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GitHub Copilot: The Agent Awakens

209 points by meetpateltech 2y ago

solarkraft 2y ago
This was sorely missing. This might get me to give it another shot in case they have finally un-fucked their suggestions which have just been getting worse ever which the release.
gauravphoenix 2y ago
awakened by replit/cursor
- sunshadow 2y ago
  Too late, we all went to cursor.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Who is 'all'?
    - yawnxyz 2y ago
      not sure, but apparently > Cursor is the fastest-growing SaaS company of all time from $1M to $100M in ARR, hitting the $100M milestone in roughly 12 months at the end of 2024—faster than Wiz (18 months), Deel (20 months), and Ramp (24 months). Source: https://sacra.com/c/cursor https://sacra.com/c/cursor
      - hshshshshsh 2y ago
        Makes sense cause everyone went to Wiz, Deel and Ramp.
lolinder 2y ago
They'd better get on the IntelliJ integration fast— if I'm going to switch editors in order to use an LLM coding assistant, I may as well just switch to Cursor, which has a strong head start on them on the assistant and also has a much better autocomplete. I'm honestly surprised to see no mention here of them moving to replicate Cursor's autocomplete—IMO that is where Cursor's real edge lies. Anyone can wrap a chatbot in some UI that allows you to avoid pasting by hand, but Cursor's ability to guess my next move—even several lines away—makes it far and away more efficient than alternatives.
- theasisa 2y ago
  I tried Cursor a couple of years ago and wasn't impressed - has it improved a lot? I only use autocomplete, not the chat function and at the time found CoPilot superior.
  - baq 2y ago
    It has improved but you're missing out if you aren't using the big ticket features. I tab myself to solutions, too, but if there's a react view to do, I dish out the composer and am literally 10x faster - what would previously take a day now takes an hour. If there's an interface to create out of a json blob, I paste the blob and just tell it to make an interface, then clean up the types a bit, etc.
  - sturza 2y ago
    Years?
    - Gothmog69 2y ago
      Tried cursor on my amiga II and wasn't that impressed tbh
      - snvzz 2y ago
        Cursor was an AmigaBASIC compiler for AmigaOS.
RobinL 2y ago
Can anyone speak to weather it's worth going back to co-pilot from cursor. On the face of it $10 a month for unlimited messages looks compelling. Is it really unlimited? From these videos it's starting to look pretty similar to cursor...
- dedene 2y ago
  I want to know as well. For me, everything I tested so far still can’t beat the autocomplete of Cursor both in speed as intelligence…
- alach11 2y ago
  I've been switching back and forth a bit at work recently, and I find Cursor still has a slight edge.
  - debian3 2y ago
    I use both too. 1 year ago Cursor was way ahead. Copilot had only one model and it was 4k input 4k output and it was forgetting about the previous reply. It was horrible. One year later, the input context is at 128k token if you use vs code insider (64k for stable). You have multiples models, etc. they still cut corner like o1 barely answer (I guess they severely restrict the amount of output token) but sonnet 3.5 works surprisingly well. They do have rate limit, you can check their issues tracker on GitHub, there are complaints about rate limits every day. All in all, for $10 it’s good value. Cursor is also great for $20 and you get more models and more features. Copilot is catching up fast, but they are not there yet. But they finally woke up.
    - mohsen1 2y ago
      https://github.blog/changelog/2025-02-06-next-edit-suggestions-agent-mode-and-prompts-files-for-github-copilot-in-vs-code-january-release-v0-24/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-02-06-next-edit-suggestio... Next Edit might finally compete with Cursor Tab. I have not tested it yet though
    - RobinL 2y ago
dabinat 2y ago
I use Copilot and it’s a game-changer for my productivity, but I really wish it was capable of natural language searching. So for example I could ask it “show me all places in the code where x is assigned a value but a flush() command is not immediately issued afterwards”.
- jgilias 2y ago
  I think Cursor can do this, if you @codebase, isn’t there something similar in copilot? E.g., your codebase being vectorized, indexed, and used as an embedding?
  - shaneofalltrad 2y ago
    I have had Cursor review all my file content solving similar things, but I would think it's limited to VSCode search capabilities and IMHO it's not great. I love how Pycharm handles indexing so search is fast and accurate. If they ever get agents going at the same quality as Cursor I would probably go to Pycharm for that advantage alone.
    - wrs 2y ago
      Cursor implemented their own code indexer so its RAG is not limited by VS Code search.
- simonw 2y ago
  I answer those kinds of questions by piping my entire codebase into a large context model (like Claude or o3-mini or Gemini) and prompting it directly. Here's a recent example: files-to-prompt datasette tests -e py -c | \ llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp -u \ 'which of these files contain tests that indirectly exercise the label_column_for_table() function' https://gist.github.com/simonw/bee455c41d463abc6282a5c9c132c1ad https://gist.github.com/simonw/bee455c41d463abc6282a5c9c132c...
  - dplgk 2y ago
    Your code is pretty small if it fits within the context if any major LLM. But very nice if it does!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xnx 2y ago
What's the current best free ($) coding assistant? I like Gemini + VS Code, but it seems a little hamstrung by what VS Code extensions are allowed to do.
- mvieira38 2y ago
  I get by just fine with Codeium on VS Code, although lately I have been getting some crashes
