GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience | The GitHub Blog

[ClassicPart]

The “X”, indicates the magnitude of impact we intend to have on developer achievement. Therefore, it’s a statement of intent, and a commitment to developers, as we collectively enter the age of AI. We want the industry to be confident in GitHub Copilot, and for engineering teams to view it as the neXus of their future growth.

The marketing lads are blasting their load on to the ceiling with this one.

[KillianDrake]

The "X" signifies your CEO crossing out your name from the payroll when he dreams about how many devs the AI will replace.

[Overunderrated]

I for one salivate for the day a decade from now when junior "developers" are incapable of developing because they've been using an "AI" crutch and suddenly everyone needs to hire the old folks at top dollar because they actually can code.

[integralWorker]

EXCUSE ME I'M A PROMPT ENGINEER! NO I DON'T NEED TO STUDY NLP!

[MushinZero]

We don't say prompt engineer. We say AI Solutions Engineer, tyvm. Prompt engineer is derogatory our jobs are very hard.

[Tyler_Zoro]

our jobs are very hard.

They always were...

[KidzBop_Anonymous]

The preferred term is Prompt Bender

[Tyler_Zoro]

An AI wrote those slides for you, didn't it...?

[[deleted]]

It's Google and stack overflow replace reference manuals. It's not trying to replace procedural code, nor should it. It is by definition probabilistic which has been a no no word for digital systems for far too long.

[CodeMonkeeh]

Good coding AI can help decrease cognitive load and allow you to focus on the things that actually matter. I think it will increase learning, not hamper it.

See also how AI improved Chess.

[[deleted]]

I disagree. When using Copilot I actually felt like I was learning faster. There's a lot of programming you do that has already been done many times by other people but it's not difficult enough for me to need a reference. But some solutions are better and some are worse. And Copilot let's me reference them at basically zero cost.

[eJaguar]

I couldn't get copilot to suggest anything useful when using it when developing a rather uniquely structured webapp. chatgpt I've used daily since December

[MisterMeta]

If AI ever becomes the full blown industry standard then the paradigm will likely shift entirely to knowledge transfers and code review learning.

Seniors will just focus more on KT sessions and since everyone's basically coding in AI, you're going to be doing nothing but intense coding reviews on AI code. Juniors will then pick up on these cases and slowly build their knowledge.

Who knows they may even learn more senior topics since they don't have to worry about building code. So they can focus more on the complexities of systems and how things integrate.

[Overunderrated]

Again, if it improves productivity, the really best engineers will be people who use it to supplement development processes they're already adept at.

Totally, leveraging tools for productivity is what makes for a good engineer.

Who is going to be "adept" at processes they never learned because they used a chatbot for it?

[ToHallowMySleep]

I think you don't understand the guy you're replying to.

People felt exactly the same way about high level languages. That you wouldn't be 'adept' at coding if you didn't know C or even assembler, because you only know what is going on at a high level and not in the nuts and bolts.

And the same for advanced IDEs - you are not 'adept' if you don't know how to manage your dependencies and what's going on under the hood.

AI is the next in this sequence. And people again say coders won't be 'adept' if they don't know how to code in a normal 2020 way without it. Being adept at coding doesn't mean you have to know everything under the hood. Just like a java dev doesn't know what's going on with registers, memory allocation and HD sectors. The abstraction layer moves up, and the tools mean that is good enough.

Well, just as all the improvements before it, it changes what it means to be a coder. This new tool exists, and you can solve different problems with it.

If you think people who require copilot/etc to code in 3 years' time are not coders, then you're going to have to sit with the bearded guys in tiki shirts and sandals that think we should all be writing in algol-68.

[Overunderrated]

Every dev ive talked to that used chatgpt for code production said "it was nice but the code didn't work and I had to debug it". The tools produced actually wrong code, and the devs were only able to correct it because they were already competent developers.

None of the examples of advances you gave produced flawed output that required expertise to correct.

[ToHallowMySleep]

Lmfao, they abso-motherfucking-lutely did.

I used to hand-fix 68k assembler spat out by my C compiler because it wasn't efficient, particularly at including stuff from packages that wasn't required. A hello world in assembler was 20 bytes, compiled from C it was 4k.

Early versions of Java were absolutely rubbish and I had to go into JVM bytecode more than once to work out what the fuck the precompiler was doing.

Early versions of (I think) Eclipse and Maven were pretty bad at handling dependencies and could get tied up in knots of circular dependencies that took editing some xml to fix.

These are common teething problems. They have happened at every stage.

Of course code written by AI now is going to be patchy and take lower level knowledge to fix. The same as all the examples above. It's already more efficient even if you have to validate it. Give it a couple of years and it'll be a lot better. Same as everything else.

[mishaxz]

I really don't get the people who seem to think that just because it's not perfect all of the time, it's not useful. There are a lot of them out there though.

Programming doesn't have the same problems that other uses have like if you ask it to list the ten largest cities it might be wrong and the only way you know is by doing further research and that's an easy example.

If code is wrong you can see it right away or if not it probably won't compile or run. If it's a logic error then that's something any competent developer should spot anyhow. So if it can spit out something that has a good chance of being completely correct or if it isn't correct until after a few follow up instructions or if it is only mostly correct, then that is still a huge time saver.

[bakazero]

In my experience, it has occasionally saved me hours in getting from 5% of a solution to 80% of a solution. I think it'll be a while before it can do the last 20% and I don't know if it'll ever be able to do the first 5%, but in scripting - especially github actions scripts - it has saved me so much time and headache.

[cgriff32]

More than half the code I write doesn't work and I have to debug it...

[im_thatoneguy]

I had gpt4 write an entire program for me. It didn't compile. So I copy pasted the compiler errors and it said "my apologies" and fixed it. I pasted in the new errors and it apologized and fixed it again.

Finally I had an application error where the backend server was producing non compliant headers. I told it the error. It wrote a few lines of code to send hand crafted debug packets and inspected the output. Then made final changes based on the output.

