6 ms·

> 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

by 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
rvz 2y ago
This sort of obfuscation of Microsoft/GitHub's real intentions *IS* deliberate. Unfortunately it's not just them, but pervasive across nearly all AI companies. > 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? Did they care about the writers, musicians, artists, journalists that had their jobs displaced or currently reduced? I don't think so and they got away with it. They don't care and in 2025, programmers of all ranks are next. Look at their actions and don't fall for the blog posts or statements.
suyash 2y ago
The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. 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." - Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  > 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. I hope I can turn this feature off, i.e. that it's not a feature other users can use on my repositories. I'm already getting AI slop comments suggesting unhelpful fixes on my open source projects, I don't need "the anointed one" sending over slop as well – while replacing the work of real humans, to boot.
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
    I thought there are restrictions about who can assign issues and who they can be assigned to? So, I would not expect that other users would be able to use it on your repositories (unless an exception is made, but I think it would be better if an exception is not made, so that other users can't use this feature on your repositories).
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      Ah, you're right, that makes sense. When I read "assign issues" I didn't connect it with GitHub's "assign issue/PR to user" feature – I don't use it very much since I'm the only one with write access on my projects. Thanks for pointing that out.
- throw83288 2y ago
  > Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my entire field that I've dreamed about for the past decade isn't about to get torched. With the pace that this field is getting solved I probably won't even have enough time to "pivot" to anything before they also get solved or upturned as well. Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve I've seen. 4 years ago these models weren't capable of stringing together a TODO app. I really, really want to be wrong. I really do.
nonethewiser 2y ago
I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers. And GitHub certainly isn’t saying the goal is to replace developers. I accept that is how you are interpreting it and I can see the argument. But Github isnt trying to get one over in their messaging. And besides I just dont agree with the idea that it takes the developer out of the loop. Whose controlling this better version of Copilot? Whose goals is it advancing? The developer.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers The blog post goes through more than what I mentioned in my comment. For example: > 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. How is that not trying to replace at least a small section of junior/boilerplate developers? The developer might be the one who listens to the product team, maybe even creates the issue and finally reviews the code before it gets merged. But I'm having a hard time imagining the flow above as "Pair programming" or a developer working with a "co-pilot", as they're trying to say it's all about.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    > How is that not trying to replace at least a small section of junior/boilerplate developers? This was a danger before AI ever became a thing. If that’s all someone is doing, there was always a danger of being outsourced to someone who would work for less than you would. And today in 2025, ignoring AI, there are thousands of generic framework developers struggling to get a job because every job they apply to has thousands of applications and companies can choose any good enough developer. It was always hard to break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle. Now it’s going to be harder. The solution at least for awhile is to run closer to the customer/stakeholder.
- jacobsenscott 2y ago
someothherguyy 2y ago
What else would the goal of agentic generative AI be other than to replace humans doing the same work?
- diggan 2y ago
  For me that's a no-brainer also. I guess my question is more about why their messaging is so messy and direction-less. Why not just say outright what their plan is?
  - whilenot-dev 2y ago
    Backlash towards the direction off of GitHub? I mean GitHub has to be one of the biggest assets when it comes to training data for source code, no? Projects should have already moved off of it when Microsoft got in the drivers seat.
Tarucho 2y ago
They are not going to say "we are making an agent to replace programmers. We will use their code and their guidance to train it"
827a 2y ago
IMO: Copilot (and Devin) has always missed the mark. Its always been a lazy, bad product that feels like it was made by a team that doesn't even want to use it themselves. Going more agentic is only going to make it worse; Copilot's product leadership appears obsessed with more comprehensive replacement of their customer workflows, but ideal customers want deeper and more fluid integration into the workflows. Its one of those facts that seems so obvious once you realize it, but no one at Github clearly does. Who is buying and using these things? Seriously, anyone at Github, answer that, not who you think is buying them, but who is actually buying them. The answer isn't CEOs or CTOs; its Software Engineers (or CTOs, for their Software Engineers). Github's leadership needs the answer to be CEOs or CTOs, because the scale of investment (to produce such a shit product) is so large that only per-customer revenue commensurate to the replacement of SE salaries justifies it. I know of four companies (including my own) that had a corporate Copilot subscription for their devs, and over the past quarter/this quarter are replacing it with a Cursor subscription, at the request of their devs. I'm super bullish on Cursor and Supermaven. - I think they understand their ICP way better. - I think their ICP is actually excited to spend money with them. - I think these new companies have demonstrated that they are more willing to build more than just a panel in VSCode; whereas Github is bogged down by legacy interests. - I think this deeper level of integration into existing workflows is what pushes AI past the hump of "oh i want to use that". Speeding up existing workflows by 30% feels insanely good. It grows the pie. Smaller & smarter, not larger & derivative. - I think, from a business perspective, MS/Github has and continues to royally screw up by literally subsidizing the cost basis of their competitors by building VSCode and hosting billions of lines of open source code competitor models train on. I love it as a user. But it costs them millions of dollars, and every dollar of that spend makes their competitors stronger.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  GitHub is way to established to course correct. Their entire sales channel is enterprise. They structurally can’t see what makes cursor and stuff so much better. Plus I think they have to much money sloshing around to care. Unlike the scrappy startups they have beefy enterprise accounts as cash cows. It’s a tail as old as time, really.
sdesol 2y ago
> post seems to go into all different directions, which seems strange. I asked AI to give feedback on the negative points in the article, with a focus on the human impact. I asked Gemini Flash 2, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3, and DeepSeek v3 and they had diverging thoughts in some areas, so your take seems valid. Here is the overall summary - *Consensus*: All LLMs agree on core risks (deskilling, code quality, workflow disruption). - *Divergence*: Job displacement and bias concerns split opinions, with some LLMs deeming them speculative. - *Scope*: Gemini and DeepSeek v3 extend discussion to broader AI ethics, while Groq/Llama 3.3 and GPT-4o prioritize strict article alignment. I was actually surprised by the Gemini 2 response --- While the article focuses on the benefits of GitHub Copilot and its new features, it's important to critically evaluate the potential downsides and unintended consequences. My initial response aimed to provide a balanced perspective by highlighting these concerns, which are relevant to the broader discussion about AI in software development. Here is the full analysis https://beta.gitsense.com/?chat=ec90dd73-0873-43ab-9da0-c61380eea504 https://beta.gitsense.com/?chat=ec90dd73-0873-43ab-9da0-c613...
- rafram 2y ago
  Telling people about things AI said to you is a little like telling people about a dream you had. It probably won’t be as interesting to them as it was to you. > While the […] focuses on […], it's important to critically evaluate the potential downsides and unintended consequences. This is just boilerplate that RLHF-aligned models put into their responses when you ask for an opinion on almost anything. It’s AI corporate-speak. It is not meaningful.
  - sdesol 2y ago
    > It’s AI corporate-speak. It is not meaningful It is if you want to better understand how models are trained and in what directions they are leaning.