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  I'm actually curious about this too. I've been experimenting with having Claude write the code and DeepSeek analyze, pasting the analysis into Claude to modify the code, rinse and repeat. Surprisingly, or maybe not, they have come up with an almost fully standards compliant LALR parser for APL -- which is notoriously hard to parse. DeepSeek gets in there "nice and deep, boy" and shakes out all the corner cases while Claude does a fairly good job of implementing the fixes without breaking anything else. Just a few more round and... But, as one might imagine, this isn't very practical for anything other than just playing around as I have to copy/paste code into the two different chat windows. I suppose I could get them to write an extension for gedit (my preferred 'code editor'), hmm...
- kristopolous 2y ago
  vscode with cline or roo + openrouter + free models. The latest free gemini ones are pretty ok.
aresant 2y ago
“Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.” … until we train our model on your usage data and totally replace you
- threatofrain 2y ago
  If we actually could get to a world where programmers can be replaced, we'll also likely find that vast swathes of the population will be replaced. Then we'll need a totally new conversation on how society should look. That conversation is coming no matter what, because there will not be a global consensus to stop ML development, esp. on the war front.
  - johnfn 2y ago
    In a world where programmers can be replaced, it's less clear to me that plumbers, janitors, electricians, construction laborers, etc, are also all out of a job.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      Think secondary effects. What does a world in which almost every programmer can be automated look like? It looks like massive extremely fast technological development, how to build and program robotics will be solved almost instantly. With solved robotics goes every other labor. We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, until they lose control of it too.
      - johnfn 2y ago
        I still don't see it. I think for quite a while replacing a single engineer will be costly and resource-intensive. I think many companies would be happy to replace all programmers with AI that are just as slow as programmers, but marginally cheaper. That doesn't mean that we'll suddenly have massive extremely fast technological development.
ai-christianson 2y ago
Very cool! I'm working on a similar agent, but FOSS (https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid) --It'll be really interesting to see how the GitHub agent works. On first impressions, it looks like they are taking the route of integrating tightly with VSCode, which means they'll be competing with Cline, Cursor, and Windsurf. IMO it might be good for them to release this on the web, similar to the replit agent. Integration with GitHub directly would be awesome.
- spiritplumber 2y ago
  Very neat!
anonzzzies 2y ago
I downloaded Insiders and installed Github Copilot Chat, getting: "GitHub Copilot Chat is not compatible with this version of VS Code. Please make sure that you have the latest versions of the extension and VS Code installed."
- Piterniel 2y ago
  Same here
  - isidorn 2y ago
    Sorry about that. Can you switch to copilot chat pre-release extension. Should be a big button "switch to pre-release". We are tracking this issue here https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/239836 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/239836
bramhaag 2y ago
It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them People were already blindly copy pasting commands from StackExchange answers, but at least those are moderated. I wonder how long it takes before someone nukes their project or root directory.
- ddalex 2y ago
  nuke a project or root is the best case scenario
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    The likely case is that it almost never does anything harmful. I've never once seen an LLM tell me to run rm -rf /
    - indymike 2y ago
      yet
      - debian3 2y ago
        I will need to rebuild that dev container.
- conradfr 2y ago
  That's why you need Jetbrains local history feature.
- why-el 2y ago
  > "ask you" I get the concern, however. But, short of nuking the actual .git directory, the upsides are worth it, in my opinion. Cursor offers filtering via a mini-prompt in its YOLO mode, so does Windsurf. The idea is killer, it allows it to progressively build and also correct its own errors. e.g. Cursorrules can be told to run tests after a feature is generated, or typecheck, or some other automated feedback-loop your codebase offers. That's pretty neat! Better yet, setup a dev container first. Then, at most, your local DB is the only concern. If still paranoid (as you should be), suspend your network while the agent is working. :D
rvz 2y ago
Wonderful! Another thing that will have downtime from the folks that brought you GitHub Actions (which goes down every month) Now when GitHub Copilot and its Agents go down are you just going to be waiting for it to fix your critical issue, or will you just roll your sleaves up and do it yourself? Can't wait for these agents to all stop working all at the same time the moment GitHub has another outage.
Ninjinka 2y ago
Wow, Copilot is so behind Cursor it's pathetic
- dhdjruf 2y ago
  Its lightyears ahead on the name. Remember that book. Guys remember that book that says adding more programmers actually doesn't speed up but extends the projects completion time! I read that book I am learned. The unlearned probably thinks the name refers to a planes copilot.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  And the M365 copilot is utter trash as well. It's the only thing we're allowed to use at work and it can barely write functional PowerShell.