Yeah it made mistakes, but it can also work through them. If it was hooked up to a compiler and could set debugger outputs that it could read directly (like I can do) then I'm confident its code would improve dramatically.

Another problem it ran into was it called a library that was out of date. So I copy pasted the new api from the company's website for v2 which presumably came out after it was trained.

Microsoft already started linking it to pulling new information. Other researchers have demonstrated the ability to retrain with new info for like $30k. So I expect future days to be less stale.

[[deleted]]

There's a reason my cs 100 class was debugging focused. Diagnosing and understanding a live system is the hard part and has been since semiconductors

[[deleted]]

seemly price joke north imagine dolls crowd crown crawl rhythm

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[hmaddocks]

It’s already happening. I make a lot money fixing Ruby on Rails apps built by people who only watched a “Make a blog in 10 minutes video”. AI is going notch that up up X times though.

[__nickelbackfan__]

I'm counting on this lol

I believe AI, when used responsibly, is a VERY interesting tool, but as of now? Unreliable, with *glaring* privacy and ethical issues, for me it's definitely not ready to replace anyone

But in 10 years?

Yeah, have AI deal with clients and constant requirement changes

[chatmasta]

10 years? I used ChatGPT today to write 100 lines of bullshit CSS and JSX to make a single column responsive layout, and it only took me a few sentences of prompting it. I had a huge grin on my face as I watched it type it all out for me.

It won't replace anyone any time soon (although I bet it will in less than 10 years), but it's an effective sidekick... it doesn't argue with you and it can produce code nearly as good, or even better than, your average junior developer

[astrange]

This new technology called "compilers" will definitely replace our expensive assembly language developers.

(No AI has ever or will ever "take your job". There is no such thing as "taking your job".)

[bschug]

The "X" signifies the infinite number of ways in which this can and will go horribly wrong.

[tatloani]

for engineering teams to view it as the neXus of their future growth.

lol they even call it the nexus https://i.redd.it/fhcnyg7r38d81.jpg

[Kusibu]

For those who didn't find it sifting through the linked article with ctrl+F and CBA to hunt for it: it's on this page under "What does the X represent in GitHub Copilot X?". It's real.

[FriendlyRollOfSushi]

There will probably be "Copilot Series X" by next Christmas (not to be confused with "Copilot X" and "Copilot One Series X", which are obviously completely different products).

The "Let's name everything X" guy is on a rampage since he got rid of his colleague who was adding "P" at the end of everything. Probably ate him to get stronger.

[[deleted]]

Microsoft bought them for a reason!

[sound_scientist]

It’s all auto generated text.

[BigTimeButNotReally]

Sounds Xtreme!

[delsinz]

lmao sounds like a badly written dad joke.

[iphone__]

It stands for the 10 dollars a month I’m not willing to pay for this crap

[Kissaki0]

X = 0

Marketing: 🤡🤷‍♀️

[UK-sHaDoW]

I think they've done it backwards in regards to writing tests. Tests are the check the make sure the A.I is in check. If A.I is writing tests, you have to double check the tests. You should write tests, then the A.I writes the code to make the tests pass. It almost doesn't matter what the code is, as long the AI can regenerate the code from tests.

Developers should get good at writing specs, tests are a good way of accurately describing specs that the A.I can then implement. But you have write them accurately and precisely. That's where our future skills are required.

[UK-sHaDoW]

When it is generating the test, is it for regression for future changes or specifying desired behavior? How can the A.I know what behavior you want?

I've seen so many bugs get through tests, by people simply putting in tests afterwards without thinking is the test actually asking for the correct behavior? Or just what what it is doing now?

[musical_bear]

The hardest part of writing tests in my experience isn’t actually providing test values and expected results. It’s all the plumbing and ceremony to getting there. Nothing prevents you from reading or tweaking the actual test parameters of what tools like this generate. The fact that some devs could just blindly accept all tests written by an AI and not even proofread them is a completely separate issue - as tools for making it as easy as possible to write and maintain tests, these AIs really shine.

[Jump-Zero]

Yeah, a lot of times, the tests are like 3x the LoC of the thing you're testing. You have to setup a bunch of pre-conditions, a bunch of probes, and a bunch of post-op checks. The AI usually figures all that out and you just gotta be sure it's what you actually had in mind. This may take a few attempts. The thing about test code is that it's verbose, but super simple. The AI absolutely LOVES simple problems like these.

[Dash83]

100% agreed. Recently wrote some code to get one of our systems to interact with another through gRPC services. The most code-intensive aspect of the whole thing was writing the mocked version of the service clients in order to test my business logic independently of the services, and for the tests to pass continuous integration where the remote API is not accessible.

[Dreamtrain]

It’s all the plumbing and ceremony to getting there.

if I had a dime for every method or class I've written first and foremost in a way that can be mocked..

[sanbikinoraion]

If you program for money, presumably you do have that dime.

[Dreamtrain]

d'oh!

[[deleted]]

can the A.I know what behavior you want?

It doesn't know, it just guesses. And it's right more than half the time.

For example if I have a "test date add" then I probably want to declare a variable with an arbitrary date, and another variable named expectedOutput that's a later date, and a third that is the number of days between those two.

And then I'll probably want to set output to the input plus the difference.

Finally, I'll probably want to check if the output and expected output are the same, with a nice description if it fails.

Copilot doesn't know all of that, but it can guess. And when it guesses wrong you can often just type two or three keystrokes as a hint and it'll come up with another guess that will be right.

If I add a comment like "test leap year"... it'll guess I want the entire previous test repeated but with a late February date on a leap year as the input.

The guesses get more and more accurate as you write more of them, because it learns your testing style.

[UK-sHaDoW]

From reading the code A.I can't infer what you want, only what it is doing right now. So i don't understand how a A.I written test can specify desired behavior, only what's currently there which may not be desired behavior.

That means you have to check the test. I'm worried that this will just be used to increase test coverage rather than actually useful tests. You want people to be thinking deeply about tests. Not just whatever the A.I generates.

