2y ago
  Had this experience across statically typed languages and not. I do admit if your type system is set up correctly, Copilot improves greatly. For me I didn’t find the value I got out of typing 90% of the code I wanted for 10% completion to be worth the $20/month subscription.
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    The reason I ask is that it’s going to perform better if the language you use is well-represented in the training set. Much of the value of Copilot is that it helps you navigate new things that you are not familiar with. For example, I use scipy/numpy a few times a month, so I am competent but not an expert by any means. Copilot is incredibly useful to suggest ways of doing things that are more idiomatic than what I was planning to write. Another way that it is useful is that it massively reduces logical bugs such as off-by-one errors that aren’t caught by typechecking, since it’s unlikely that both me and copilot will make the same off-by-one error at the same time. If only copilot makes an off-by-one error then I will catch it because the suggestion will be different to what I expected. If I am about to make an off-by-one error then copilot will suggest something contrary to my expectation and that forces me to reconsider what I was about to write.

electriclove 2y ago

Is Eric Schmidt still relevant?

aborsy 2y ago
He has some government roles apparently! Care to clarify?
khazhoux 2y ago
In what sense? He funds many companies, so in that sense he is still relevant. He can opine on how he grew the biggest company that launched today’s web, so in that sense he is still relevant. And let’s not forget, you know his name but he doesn’t know yours, so in that sense also he is relevant.

aborsy 2y ago

I haven’t used copilot. Isn’t it collecting a lot code from the Internet and combining to make auto complete suggestions? I just don’t see how it could think and write new code like a human developer would. Any feedback from copilot users?

esalman 2y ago
The magic is in how it combines the code based on context.

khazhoux 2y ago

It's hard to imagine how a company raised a quarter-billion dollars off the same idea everyone had --and many already acted on-- after we all saw chatgpt in 2022. There's how many copilots already?

flanked-evergl 2y ago
Is there any other service that does what GitHub copilot does? I have looked, and they are all just ChatGPT like things branded copilot, maybe I have not looked hard enough.
- geepytee 2y ago
  Lots of them. Check out https://double.bot https://double.bot for example.

fdschoeneman 2y ago

They collected my email when I signed up to try and then told me I couldn't try it. Unethical.

peter_d_sherman 2y ago

>"Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers. Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent). Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together?" Well, we don't know! We do know however that there are a lot of AI coding assistants, and there will probably be many more in the years to come... The excerpted text above -- makes for a reasonably good list as to what's available as of the current date... Related: https://github.com/sourcegraph/awesome-code-ai https://github.com/sourcegraph/awesome-code-ai

chubs 2y ago

The article says "Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort" - correct me if i'm wrong (happens often! :) ) - but does this mean that they're using some open model from huggingface, wrapping some UI around it, and voila they're worth a billion dollars? Hmm.

0xfedbee 2y ago

Just another blow of air into the AI bubble. Can’t wait to see all these stupid companies and their VCs go bankrupt.

htrp 2y ago

>In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify. The other problem is they may have built a solution that was state of the art at the time but the SOTA has passed them by. A lot of AI codegen/completion solutions were inspired by general transformer (Bert or GPT2) approaches without any type of chat tuning models.... and then OpenAI dropped ChatGPT. So what was a revolutionary demo in 2022 is now just a couple of CoT prompts in the latest openAI api call.

tom_vidal 2y ago

What on earth is the point of doing “stealth”? This just sounds to me like a way to burn money and scale before finding product-market fit.