zombiwoof 2y ago
Vs code speech makes Siri and the billions spend look more shit than it is
diggan 2y ago
> When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write better code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer. Later: > GitHub Copilot’s new agent mode is capable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically. Is this Microsoft/GitHub acknowledging they initially missed the mark, except they aren't really clear in the post that they're abandoning the approach of "AI pair programmer / not replacing the developer"? Seems really strange to re-iterate their "clear goal" and then in the next paragraph go directly against their goal? Are they maybe afraid of a potential backslash if it became more clear that they're now looking to replace (some) developers / the boring parts of development? I have no opinions either way, but the messaging of the post seems to go into all different directions, which seems strange.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  I don't see a contradiction
- chipgap98 2y ago
  I don't think those are contradictory. The agent is iterating on the code it writes in order to be more useful.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add. This makes it seem like a very basic/rudimentary developer could be replaced by the new autonomous agent. Or am I misunderstanding what they're announcing here?
    - chipgap98 2y ago
      Ah sorry I missed that part. You are right that this sounds like more replacement for people
astrodude 2y ago
Windsurf is a solid tool in this space. CoPilot and Cursor are way behind
xena 2y ago
And this is how we get automated out of a job. To a product announcement.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  You must be a pretty bad programmer if this can take your job.
amrocha 2y ago
I don’t see how this is a net positive for programmers, and for people in general. It’s hard to fathom why anyone worked on this.
- empath75 2y ago
  There is not a limited amount of coding work that is available to do in the world. Many more things will be automated if automation is cheaper and easier, and no matter how much software development work is done by bots, there will always be work for people to do.
hole_in_foot 2y ago
[dead]
acedTrex 2y ago
I am so over this LLM obsession. Please let it end
- 93po 2y ago
  I am so over this internet/computer/combustion engine obsession. Please let it end ;)
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Sorry, this is as paradigmatic a shift as microcomputers, the consumer internet and smartphones. If you really really hate it, you'll either have to leave the industry or stay way out of the mainstream.
  - acedTrex 2y ago
    Those shifts were plainly and immediately obvious. LLMs have yet to deliver on any of their promises and every interaction with them shows the fundamental limitations.
ks2048 2y ago
So what happens when GitHub's auto-SWE is good enough to take on "Write me a GitHub clone, but with additional features X,Y, and Z"? Will they have regret it? I know this is slightly far-fetched and AI-coders are coming regardless of if GitHub is working on it, but it does seem like these companies are destroying part of their moat (codebase and SW infrastructure). (I also realize their bigger moat is brand and existing user base).
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  If that works, they can always put more money into improving GitHub. I see this as a technology that "lifts all boats" but like so many technologies, it does lift moneyed boats a lot further.
- petercooper 2y ago
  I mean, we have GitLab, Forgejo, Gitea, Sourcehut, and many others all vaguely in that space and they're not eating GitHub's breakfast. If anything, it reinforces just how wide that moat of brand, momentum, and influence/power is, and it might get even wider in an AI world.
- TuxSH 2y ago
  GitHub's real moat is their good and responsive support (even for free users), infra (GH Actions, GHCR, etc.), and value as social network. Indeed, people use GitHub because all their peers do (network effect). Gitea focuses on self-hosting AFAIK
balls187 2y ago
Was using Github copilot with VSCode. Found it really helpful for small things. I gave Codium Windsurf a spin to evaluate it on an internal app built: a simple svelte-kit/typescript app ontop of Twilio. It's been on todo list to host it (on lightsail), so the suits can use it themselves. Asked Windsurf to enhance some capabilities: adding a store library backing to dynamodb. Windsurf's code failed to run. svelte-check reported 6 errors. I asked windsurf to fix the errors, and it did, creating 10 errors. Repeat one more time and resulted in 16 errors. If I wasn't busy, I would have seen how many errors it would get up to before I got bored. It felt like repeatedly opening a JPEG and resaving it. Giving up on using Windsurf. Gonna try Cursor next. After that, back to Github.
magicmicah85 2y ago
The autonomous agent stuff is what’s had me worried the past year as lots of open source projects have popped up that do similar capabilities. It’s really cool technology but it will replace humans, no matter how garbage the code quality is. I’ve seen garbage from humans, I’ve seen garbage from AI. As long as metrics are being met, business does not care how they achieve their goals. I for one am going to welcome our new agent underlords as I’m all about self preservation.
brianmcc 2y ago
Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages." Not wanting to come across all Luddite about it, but we really ought not to stumble blindly into all this. That said, I remain sceptical. The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.
- ALittleLight 2y ago