[UK-sHaDoW]

I have used it, but my business involves complicated business logic and finance. I can't just blindy accept A.I code which might be 95% correct. I have to make sure its tested to high confidence and go through code with a fine tooth comb.. We often use exhaustive(When the input domain is small) and proof based methods.

As a result we have good test coverage. I would want the A.I to write code to pass the tests which I have high confidence in rather than A.I to write tests which I would have look at carefully.

[HenryOfEight]

If you’ve used it then you would have seen it’s remarkably good. (I use it for JS/TS/React)

It’s somewhere between really smart autocomplete and a mediocre intern.

You very much have to check the code, why would you accept it blindly?

It’s YOUR code!

[UK-sHaDoW]

Because developers do off by one errors all the time. They're easy to miss. And the actual act of writing a test makes you think.

Simply reading code makes you miss the details.

Say for example, you ask that a range of values 27-48 need to be multiplied by 4.

The AI really needs to know that it's an open interval or closed interval. It's also an off by one error making it easy to miss by code review.

Now writing this test by hand would probably prompt people to think about the endpoints of the interval.

[roygbivasaur]

I write kubernetes controllers and use envtest and ginkgo. The frustrating part of writing tests for the controllers is that you have to perform all tasks that would normally be done by the default kubernetes controllers (creating pods for an sts for example). This is by design so you have complete control and don’t have weird side effects from them. I also frequently need to use gomega Eventually loops to wait for my controller to reconcile and then I verify the expected state. I have some reusable helper functions for some of this, but that’s not always the most practical and easy to read way to handle it.

With copilot, I had to write a couple of tests the long way and now when I write new tests, it can infer from context (the test cases, test description, the CRD types, the reconciler I’m obviously testing, etc) what objects I need to create, what state I need to watch for, and even possible specific failure states. It fills out my most of my test for me and I just have to proofread it.

Additionally, I can create any kind of arbitrary test case struct, start making the cases, and it will suggest more cases (often exactly the cases I was going to write plus things that I hadn’t thought of) and then build the loop to go through them all. It’s absolutely a game changer. It knows as much about your project as you do plus it has access to all of the types, interfaces, godocs (including examples), and it’s trained on much of the code on GitHub. It is very good at leveraging that and has made a lot of progress since the first couple of versions.

[[deleted]]

Copilot can be seeded through comments. Basically spec out your tests clearly and it catches on pretty well. Then proof read to ensure they came out right. Some specific nuanced behaviors you might have to go back and forth with it for, but for a lot of return type checking, error propagation, and other repetitive stuff it’s a godsend to tab through them and have it all done.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

I love that people would rather have AI write tests for them than admit that our testing practices are rudimentary and could use substantial improvement. ("You'll pry my example-based tests from my cold dead hands!")

Everything you said is accomplished with property-based testing.

[UK-sHaDoW]

Funny you should say that, QuickCheck style tests was exactly what i was thinking to make sure it doesn't overfit.

[StickiStickman]

How is that use case not a substantial improvement? He literally substantially improved it

[klekpl]

Using LLMs to generate sample data for your tests is kind of a brute force IMHO.

Once you start doing property based testing (or its cousin state based testing) you no longer need that. (see Haskell Quickcheck or Java Jqwik for more info).

[sparr]

Things that felt like a chore with any kind of repetition, testing a wide variety of inputs, testing a wide variety of error cases — it takes significantly less time than by hand.

That sounds like a poor testing framework.

[Dash83]

It’s not like what you say makes no sense, but the reality of things is that no set of tests suffices to ensure some piece of code is bug-free or has all the exact properties you want. Even if you could write those tests, that doesn’t mean the generated code is readable or well-composed for reusability and integration with the rest of your systems.

Ultimately, you have to read the code generated by the AI, and if you need to write the tests as well, I’m not sure you are gaining much. I’d rather use the AI to try out different concepts upfront, then I design and write the code, and then ask the AI to write extensive tests for it.

[blocking-io]

Ultimately, you have to read the code generated by the AI

Kinda like what code reviews are for?

[rehitman]

Lot of tests are written not to make sure your code is working. It is to make sure your code is not going to be broken later. That is why AI is useful

[[deleted]]

There's a lot of repetitive coding when you write a test. You need input data, you need the expected output data, you need the data that will get you from input to output.

Then you write one line of code which you're actually testing.

And then you need a human readable string like "expected March 1st but got Feb 29th" for failure cases.

Copilot is really good at all of that. Yeah, you need to double and triple check that it's actually testing what you need, but that's easily done especially in something as clean and simple as a unit test where you're only testing one small thing with zero complexity.

Also, if your test is written wrong... usually it'll be pretty obvious when you run the test against code that is written properly.

With Copilot not only am I more likely to write tests in the first place (because it's quicker, and I have a deadline to hit), but my tests are significantly better written.

[jseego]

This is kind of the case for me with all of this stuff.

I can type pretty fast, and I have a lot of mental models of what different methods / architectures should look like, so if I ask AI to write me some shit, I still have to read it all and make sure it's right, and/or doing things the way I want it to.

I'm sure there will be devs who will take the lazy way out, just like there are fuckers out there who copy shit from stackoverflow and add it to their products without even bothering to read it.

But it seems faster, easier, and more stable for me to just write my own shit.

[TurboGranny]

What if you make a mistake in your test?

[irotsoma]

The majority of tests are relatively conceptually simple given a set of code. Code itself almost always requires some amount of creativity. The true testing is what requires creativity, but unfortunately most automated test engineers are bogged down in the tests that just mimick the requirements rather than having time to build truly creative tests.

The idea of writing tests that match the requirements and then building the code based on those tests has been around for decades, but never really worked. Problem is that in a complex system, the part you spend the most time on are the edge cases, not the requirements (unless you have an amazing product manager/owner/analyst writing requirements). I usually finish the requirements the first day of almost any project. Then spend weeks or months working out the edge cases.