by diggan 2y ago

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

rvz 2y ago

This sort of obfuscation of Microsoft/GitHub's real intentions *IS* deliberate. Unfortunately it's not just them, but pervasive across nearly all AI companies. > 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? Did they care about the writers, musicians, artists, journalists that had their jobs displaced or currently reduced? I don't think so and they got away with it. They don't care and in 2025, programmers of all ranks are next. Look at their actions and don't fall for the blog posts or statements.

suyash 2y ago

The irony doesn't end there, later in the post they say "We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. 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." - Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear.

nozzlegear 2y ago
> 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. I hope I can turn this feature off, i.e. that it's not a feature other users can use on my repositories. I'm already getting AI slop comments suggesting unhelpful fixes on my open source projects, I don't need "the anointed one" sending over slop as well – while replacing the work of real humans, to boot.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I thought there are restrictions about who can assign issues and who they can be assigned to? So, I would not expect that other users would be able to use it on your repositories (unless an exception is made, but I think it would be better if an exception is not made, so that other users can't use this feature on your repositories).
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    Ah, you're right, that makes sense. When I read "assign issues" I didn't connect it with GitHub's "assign issue/PR to user" feature – I don't use it very much since I'm the only one with write access on my projects. Thanks for pointing that out.
throw83288 2y ago
> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear. Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement. It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my entire field that I've dreamed about for the past decade isn't about to get torched. With the pace that this field is getting solved I probably won't even have enough time to "pivot" to anything before they also get solved or upturned as well. Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve I've seen. 4 years ago these models weren't capable of stringing together a TODO app. I really, really want to be wrong. I really do.

nonethewiser 2y ago

I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers. And GitHub certainly isn’t saying the goal is to replace developers. I accept that is how you are interpreting it and I can see the argument. But Github isnt trying to get one over in their messaging. And besides I just dont agree with the idea that it takes the developer out of the loop. Whose controlling this better version of Copilot? Whose goals is it advancing? The developer.