  True, but if the coding becomes trivial then you'll be replaced by a good PM who can work with an agent team.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Coding was always trivial (see code generators, snippets, templates). The issue is making all the little pieces work and adjust them as needed.
    - Almondsetat 2y ago
      And that's why software engineering =/= coding
      - skydhash 2y ago
        I'm currently reading Modern Software Engineering by David Farley and I can say that we won't see programmers replaced unless all the concerns pointed out in this book and others has been resolved.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      No-code database work was solved with Filemaker Pro decades ago. It turned out that you also need an attention span and an interest in the subject. Most of the flowchart automation software I've been playing around with is already good enough. The Python ecosystem is good enough. Ollama is good enough. The small, purpose built models people seem compelled to make are good enough. If I can replicate your SaaS business model by crawling your site for a description of services, what does that do to the landscape?
Tarucho 2y ago
Time to quit using Github?
phil917 2y ago
I feel like anytime I try these "agentic" programming tools they always fall on their face. Devin was pretty bad and honestly soaked up more time than it saved. I've tried Cursor Composer before and came away with bad results. I tried Copilot again just now with o3-mini and it just completely hallucinated up some fields into my project when I asked it to do something... Am I taking crazy pills or do these tools kinda suck?
- jetpackjoe 2y ago
  You might be asking it too much, or not giving it enough context. I've found the Cursor Agent to work great when you give it a narrow scope and plenty of examples.
  - phil917 2y ago
    Perhaps, but at that point I feel like I'm spending more time feeding the tool the right prompt and context, going back and forth with corrections, etc... when I could just write the code myself with less time and hassle. I've definitely had far more success with using AI as a fuzzy search or asking it for one-off pieces of functionality. Any time I ask it to interact directly inside my codebase, it usually fails.
anttiharju 2y ago
The post appears to have a lot of points in a relatively short amount of time (165 in 3h). I wonder why it has fallen of the front page of hn.
- mohsen1 2y ago
  I came here by submitting the link. Indeed it’s a little suspicious
taimurcoder99 2y ago
For someone who wants a succinct summary of all the top comments summarized in simple English: https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/9a9c6519-9fd1-4b8a-87c0-7dabedeac397 https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/9a9c6519-9fd1-4b8a-87c0-7...
taimurcoder99 2y ago
Summary of this page from chatgpt: https://chatgpt.com/c/67a53bee-35d8-8010-a043-5b3ece65870f https://chatgpt.com/c/67a53bee-35d8-8010-a043-5b3ece65870f
crakhamster01 2y ago
I keep going back and forth on whether Agents are good for the software development discipline. While I think it's extremely short-sighted that we continue to push full steam ahead on AI automating away jobs, I can't deny that LLMs have given my development flow a decent productivity boost. 80% of the time, my workflow with Cursor looks similar to the golden path depicted in this blog post - outline the changes I want made -> review the code -> suggest edits/iterate -> ship it. There's undoubtedly a class of problems where this feature can slot in and start chipping away immediately. The other 20% of the time, Cursor will hit a wall and is unable to complete the task through just prompting. It will either introduce a subtle bug in its logic, or come across an error that it incorrectly diagnoses. These stumbles can happen for a variety of reasons: 1. Poorly documented code - the LLM infers the wrong responsibility for a piece of code, or is led astray by old comments 2. Misleading or unhelpful errors from 1st/3rd party libraries 3. Task is too complex - perhaps I asked for more than I should have In any case, the "self-healing" functionality that Agents rely on to iterate is often insufficient. Prompting for a fix usually just leads me in circles or further down the path of a bad solution. In these instances, I have to drop the coding assistant altogether and do things the old fashioned way - gain a sufficient understanding of the code and figure out where the LLM went wrong (or just write the solution from scratch). I guess going back to my initial point, it feels like the easy answer is that Agents are good if you're a senior/experienced developer. This means that in the short-term the demand for junior engineers will dry up, since we have Agents to do the rote work, but doesn't this mean that we're effectively choking out the pipeline for experienced devs? Though they're low in complexity/value, the tasks we will handoff to Agents are immeasurably useful for building software fundamentals. It seems like in 2025 we've suddenly forgotten about "teaching a man to fish"...
myth_drannon 2y ago
Does anyone remember 4GL languages[1] and CASE tools that were all the rage in the '90s and were supposed to make software developers obsolete? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...
Jarie_Tuytens 2y ago
How is anyone surprised by their incentive to replace SWE jobs? SWE's have an immensely big piece of the companies budget, and that pain is what has led us to where we are now. Remember, this pain is also human made. We created how software was made, people latched onto it, acted as if it was a science, not realizing that humans can also CHANGE the way software is made. You can't change physics, but you can change human made concepts (up to a certain degree ofcourse, CS itself is still key).
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209 points by meetpateltech 2y ago