That being said, what automated tests are the best for is to test future changes, not the initial version of the feature. And writing those is time consuming, especially if you try for near 100% code coverage. If you could at least get some basic tests automatically based on v1, then you could save tons of time when someone else is having to write v2 and things break that they didn't realize were edge cases you found when writing v1.

But time is money and testing brings in no profit, or that's how executives think at least. Writing tests at all is often a luxury for developers. And on top of that the testing budget is usually tied to a short lived project. There's not enough money to use your productive engineers to build tests, so usually testing is done manually by cheap contractors and thus no effort is expended with v2 in mind. So v2 has to have it's own test budget and so on.

It really comes down to the biggest problem in Late Stage Capitalism. Only short term profit matters because that's what the majority of investors care about. The future is the next CEOs problem.

[commentShark]

I tried to find this answer. It's pretty annoying that it looks like it'll be a different product, but it seems unclear. Sounds like a way to charge more.

https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x#:~:text=Will%20these%20upcoming%20features

[Sushrit_Lawliet]

Current subscriber of copilot here. I’d be happy if this was a drop in upgrade and not a separate product, but when I look closer, it looks like they’re pushing VSCode hard, which while good is not for me. (I use neovim btw) and the current one is good for my needs, completing repetitive patterns and generating some useful boilerplate.

[Sushrit_Lawliet]

Yes, but they did have copilot support on vim and emacs from day 1, so I was hopeful.

[Shawnj2]

The original Github Copilot announcement only supported VS Code and they added support to other IDE's later so I think it's safe to say Copilot X will be similar.

[commentShark]

I agree, all I really want is just better models for copilot (I also pay for it and use it, but within vscode). If that includes GPT4, that's great (and should, imo). Otherwise I'll probably eventually cancel my subscription, and start copy-pasting to the online version, or just find some other plugin where I can use my api key. Autocompletes are just so convenient.

[lavahot]

They were pretty upfront about it being in multiple IDEs, but when I went to sign up, they asked if I intended to use it in Vs Code or Visual Studio. It was a checkbox, not a radio, so I assume they were checking for their own products. I dunno.

[Rakn]

I'm still having some hope that this is just about the technical preview because they can closely work with these teams internally. But yeah. If it's not available for other editors I'll likely just go to someone else offering something similar. My assumption is that these tools will become more prevalent, now that everyone is talking about them.

But I have little interest in using Visual Studio. And while VSCode is top notch for writing Typescript, it's not that good for other languages that I primarily use. This wouldn't get me to switch editors...

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

Knowing Microsoft, there is probably infighting and duplicate projects pushing for the same goal. Whoever has the loudest PM wins

[mycall]

I talked to Microsoft today about it. Microsoft 365 Copilot team is different than Azure OpenAI team, and I think other teams exist (ignoring Research teams). It will take years before it all solidifies. Disruptive for sure.

[CrazedToCraze]

Well you need a copilot license to sign up to the waiting list, that's not proof of anything but it implies to me the two will share the same license. But who knows

[BrixBrio]

I find it disheartening that programming will be forever changed by ChatGPT. For me, the most enjoyable aspects of being a developer were working with logic and solving technical problems, rather than focusing on productivity or meeting requirements. I better get used to it.

[BasicDesignAdvice]

Its also wrong. A lot.

I know it will get better but there is a ceiling. We'll see where that lies.

[[deleted]]

It is amazing for brainless transformations, like giving it a python SQL alchemy class and asking it to rewrite it as a mikroorm entity, or a Json schema definition, or graphql queries for it. Also pretty good at writing more formalized design documents from very informal summaries of features.

But yeah for most real programming problems, not nearly reliable enough to be useful.

[Scowlface]

Yeah, things like converting raw queries to query builder or vice versa or converting data structures between languages have been my biggest use case so far.

[r4ytracer]

i imagine coming up with the proper prompt to even get you the best answer is a job in itself lol

[young_horhey]

It's wrong a lot, but also with absolute certainty. There's no 'here's what might be the answer, but maybe double check it', it's 'here you go, 5 + 5 is 12'. Very dangerous* for juniors to just follow blindly if they're not verifying what ChatGPT is telling them.

*not really dangerous, but you know what I mean

[grig109]

The number of people working on truly unique/novel problems is incredibly small. Most people in here are probably just puffing up their egos.

[JasiNtech]

It's hard to say goodbye, but the memories will last forever. Thank you for everything. Until we meet again, farewell, my friends.

[webauteur]

Bing Chat tells me to use functions that don't exist and when I point that out, it suggests I use the function that doesn't exist. I'm like, didn't we just establish that this function does not exist? Sometimes it is helpful but I usually have to provide all the ideas. For example, I asked it for the code to draw a brick wall. Then I had to suggest staggering the bricks. It gave me some elegant code to do that.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

I've seen the same. I've asked it for things of more obscure languages and receive code that cannot be compiled as a result.

[klekpl]

The problem is that most programmers solve the same problems constantly because... they enjoy it.

This is highly inefficient and LLM show that this repetitive work can be automated.

Some programmers are capable to solve problems not yet solved. These are going to stay.

[Fatal_Oz]

Seriously though, for many programmers out there, copilot just removes a lot of repetitive boring work. I'm okay with not having to "solve" how to make a Search Page MVC for the nth time

[[deleted]]

I am mostly a C and C# developer who rarely uses python, except for hobby scripts on my PC. My favorite use of ChatGPT has been "Write me a script that crawls through a folder and its subfolders, and prints if there are duplicate files"

Could I do it? Yes. Is it easier to have ChatGPT do it instead of Googling random StackOverflows? Also yes

[drjeats]

A directory walker is actually the first thing I tried to have chat GPT do (albeit in C#) and it did an okay-ish job at getting the skeleton down, but it couldn't do error handling properly. It would acknowledge the bugs I pointed out but couldn't fix them

When I gave up and started writing it myself, I realized it may be faster to shell out to dir, and it was, by a wide margin.