diggan 2y ago
> I dont think making Copilot better by handling its bad ouput means replacing developers The blog post goes through more than what I mentioned in my comment. For example: > 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. How is that not trying to replace at least a small section of junior/boilerplate developers? The developer might be the one who listens to the product team, maybe even creates the issue and finally reviews the code before it gets merged. But I'm having a hard time imagining the flow above as "Pair programming" or a developer working with a "co-pilot", as they're trying to say it's all about.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > How is that not trying to replace at least a small section of junior/boilerplate developers? This was a danger before AI ever became a thing. If that’s all someone is doing, there was always a danger of being outsourced to someone who would work for less than you would. And today in 2025, ignoring AI, there are thousands of generic framework developers struggling to get a job because every job they apply to has thousands of applications and companies can choose any good enough developer. It was always hard to break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle. Now it’s going to be harder. The solution at least for awhile is to run closer to the customer/stakeholder.
jacobsenscott 2y ago

someothherguyy 2y ago

What else would the goal of agentic generative AI be other than to replace humans doing the same work?

diggan 2y ago
For me that's a no-brainer also. I guess my question is more about why their messaging is so messy and direction-less. Why not just say outright what their plan is?
- whilenot-dev 2y ago
  Backlash towards the direction off of GitHub? I mean GitHub has to be one of the biggest assets when it comes to training data for source code, no? Projects should have already moved off of it when Microsoft got in the drivers seat.

Tarucho 2y ago

They are not going to say "we are making an agent to replace programmers. We will use their code and their guidance to train it"

827a 2y ago

IMO: Copilot (and Devin) has always missed the mark. Its always been a lazy, bad product that feels like it was made by a team that doesn't even want to use it themselves. Going more agentic is only going to make it worse; Copilot's product leadership appears obsessed with more comprehensive replacement of their customer workflows, but ideal customers want deeper and more fluid integration into the workflows. Its one of those facts that seems so obvious once you realize it, but no one at Github clearly does. Who is buying and using these things? Seriously, anyone at Github, answer that, not who you think is buying them, but who is actually buying them. The answer isn't CEOs or CTOs; its Software Engineers (or CTOs, for their Software Engineers). Github's leadership needs the answer to be CEOs or CTOs, because the scale of investment (to produce such a shit product) is so large that only per-customer revenue commensurate to the replacement of SE salaries justifies it. I know of four companies (including my own) that had a corporate Copilot subscription for their devs, and over the past quarter/this quarter are replacing it with a Cursor subscription, at the request of their devs. I'm super bullish on Cursor and Supermaven. - I think they understand their ICP way better. - I think their ICP is actually excited to spend money with them. - I think these new companies have demonstrated that they are more willing to build more than just a panel in VSCode; whereas Github is bogged down by legacy interests. - I think this deeper level of integration into existing workflows is what pushes AI past the hump of "oh i want to use that". Speeding up existing workflows by 30% feels insanely good. It grows the pie. Smaller & smarter, not larger & derivative. - I think, from a business perspective, MS/Github has and continues to royally screw up by literally subsidizing the cost basis of their competitors by building VSCode and hosting billions of lines of open source code competitor models train on. I love it as a user. But it costs them millions of dollars, and every dollar of that spend makes their competitors stronger.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago
GitHub is way to established to course correct. Their entire sales channel is enterprise. They structurally can’t see what makes cursor and stuff so much better. Plus I think they have to much money sloshing around to care. Unlike the scrappy startups they have beefy enterprise accounts as cash cows. It’s a tail as old as time, really.

sdesol 2y ago

> post seems to go into all different directions, which seems strange. I asked AI to give feedback on the negative points in the article, with a focus on the human impact. I asked Gemini Flash 2, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3, and DeepSeek v3 and they had diverging thoughts in some areas, so your take seems valid. Here is the overall summary - *Consensus*: All LLMs agree on core risks (deskilling, code quality, workflow disruption). - *Divergence*: Job displacement and bias concerns split opinions, with some LLMs deeming them speculative. - *Scope*: Gemini and DeepSeek v3 extend discussion to broader AI ethics, while Groq/Llama 3.3 and GPT-4o prioritize strict article alignment. I was actually surprised by the Gemini 2 response --- While the article focuses on the benefits of GitHub Copilot and its new features, it's important to critically evaluate the potential downsides and unintended consequences. My initial response aimed to provide a balanced perspective by highlighting these concerns, which are relevant to the broader discussion about AI in software development. Here is the full analysis https://beta.gitsense.com/?chat=ec90dd73-0873-43ab-9da0-c61380eea504 https://beta.gitsense.com/?chat=ec90dd73-0873-43ab-9da0-c613...

rafram 2y ago
Telling people about things AI said to you is a little like telling people about a dream you had. It probably won’t be as interesting to them as it was to you. > While the […] focuses on […], it's important to critically evaluate the potential downsides and unintended consequences. This is just boilerplate that RLHF-aligned models put into their responses when you ask for an opinion on almost anything. It’s AI corporate-speak. It is not meaningful.
- sdesol 2y ago
  > It’s AI corporate-speak. It is not meaningful It is if you want to better understand how models are trained and in what directions they are leaning.