This was sorely missing. This might get me to give it another shot in case they have finally un-fucked their suggestions which have just been getting worse ever which the release.

gauravphoenix 2y ago

awakened by replit/cursor

sunshadow 2y ago
Too late, we all went to cursor.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Who is 'all'?
  - yawnxyz 2y ago
    not sure, but apparently > Cursor is the fastest-growing SaaS company of all time from $1M to $100M in ARR, hitting the $100M milestone in roughly 12 months at the end of 2024—faster than Wiz (18 months), Deel (20 months), and Ramp (24 months). Source: https://sacra.com/c/cursor https://sacra.com/c/cursor
    - hshshshshsh 2y ago
      Makes sense cause everyone went to Wiz, Deel and Ramp.

lolinder 2y ago

They'd better get on the IntelliJ integration fast— if I'm going to switch editors in order to use an LLM coding assistant, I may as well just switch to Cursor, which has a strong head start on them on the assistant and also has a much better autocomplete. I'm honestly surprised to see no mention here of them moving to replicate Cursor's autocomplete—IMO that is where Cursor's real edge lies. Anyone can wrap a chatbot in some UI that allows you to avoid pasting by hand, but Cursor's ability to guess my next move—even several lines away—makes it far and away more efficient than alternatives.

theasisa 2y ago
I tried Cursor a couple of years ago and wasn't impressed - has it improved a lot? I only use autocomplete, not the chat function and at the time found CoPilot superior.
- baq 2y ago
  It has improved but you're missing out if you aren't using the big ticket features. I tab myself to solutions, too, but if there's a react view to do, I dish out the composer and am literally 10x faster - what would previously take a day now takes an hour. If there's an interface to create out of a json blob, I paste the blob and just tell it to make an interface, then clean up the types a bit, etc.
- sturza 2y ago
  Years?
  - Gothmog69 2y ago
    Tried cursor on my amiga II and wasn't that impressed tbh
    - snvzz 2y ago
      Cursor was an AmigaBASIC compiler for AmigaOS.

RobinL 2y ago

Can anyone speak to weather it's worth going back to co-pilot from cursor. On the face of it $10 a month for unlimited messages looks compelling. Is it really unlimited? From these videos it's starting to look pretty similar to cursor...

dedene 2y ago
I want to know as well. For me, everything I tested so far still can’t beat the autocomplete of Cursor both in speed as intelligence…
alach11 2y ago
I've been switching back and forth a bit at work recently, and I find Cursor still has a slight edge.
- debian3 2y ago
  I use both too. 1 year ago Cursor was way ahead. Copilot had only one model and it was 4k input 4k output and it was forgetting about the previous reply. It was horrible. One year later, the input context is at 128k token if you use vs code insider (64k for stable). You have multiples models, etc. they still cut corner like o1 barely answer (I guess they severely restrict the amount of output token) but sonnet 3.5 works surprisingly well. They do have rate limit, you can check their issues tracker on GitHub, there are complaints about rate limits every day. All in all, for $10 it’s good value. Cursor is also great for $20 and you get more models and more features. Copilot is catching up fast, but they are not there yet. But they finally woke up.
  - mohsen1 2y ago
    https://github.blog/changelog/2025-02-06-next-edit-suggestions-agent-mode-and-prompts-files-for-github-copilot-in-vs-code-january-release-v0-24/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-02-06-next-edit-suggestio... Next Edit might finally compete with Cursor Tab. I have not tested it yet though
  - RobinL 2y ago

dabinat 2y ago

I use Copilot and it’s a game-changer for my productivity, but I really wish it was capable of natural language searching. So for example I could ask it “show me all places in the code where x is assigned a value but a flush() command is not immediately issued afterwards”.

jgilias 2y ago
I think Cursor can do this, if you @codebase, isn’t there something similar in copilot? E.g., your codebase being vectorized, indexed, and used as an embedding?
- shaneofalltrad 2y ago
  I have had Cursor review all my file content solving similar things, but I would think it's limited to VSCode search capabilities and IMHO it's not great. I love how Pycharm handles indexing so search is fast and accurate. If they ever get agents going at the same quality as Cursor I would probably go to Pycharm for that advantage alone.
  - wrs 2y ago
    Cursor implemented their own code indexer so its RAG is not limited by VS Code search.
simonw 2y ago
I answer those kinds of questions by piping my entire codebase into a large context model (like Claude or o3-mini or Gemini) and prompting it directly. Here's a recent example: files-to-prompt datasette tests -e py -c | \ llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp -u \ 'which of these files contain tests that indirectly exercise the label_column_for_table() function' https://gist.github.com/simonw/bee455c41d463abc6282a5c9c132c1ad https://gist.github.com/simonw/bee455c41d463abc6282a5c9c132c...
- dplgk 2y ago
  Your code is pretty small if it fits within the context if any major LLM. But very nice if it does!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xnx 2y ago