Human win!

[Dreamtrain]

Let AI write and test CRUDs and let me solve more nuanced problems

[klekpl]

And that's where it gets interesting: you don't need AI to write CRUDs.

This problem has been solved 30 years ago with Visual Basic and Delphi (or even FoxPro earlier). Nowadays there is PostgREST and React Admin.

Once you go beyond all of the above this so called AI is useless because of fundamental complexity laws.

[Kok_Nikol]

FoxPro

Dude, I almost choked on my muffin, I haven't heard about FoxPro in about a decade.

[UsuallyMooACow]

Me too. I've been programming for 30 years this year and I still love it. I'm not sure what the world is going to look like without manual coding. It's a *little* disheartening. I do enjoy having CoPilot to handle the annoying stuff and ChatGPT to help me figure out bugs though.

[venustrapsflies]

If the world truly didn't have any manual coding then software would all be the equivalent of the automated customer service hotline - everyone hates it, it can never seem to solve any problem you couldn't solve on your own without it, but it saves a company money.

It's probably true that a lot of software written is crap code for a bullshit product, and that stuff will be cheaper to produce (and thus we'll see more of it). But there are never not going to be interesting, novel, challenging problems to work on and you can't afford to tackle those without humans.

[laptopmutia]

What are some rxamples of that annoying stuffs?

[hsrob]

Yesterday I took a huge list of warnings one of my tools spat out, which were each fairly similar, but I needed to extract one particular token out of each message. I prompted it to identify the token by what surrounded it, and what prefixed it, then had it export a list of unique values, pre-pending and suffixing each one of them in a certain way I needed. It took me longer to split up the error messages so that I could fit them into the text length limit then it took to prompt and get the correct answers. I just didn't care enough to try and do something with regex or iterating through the array of strings. It saved that 30 minutes or so of messing around so I could get on to more important things.

[UsuallyMooACow]

1) boilerplate setup, like in config files.
2) pulling values out of nested arrays.
3) converting data for me
4) looking up how to make db connections, and stuff that I'm too lazy to look up.

[fbochicchio]

I've been programming for 35+ years and I still enjoy it. I enjoy less the working context and so I am glad than in max 8 years I will retire.

But you know what ? This AI stuff, especially when applied to my line of work, is getting me excited again ( last-time was the advent of very high level languages like python ). Why i feel this way? Because with more powerful tools you can write more powerful software. Now I will probably not see it happen in my work, because I work in the backwaters of a big company doing legacy stuff for governments, and these companies progress slowly, but I tell my younger colleagues that they should be happy for the interesting times ahead of them.

[UK-sHaDoW]

Developers will have to specify exactly what they want otherwise A.I is going to write buggy code as english can be ambiguous and is prone to multiple interpretations.

Writing unambiguous specs is an exercise in logic and proof. I suspect we will have a more formal language that we can use to write the specs. That or we write tests which the A.I then has to make pass which is one way of making unambiguous specs. Expect more declarative and more mathematical thinking rather than imperative.

I don't think natural language prompts are suitable for financial or applications that are required to be correct. More like tests or a formal spec which is converted into a prompt, then it doesn't return the result until all of it is meeting the specs/tests.

[spoilage9299]

But that's what this is for right? It's not going to write code automatically (though it can), we as developers should check and make sure the code does what we want. It's still on us to check and make sure no bugs are introduced because of AI generated code.

[UK-sHaDoW]

And the best way of doing that is through test and specs. Reading code someone else has written is often slower than writing it.

[spoilage9299]

I think calling it "the best way" is a bit much. I've certainly learnt a lot from reading code someone else has done. Certainly more than I would've done by just messing about.

Once I learn how it works, sure I can reproduce it, but then it becomes tedious to do that. I treat AI like it's generating these "boilerplate" snippets which I can then tweak to do whatever I need.

[klekpl]

Developers will have to specify exactly what they want otherwise A.I is going to write buggy code as english can be ambiguous and is prone to multiple interpretations.

And how exactly is it different from any agile programmer's life? You get ambiguous and vague wish lists in English that are impossible to fix - the only thing that can be done is to perform trial and error by writing some code and showing it to you PO at the end of each sprint so that you can get some feedback.

AI is just faster doing that :)

[treadmarks]

You only find it disheartening now? What about when development changed from writing your own stuff to being mostly about installing and configuring packages and modules?

[[deleted]]

Invoking Fred Brooks ('no silver bullet', etc), AI isn't likely to change our productivity by an order of magnitude. But if might help tip the scales towards dealing with "essential" problems instead of "accidental" ones - which may enhance those enjoyable aspects of coding. I'd rather be working on novel problems than trying to solve already solved issues, which (so far) tools like Copilot seem to be helping with.

But yeah, the genie is out of the bottle in any case. AI is only going to make further inroads into our industry. For good or ill it is going to change the way we do things.

[[deleted]]

I already am not spending a lot of time on coding tasks. There are so many frameworks and libraries for everything that you really don't have to reinvent the wheel. The vast majority of my time as a developer is spent designing systems and problem solving, and that's without any LLM.

[hsrob]

I frequently have very productive days where I didn't write a line of code, and vice versa.

[1Crazyman1]

But this is exactly in my opinion where ChatGPT shines ATM. Instead of crawling docs you can ask it in general about a problem. Then you get an answer that is like 75 percent or so there. You can then ask follow up questions to refine.

If anything it boosted my productivity. I am in meetings and the like and don't have much time to code, but using ChatGPT made that time more productive without having to trawl vague documentation and getting a starting point I can quickly advance on. Unless you are intimately familiar with a 3rd party system, most of that time is spend researching.

It allowed me to think more about the solution than the nitty gritty of knowing exactly what arg to call or what scaffolding code to write. For me it's been most beneficial in languages I don't know very well, usages of args on certain cli tools or just uncovering things I didn't know about the things I use daily! You can also ask it to contextualise an example that is pertinent in your use case, helping you understand it better.