What's the current best free ($) coding assistant? I like Gemini + VS Code, but it seems a little hamstrung by what VS Code extensions are allowed to do.

mvieira38 2y ago
I get by just fine with Codeium on VS Code, although lately I have been getting some crashes
UncleEntity 2y ago
I'm actually curious about this too. I've been experimenting with having Claude write the code and DeepSeek analyze, pasting the analysis into Claude to modify the code, rinse and repeat. Surprisingly, or maybe not, they have come up with an almost fully standards compliant LALR parser for APL -- which is notoriously hard to parse. DeepSeek gets in there "nice and deep, boy" and shakes out all the corner cases while Claude does a fairly good job of implementing the fixes without breaking anything else. Just a few more round and... But, as one might imagine, this isn't very practical for anything other than just playing around as I have to copy/paste code into the two different chat windows. I suppose I could get them to write an extension for gedit (my preferred 'code editor'), hmm...
kristopolous 2y ago
vscode with cline or roo + openrouter + free models. The latest free gemini ones are pretty ok.

aresant 2y ago

“Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.” … until we train our model on your usage data and totally replace you

threatofrain 2y ago
If we actually could get to a world where programmers can be replaced, we'll also likely find that vast swathes of the population will be replaced. Then we'll need a totally new conversation on how society should look. That conversation is coming no matter what, because there will not be a global consensus to stop ML development, esp. on the war front.
- johnfn 2y ago
  In a world where programmers can be replaced, it's less clear to me that plumbers, janitors, electricians, construction laborers, etc, are also all out of a job.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    Think secondary effects. What does a world in which almost every programmer can be automated look like? It looks like massive extremely fast technological development, how to build and program robotics will be solved almost instantly. With solved robotics goes every other labor. We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, until they lose control of it too.
    - johnfn 2y ago
      I still don't see it. I think for quite a while replacing a single engineer will be costly and resource-intensive. I think many companies would be happy to replace all programmers with AI that are just as slow as programmers, but marginally cheaper. That doesn't mean that we'll suddenly have massive extremely fast technological development.

ai-christianson 2y ago

Very cool! I'm working on a similar agent, but FOSS (https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid) --It'll be really interesting to see how the GitHub agent works. On first impressions, it looks like they are taking the route of integrating tightly with VSCode, which means they'll be competing with Cline, Cursor, and Windsurf. IMO it might be good for them to release this on the web, similar to the replit agent. Integration with GitHub directly would be awesome.

spiritplumber 2y ago
Very neat!

anonzzzies 2y ago

I downloaded Insiders and installed Github Copilot Chat, getting: "GitHub Copilot Chat is not compatible with this version of VS Code. Please make sure that you have the latest versions of the extension and VS Code installed."

Piterniel 2y ago
Same here
- isidorn 2y ago
  Sorry about that. Can you switch to copilot chat pre-release extension. Should be a big button "switch to pre-release". We are tracking this issue here https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/239836 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/239836

bramhaag 2y ago

It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them People were already blindly copy pasting commands from StackExchange answers, but at least those are moderated. I wonder how long it takes before someone nukes their project or root directory.

ddalex 2y ago
nuke a project or root is the best case scenario
- snapcaster 2y ago
  The likely case is that it almost never does anything harmful. I've never once seen an LLM tell me to run rm -rf /
  - indymike 2y ago
    yet
    - debian3 2y ago
      I will need to rebuild that dev container.
conradfr 2y ago
That's why you need Jetbrains local history feature.
why-el 2y ago
> "ask you" I get the concern, however. But, short of nuking the actual .git directory, the upsides are worth it, in my opinion. Cursor offers filtering via a mini-prompt in its YOLO mode, so does Windsurf. The idea is killer, it allows it to progressively build and also correct its own errors. e.g. Cursorrules can be told to run tests after a feature is generated, or typecheck, or some other automated feedback-loop your codebase offers. That's pretty neat! Better yet, setup a dev container first. Then, at most, your local DB is the only concern. If still paranoid (as you should be), suspend your network while the agent is working. :D

rvz 2y ago

Wonderful! Another thing that will have downtime from the folks that brought you GitHub Actions (which goes down every month) Now when GitHub Copilot and its Agents go down are you just going to be waiting for it to fix your critical issue, or will you just roll your sleaves up and do it yourself? Can't wait for these agents to all stop working all at the same time the moment GitHub has another outage.