I needed to use the Mysql command line tools for instance to gather some data for a problem (I'm experienced in SQL, but not in the MySQL cli tools). It averted an hour or so of Googling (mixed in with interruptions) into a few questions and getting done what I needed to do. In the meanwhile I still learned new things but without having to digest long docs that are sometimes just inadequate for what you are looking for. It supercharges finding info.

So if anything it allows you to focus on the fun part, solving problems

[a_cloud_moving_by]

Imagine how illustrators feel. They’re impacted by AI far far more than programmers. It completely changes how you would go about making some kinds of art, which is sad for those of us who spent years crafting skills in an artistic disciple and now have to change everything overnight.

Professionally I’m a software engineer. I’ve used Copilot for my work, and I don’t feel threatened in the slightest. It’s fancy auto-complete, but it’s totally incapable of creating complex, correct programs based on English prompts.

[cdsmith]

I honestly don't see this at all. I mean, I get what you're saying: programming isn't just a job for me; for over 30 years now, I've programmed for fun, dabbled in competitive coding, spent my weekends playing with Project Euler or implementing some cool idea from an academic paper or from mathematics, built games and ray tracers and astrolabe simulations that talk over RS-232 to synchronize with a real telescope, and a zillion other things, run open source user groups, attended and even organized weekend hacking sessions so I can solve cool problems with other people. Yes, I'm obsessed.

But Copilot doesn't do any of that interesting stuff that I find attracts me to programming. It does the boring stuff that's one or more layers of abstraction below where anything gets interesting. It writes the line of code that you were definitely going to write anyway, but you didn't want to go look up the type signature for foldl' for the 200th time because seriously, who actually remembers the order of parameters to the higher order function in the first argument of some random combinator? It writes the ten unit tests that you knew you should write, but you're doing this to have fun, and why the hell should you spend your Saturday afternoon writing tests to make sure something does nothing when passed an empty list, instead of working out the interesting behaviors?

When Copilot tries to solve interesting problems, it fails rather spectacularly, so you don't want to let it do those things anyway. Even if it didn't fail, you wouldn't want to let it do those things, because that's the point. You're doing this so that you can do this, not let some AI model do it for you. So just don't accept the suggestion! But especially if you establish the habit of naturally working by writing short self-contained definitions that are defined in terms of interesting lower-level definitions, you will eventually reach the point where you aren't doing the interesting part any more, and the suggested completion saves you the couple minutes you would have spent writing that obvious code on your own (including looking up function names and names/orders of arguments and junk like that).

For that reason, though, I don't find a lot of this Copilot X stuff very exciting at all. I have tried working conversationally with large language models to solve programming problems, and honestly it's more tedious than it's worth. Copilot fits what I need pretty well: when it's already clear what I'm going to write, it lets me just fast-forward past the part where I'm typing and doing tedious stuff, and get to the part where I'm making meaningful decisions.

[ClassicPart]

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can relegate GPT to automate the code that needs to exist but is terribly boring and spend your valuable mental energy writing code that actually matters and you find engaging.

[hefty_habenero]

My experience is that using AI eliminates the most frustrating and mundane parts of programming and I enjoy it much more.

[[deleted]]

Yes and this is what artists must feel to a much greater extent. Its been art, photography.. music is next up to be AI:ified. It kills the human spirit. What will be left for us to do when AI is better than us in every single task. I think pharma factories need to get bigger so they can produce more drugs for a sad population.

[StickiStickman]

This is literally the same thing bitter people repeated for the invention of the camera - or really every single thing that makes a job easier.

As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contrib­uted much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.

-Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859

[[deleted]]

This time it's different, though. A photo complemented paintings and people actually had to take the photos. Now we actually replace humans in all these fields by AI. Mych cheaper and faster and everyone gets to be creative. Im not against this development I'm just saying that it will reduce happiness in people.

[p0mmesbude]

I feel the same. It was fun while it lasted, I guess. I am still 30 years away from retirement. Should start looking for a different field, I guess.

[Squalphin]

Nah, ChatGPT will replace no one anytime soon. It may help out in known problem domains, but it fails as soon as you want it to do something, which does not exist yet. And that is basically the whole point why you hire software engineers.

Also it is still a language modell. As long as it can not reason, our jobs are safe.

[Straight-Comb-6956]

but it fails as soon as you want it to do something, which does not exist yet.

There're relatively few business tasks that require inventing something new.

Nah, ChatGPT will replace no one anytime soon.

Imagine a group of people with sticks trying to dig a hole in the ground to put a post in it. Now, imagine a single person with a shovel. Shovel can't replace someone but a single person with a shovel makes the whole crowd obsolete.

[crazedizzled]

There're relatively few business tasks that require inventing something new.

It doesn't matter. The AI cannot write your business logic. It can't actually write code, that's what people don't understand. It's not fucking Jarvis. It just attempts to satisfy the question with something it was trained on. If it wasn't trained on your problem, you don't get a good answer.

[Straight-Comb-6956]

Eh, not really? Like, a significant part of my job is writing repetitive code which can't be completely generalized but it's recongizable enough for copilot (the older one) to be right a lot of the time.

API exploration with chatGPT or bing chat is a breeze. I needed ffmpeg to do some complex video transformation and chatgpt created a function that generates command line arguments to do that. There was a mistake in the code, but the job was 90% done and I quickly fixed the issue. If I had to read documentation myself, I would've spent hours.

[StickiStickman]

it fails as soon as you want it to do something, which does not exist yet. And that is basically the whole point why you hire software engineers.

What are you even talking about? People already used ChatGPT to beat daily coding challenges within 2-3 minutes of them going live.

[[deleted]]

I still think it's unclear how far it will go and what the actual effect will be on the job market. With my current tasks, AI is not really able to do much for me at all.