Ninjinka 2y ago

Wow, Copilot is so behind Cursor it's pathetic

dhdjruf 2y ago
Its lightyears ahead on the name. Remember that book. Guys remember that book that says adding more programmers actually doesn't speed up but extends the projects completion time! I read that book I am learned. The unlearned probably thinks the name refers to a planes copilot.
bongodongobob 2y ago
And the M365 copilot is utter trash as well. It's the only thing we're allowed to use at work and it can barely write functional PowerShell.

zombiwoof 2y ago

Vs code speech makes Siri and the billions spend look more shit than it is

diggan 2y ago

> When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write better code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer. Later: > GitHub Copilot’s new agent mode is capable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically. Is this Microsoft/GitHub acknowledging they initially missed the mark, except they aren't really clear in the post that they're abandoning the approach of "AI pair programmer / not replacing the developer"? Seems really strange to re-iterate their "clear goal" and then in the next paragraph go directly against their goal? Are they maybe afraid of a potential backslash if it became more clear that they're now looking to replace (some) developers / the boring parts of development? I have no opinions either way, but the messaging of the post seems to go into all different directions, which seems strange.

WithinReason 2y ago
I don't see a contradiction
chipgap98 2y ago
I don't think those are contradictory. The agent is iterating on the code it writes in order to be more useful.
- diggan 2y ago
  > When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add. This makes it seem like a very basic/rudimentary developer could be replaced by the new autonomous agent. Or am I misunderstanding what they're announcing here?
  - chipgap98 2y ago
    Ah sorry I missed that part. You are right that this sounds like more replacement for people

astrodude 2y ago

Windsurf is a solid tool in this space. CoPilot and Cursor are way behind

xena 2y ago

And this is how we get automated out of a job. To a product announcement.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
You must be a pretty bad programmer if this can take your job.

amrocha 2y ago

I don’t see how this is a net positive for programmers, and for people in general. It’s hard to fathom why anyone worked on this.

empath75 2y ago
There is not a limited amount of coding work that is available to do in the world. Many more things will be automated if automation is cheaper and easier, and no matter how much software development work is done by bots, there will always be work for people to do.

hole_in_foot 2y ago

[dead]

acedTrex 2y ago

I am so over this LLM obsession. Please let it end

93po 2y ago
I am so over this internet/computer/combustion engine obsession. Please let it end ;)
kristopolous 2y ago
Sorry, this is as paradigmatic a shift as microcomputers, the consumer internet and smartphones. If you really really hate it, you'll either have to leave the industry or stay way out of the mainstream.
- acedTrex 2y ago
  Those shifts were plainly and immediately obvious. LLMs have yet to deliver on any of their promises and every interaction with them shows the fundamental limitations.

ks2048 2y ago

So what happens when GitHub's auto-SWE is good enough to take on "Write me a GitHub clone, but with additional features X,Y, and Z"? Will they have regret it? I know this is slightly far-fetched and AI-coders are coming regardless of if GitHub is working on it, but it does seem like these companies are destroying part of their moat (codebase and SW infrastructure). (I also realize their bigger moat is brand and existing user base).

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
If that works, they can always put more money into improving GitHub. I see this as a technology that "lifts all boats" but like so many technologies, it does lift moneyed boats a lot further.
petercooper 2y ago
I mean, we have GitLab, Forgejo, Gitea, Sourcehut, and many others all vaguely in that space and they're not eating GitHub's breakfast. If anything, it reinforces just how wide that moat of brand, momentum, and influence/power is, and it might get even wider in an AI world.
TuxSH 2y ago
GitHub's real moat is their good and responsive support (even for free users), infra (GH Actions, GHCR, etc.), and value as social network. Indeed, people use GitHub because all their peers do (network effect). Gitea focuses on self-hosting AFAIK

balls187 2y ago

Was using Github copilot with VSCode. Found it really helpful for small things. I gave Codium Windsurf a spin to evaluate it on an internal app built: a simple svelte-kit/typescript app ontop of Twilio. It's been on todo list to host it (on lightsail), so the suits can use it themselves. Asked Windsurf to enhance some capabilities: adding a store library backing to dynamodb. Windsurf's code failed to run. svelte-check reported 6 errors. I asked windsurf to fix the errors, and it did, creating 10 errors. Repeat one more time and resulted in 16 errors. If I wasn't busy, I would have seen how many errors it would get up to before I got bored. It felt like repeatedly opening a JPEG and resaving it. Giving up on using Windsurf. Gonna try Cursor next. After that, back to Github.

magicmicah85 2y ago

The autonomous agent stuff is what’s had me worried the past year as lots of open source projects have popped up that do similar capabilities. It’s really cool technology but it will replace humans, no matter how garbage the code quality is. I’ve seen garbage from humans, I’ve seen garbage from AI. As long as metrics are being met, business does not care how they achieve their goals. I for one am going to welcome our new agent underlords as I’m all about self preservation.

brianmcc 2y ago

Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages." Not wanting to come across all Luddite about it, but we really ought not to stumble blindly into all this. That said, I remain sceptical. The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.