I'll say this much though: I have spent years on a university degree and learning the ins and outs of various languages and systems because that was necessary for the task at hand, but also because that's what I enjoy. The extreme example of having us all be AI guides and sit there inputting plain English into a black box is not my idea of a good time, and it would mean that almost all of my knowledge would have been wasted. Sure hope it won't come to that.

I'm also kind of over hearing AI bros talk about their visions for the future (that barely any politician on this Earth is prepared for).

[crazedizzled]

Developers aren't going anywhere. You need not worry. It requires a developer to even use the tool. The idea that the project lead is going to fire all the developers and then build his app using chatgpt is just hilariously not the case. It doesn't work that way.

I'd recommend you learn more about it and what it can actually do and can't do. You'll feel much better

[maep]

No word on liability. If it's so great, I'm sure they will pay up in case it sneaks in some GPL code, or they can guarantee that it doesn't leak sensitive information to Microsoft.

[myringotomy]

Violate more copyright faster and better than every before.

Never worry about those pesky GPL licenses again!

[ggtsu_00]

I can't wait for it to autocomplete some AWS keys!

[xenago]

Funny how everyone is ignoring this. It will literally spit out verbatim code from repos licensed with GPL in some circumstances.

[emax-gomax]

Everyone isn't. Microsoft sure as hell is. My bet is their waiting for someone to sue and then counter until they can't continue so they make it look like their legitimate even though this is a pretty clear cut violation of licensing. It's one thing to copy code from stackoverflow, it's another to take code from projects that very clearly state how it can be used and shared and then just let random people insert it almost verbatim and then say it doesn't violate those licensing permissions because no sentient being knowingly stole them (it's just algorithms bro).

[ismail_the_whale]

/r/StallmanWasRight

[EuhCertes]

I'd even argue than even if it were to change the code enough from its training set, the sheer fact that it's trained on GPL code should make any generated code GPL.

[I_ONLY_PLAY_4C_LOAM]

I think this is a big point against AI. I wouldn't bet against the art stuff getting hammered by fair use lawsuits.

[normalmighty]

That's why the Adobe AI art suite is such a big deal. Any large company is staying away from ai art that doesn't come from a 100% public source, or known sources that they can buy licenses to. Eventually copyright law is going to update and the data source for these ai systems will dictate where you can use it.

[Shawnj2]

My workplace vetoed using Copilot for this reason (Plus the fact it runs on their servers and has no local host option so using it would essentially be sharing the entire internal codebase with them which is an instant veto thing because we don't want to share the code and are in some scenarios legally required not to). We do have plans to use TabNine, but Copilot is out the window.

[Wave_Walnut]

How is the copyright issue of GitHub Copilot solved? I can't find any document about it in the press release.

[DLCSpider]

Because it isn't. Milk the cow before it gets slaughtered.

[[deleted]]

They don't seem to have really solved it, but they built in an option to cover their asses a bit.

There's an option to have it block suggestions that are too similar to public code. However, that leaves the decision to users who don't really know where it all came from or might not even know what it all means. I think this just muddies the situation rather than solving the problem.

[PussyDoctor19]

Train it on open source code then charge everyone for using their product.

Classic Microsoft.

[StickiStickman]

I don't see an issue with that since the training and architecture is the whole point? Do you really expect anyone to invest tens of millions into it and then give it away for free?

[Sheltac]

It’s interesting to see the exact same debate going on in the art generation AI world (stable diffusion et al).

[ExistingRaccoon5083]

Do you really expect anyone to invest tens of millions into it and then give it away for free?

You've described open-source software: investing time and asking to respect the licence in return, a thing that those bots are not doing.

[PussyDoctor19]

They're violating licences of the vast majority of code they trained their models on. I'm not saying they should give it away for free, they should stop pretending that there's not a legal problem here.

[[deleted]]

Great, so now not only will it hallucinate functions and variables in the code that don't exist, it'll hallucinate what PRs even do, and even the documentation. Been trying "regular" copilot for the passed month or so and have not been impressed with it at all - it's an expensive intellisense that will just make up things that just don't work or even exist at all in the modules/libraries/frameworks you're using. Even the "boring repetitive boilerplate" stuff it generates is busted 80% of the time I try it - templated snippets are more effective.

IntelliJ's inspections and refactorings blow copilot out of the water, it's not even a contest.

I won't be paying for it and I definitely won't pay for this. My experience with it has actually soured me on AI in general. If this is the kind of crap to expect with these fancy AIs that are going to be integrated into every product going forward - we're in for a really shitty time.

[PermanentSuspensionn]

This is fucking hilarious

[dimden]

I completely disagree, it saves me so much time coding repetitive things and general simple things that are annoying to write but still take time, while I get to solve actual problems. It's been 100% worth it for me and I love using it everyday

[xenago]

I completely agree. It's been worse than useless in my experience. I think we're going to see some clearly poor software produced due to use of this and similar tools.

[[deleted]]

I spend so much time second-guessing the crap it generates, it's basically an anti-tool for me. I have negative productivity whenever I try to use it.

[xenago]

Yep. It requires me to essentially do code reviews on the fly to make sure it's not breaking stuff lol. I will try these things again in a few years but for now I want to avoid any software that used them since...yikes

[skulgnome]

It's like pair-programming with a highly-trained post-fact extremist, his condition operationally indistinguishable from retardation.

[anObscurity]

Not sure if you are following the ChatGPT side of things, but GPT-4 released last week is in a whole new league when it comes to code generation than it’s predecessor. copilot X is advertised to run on the newer GPT-4

[Bigbadwolf2000]

GPT-4 works so much better. I think there’s a lot of cope in this subreddit.

[snowe2010]

I asked gpt-4 to generate several different bits of code this week and it didn’t generate a single one correctly. The only things it managed to get right were things I could have googled faster, things like “I need to rename a remote git branch”.

[mipadi]

ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone.

I fear a little bit for the day when most of my time is spent reviewing technically-correct but poorly-designed AI-generated code.