ALittleLight 2y ago
True, but if the coding becomes trivial then you'll be replaced by a good PM who can work with an agent team.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Coding was always trivial (see code generators, snippets, templates). The issue is making all the little pieces work and adjust them as needed.
  - Almondsetat 2y ago
    And that's why software engineering =/= coding
    - skydhash 2y ago
      I'm currently reading Modern Software Engineering by David Farley and I can say that we won't see programmers replaced unless all the concerns pointed out in this book and others has been resolved.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    No-code database work was solved with Filemaker Pro decades ago. It turned out that you also need an attention span and an interest in the subject. Most of the flowchart automation software I've been playing around with is already good enough. The Python ecosystem is good enough. Ollama is good enough. The small, purpose built models people seem compelled to make are good enough. If I can replicate your SaaS business model by crawling your site for a description of services, what does that do to the landscape?

Tarucho 2y ago

Time to quit using Github?

phil917 2y ago

I feel like anytime I try these "agentic" programming tools they always fall on their face. Devin was pretty bad and honestly soaked up more time than it saved. I've tried Cursor Composer before and came away with bad results. I tried Copilot again just now with o3-mini and it just completely hallucinated up some fields into my project when I asked it to do something... Am I taking crazy pills or do these tools kinda suck?

jetpackjoe 2y ago
You might be asking it too much, or not giving it enough context. I've found the Cursor Agent to work great when you give it a narrow scope and plenty of examples.
- phil917 2y ago
  Perhaps, but at that point I feel like I'm spending more time feeding the tool the right prompt and context, going back and forth with corrections, etc... when I could just write the code myself with less time and hassle. I've definitely had far more success with using AI as a fuzzy search or asking it for one-off pieces of functionality. Any time I ask it to interact directly inside my codebase, it usually fails.

anttiharju 2y ago

The post appears to have a lot of points in a relatively short amount of time (165 in 3h). I wonder why it has fallen of the front page of hn.

mohsen1 2y ago
I came here by submitting the link. Indeed it’s a little suspicious

taimurcoder99 2y ago

For someone who wants a succinct summary of all the top comments summarized in simple English: https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/9a9c6519-9fd1-4b8a-87c0-7dabedeac397 https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/9a9c6519-9fd1-4b8a-87c0-7...

taimurcoder99 2y ago

Summary of this page from chatgpt: https://chatgpt.com/c/67a53bee-35d8-8010-a043-5b3ece65870f https://chatgpt.com/c/67a53bee-35d8-8010-a043-5b3ece65870f

crakhamster01 2y ago

I keep going back and forth on whether Agents are good for the software development discipline. While I think it's extremely short-sighted that we continue to push full steam ahead on AI automating away jobs, I can't deny that LLMs have given my development flow a decent productivity boost. 80% of the time, my workflow with Cursor looks similar to the golden path depicted in this blog post - outline the changes I want made -> review the code -> suggest edits/iterate -> ship it. There's undoubtedly a class of problems where this feature can slot in and start chipping away immediately. The other 20% of the time, Cursor will hit a wall and is unable to complete the task through just prompting. It will either introduce a subtle bug in its logic, or come across an error that it incorrectly diagnoses. These stumbles can happen for a variety of reasons: 1. Poorly documented code - the LLM infers the wrong responsibility for a piece of code, or is led astray by old comments 2. Misleading or unhelpful errors from 1st/3rd party libraries 3. Task is too complex - perhaps I asked for more than I should have In any case, the "self-healing" functionality that Agents rely on to iterate is often insufficient. Prompting for a fix usually just leads me in circles or further down the path of a bad solution. In these instances, I have to drop the coding assistant altogether and do things the old fashioned way - gain a sufficient understanding of the code and figure out where the LLM went wrong (or just write the solution from scratch). I guess going back to my initial point, it feels like the easy answer is that Agents are good if you're a senior/experienced developer. This means that in the short-term the demand for junior engineers will dry up, since we have Agents to do the rote work, but doesn't this mean that we're effectively choking out the pipeline for experienced devs? Though they're low in complexity/value, the tasks we will handoff to Agents are immeasurably useful for building software fundamentals. It seems like in 2025 we've suddenly forgotten about "teaching a man to fish"...

myth_drannon 2y ago

Does anyone remember 4GL languages[1] and CASE tools that were all the rage in the '90s and were supposed to make software developers obsolete? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

Jarie_Tuytens 2y ago

How is anyone surprised by their incentive to replace SWE jobs? SWE's have an immensely big piece of the companies budget, and that pain is what has led us to where we are now. Remember, this pain is also human made. We created how software was made, people latched onto it, acted as if it was a science, not realizing that humans can also CHANGE the way software is made. You can't change physics, but you can change human made concepts (up to a certain degree ofcourse, CS itself is still key).

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