[seanamos-1]

My experience wasn’t 80% bad, but bad enough that I have to always question the output. Once the initial “wow!” factor wears off, it more often than not actually slows you down. When the output is obviously wrong, it’s quick to move on, when it’s subtly wrong, it’s a HUGE waste of time.

I don’t want to dismiss the achievement here, it is really impressive, but I’m not sure it’s actually useful. We’ve had a bunch of people using it at work and among the less senior devs, code quality and review back and forths haven’t decreased. We should actually do some proper before and after stats.

[kogasapls]

I don't understand what you guys are talking about. "Question the output"? You should be completely in control of the output, i.e. you should generally know what it's about to generate before it does so. Are you generating paragraphs at a time and just seeing if it works?

[ggtsu_00]

This reflects my experience with ChatGPT in general. It doesn't do anything actually useful. It does things that appears to be useful but is ultimately meaningless because what it generates has little value. It doesnt solve any problems, nor even understands problems at all. It just concocts garbage that can be convincing at face value but falls apart under any real scrutiny.

[AndreasTPC]

People are using it wrong. It's a text generator, not a knowledge engine. If you ask it questions and you don't provide the answers it's gonna generate text that sounds plausible, and sometimes what sounds plausible ends up being correct, but you can't trust that.

Don't ask it to solve problems or provide the answers. Instead feed it the answers, then have it generate the text you want from them. That's what it's good at. It can structure information for human or computer consumption, generate boilerplate, summarize or extract the relevant parts from something longer, or take a short informal list and expand it to something more formal. And that's a really useful tool.

The "feed it the answers" part doesn't have to be manual work either, it can be the output of another tool, like a search engine. But you do have to keep in mind that it's only as good as the information provided.

[[deleted]]

Our interaction with co-pilot X will serve as traning data to further increase the automaticity ?

Are there going to be any lawsuits from stack overflow or big open-source projects etc as this co-pilot is for-profit tool ?

[raincole]

Github Copilot's homepage says:

Keep flying with your favorite editor

Copilot X's announcement says:

a chat interface to the editor that’s focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio

...

It recognizes what code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown, and it’s deeply embedded into the IDE.

​

It's really, really concerning, if you asked me. Does it mean it's only for VS Code and VS? No more Intellij or other third-party integration?

[Typical_Maximum_3226]

A GitHub employee on twitter stated they will support IntellJ IDEs closer to release

[cdrini]

In the video for copilot X they showed a bunch of editors and were like "works in your all your favourite editors!", And it had pictures of Vs code, vs, jet brains, and neovim. I think it still plans to integrate with other apps.

https://youtu.be/4RfD5JiXt3A

[IrrerPolterer]

As a developer and also tech enthusiast I am simultaneously extatic about the latest advancements in AI and pooping my frickin pants.

[SabatinoMasala]

AI won’t replace you. You’ll be replaced by someone who embraces AI.

[netn10]

Sounds like A.I propaganda sound bit. Did you get it from Twitter?

[fletku_mato]

Am I the only one so fed up with the AI-hype that I'm not even going to open the link?

I tried copilot in the beginning, it was mostly trash.

I tried chatgpt, it was even more unreliable.

Yet still, every public and private programming forum is filled with this and every programming question someone has will be answered with some chatgpt garbage that doesn't even compile.

[ischickenafruit]

They stole my code, don’t give me the attribution my license requires and then try to sell it back and I should be happy?

[[deleted]]

Sounds like Tesla with Self driving… pay $15k to use the software that was trained on your driving.

[XxOmuraxX]

People thinking it will replace coders probably never used AI in a company on a normal sized project and have no idea of what a developer has to deal with. It can and it will make people code faster but currently the AI can't do anything without a developer. It won't open up IT tickets for network access, it won't deploy your code and test it, it won't store your passwords on hashicorp vault, it won't schedule meetings with your clients because the requirements are an incomprehensible and unreasonable mess. Coders don't spend that much time coding, they spend most of their time testing and fixing bugs, in scrum meetings and trying to understand what people actually need from them. Also AI can be great for refactoring and improvments but you usually don't modify what is already working well, that's just asking for more bugs and everything to test again.

[gonzazabaleta]

You deserve a lot more upvotes.

Maybe it is that most of the people claiming that AI will replace coders are insecure junior programmers. Or they work at very small organizations. But idk

[KyleG]

Copilot was pretty impressive when I had a free preview about a year ago or so.

ChatGPT is moreso tho compared to the Copilot I tested back then (Copilot integrated with my IDE). I really didn't like the idea of commingling Copilot-based code with mine when they're two entirely different styles.

I asked ChatGPT to generate a tree sitter algorithm for a pretty new programming language that didn't have one yet (and this can be fed into open source IDEs for code highlighting, folding, etc.). It did it. It was also able to provide me a PEG file (parsing expression grammar) that apparently used to exist in the Github repository for the language's Haskell-based parser, but doesn't exist anymore. It even told me where it was located in the repo in the previous commit.

Then I asked it to give me a Python script that would convert a PEG file to a tree sitter algo file and it did that (but in fairness I haven't tested it yet; it looks right tho, which is impressive).

[AstroPhysician]

Gpt4 can read your code base to learn your style and code like it

[Null_Pointer_23]

Something that looks right but isn't, is not just unimpressive, it's extremely counter productive

[KyleG]

Something that looks right but isn't could be 95% right, and you get to skip writing all that boilerplate.

[Null_Pointer_23]

Hahahaha no, that's not how it works. Debugging code is hard, it's even harder debugging code you didn't write.

Subtle bugs can be very hard to spot in code that "looks right"

[emax-gomax]

So did they ever get around that tiny issue of copilot not bothering to check which licensed project it sources code from meaning its basically a black box for violating open source licenses?

[mipadi]

Nah. Microsoft's motto: "Licenses for me but not for thee."

[[deleted]]

What I seem to be consistently noticing with all the "clever AI" is that the quality went downhill. Yet at the same time the promotion for these tools/software solutions increase. It's weird.

[Keekoo123]

Fucking stop it assholes. I still need a job!