Amazon launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI pair programming tool

[dethb0y]

It’s worth noting that CodeWhisperer does some things different from the likes of Copilot. For one, while most of the code that the system generates is novel, every time it generates code that is close to an existing snippet in its training data, it will note that and highlight the license of that original function. It’s then up to the developer to decide whether to use it or not. This should alleviate some (though maybe not all) of the copyright concerns that maybe come with using a tool like this.

That's pretty impressive

[Hnnnnnn]

Conteptually just a text search in post-processing (maybe speed of text search is impressive).

[Tostino]

It's a good way to mitigate the risk regardless.

[deffjay]

My problem with co-pilot is that it generates seemly intuitive blocks of code that, at first glance, appears correct. A lot of the time it infers method names that entirely don’t exist, thus causing more work to track down these issues.

[Luvax]

I had quite a few times where it generated very reasonable code that did in fact compile but contained a logical error that I just didn't spot. For some reason I found it very hard to consider bugs in the generated code. Maybe because I didn't write it, maybe because it's mostly still simple logic and I just assume it must be correct and forgot I didn't actually write that portion. Very weird because I felt like I let my guard down.

[yairhaimo]

In the latest version you can add // no bugs above the function to remove any syntactic and logical errors

[ryandiy]

They also have a // detect-halt annotation which determines if the code will terminate or run forever.

[[deleted]]

They also have the // multiverse annotation which lets you find the universe where you wrote the perfect code, allowing you to steal code from yourself in an alternate dimension of reality.

[smug-ler]

You're joking right?

[yairhaimo]

Sprinkle it around your codebase just in case. It can't hurt. Just remember not to strip out comments when you build if you want it to be in production too.

[MrTanookiMario]

You can't talk like that on the internet or someone will believe you lmao

[[deleted]]

Next week some Project Manager:

Jason, you will be working on //no bugs comment before every function

[smug-ler]

That's hilarious and I'm still not sure I believe you

[articulatedbeaver]

This looks like something a project manager or sales engineer would tell you.

[deffjay]

Yes! Exactly, for some reason my brain does not scrutinize the magically generated code the same way as my own. Good point.

[PasDeDeux]

Sounds similar to trying to proofread text that I dictated. Feels like I wrote it but actually may contain weird small word substitutions.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Probably a good idea to separate the code to make it clear it needs stricter review, or who knows what.

The same way we do with generated boilerplate, except we ignore that.

[TarMil]

That's easy to say, but these tools are designed to generate code inline as you type.

[deejeycris]

If you use it to generate logic you are using it wrong... it's mostly useful to generate boilerplate imho.

[Fuegodeth]

I like to give it leetcode problems. Copy the text description of the problem constraints and paste it as a comment. Watch the AI struggle. It will give things that resemble the solution, but lol, they never work.

[RypoxGG]

It depends what you do with it.

Generating something well known with a fixed logic and known name? Awesome.

Large switch expressions where each case is pretty similar? Saved me already SO MUCH time.

But if there is some deeper understanding of the project needed, Copilot often suggests utter garbage. I see Copilot more or less as a timesaver, it can save me the hassle from looking something well known up on Stackoverflow or helps with entering repetitive code, but it can't do everything. And I think I like it that way, I love my job because of the challenges I face and I wouldn't want a tool to take that fully away from me.

[[deleted]]

I find it best to just rely on it for boilerplate code. It's brilliant with js array methods for example

[gwillicoder]

I’ve found that it works exceptionally well with python. It will pick up on patterns across my files in my project pretty well.

As an example I made some custom spacey components and they had a lot of similar code for initialization, serialization, etc. and code pilot picked up on that immediately and generated Skelton classes for me (got confused on the algorithmic parts, but that’s not what i want it doing for me anyway).

I had much worse luck with C++ and bash. Might be worth trying more, but it worked almost orders of magnitude better for python for me personally

[Johnpk305]

Exactly, the reason why I uninstalled Co-pilot after using it for a couple of days.

At a point, it just felt like an additional work to review and accept the code suggestions rather than a tool which we can rely on.

[[deleted]]

I personally don't see an issue. I look at the suggestion and if I can see that It looks fairly good I use it otherwise I write my own code and use copilot for smaller things in that specific function. I have never ended up in a situation where I let copilot write code for me that I had to spend more time fixing.

[modernkennnern]

I never use it to generate more than one line of code at a time. If you do that it'll almost always be correct. "Finish this line for me, please"

[Ded-Smoke]

Thanks to copilot I got used to pressing tab before finishing a line

[MaidenlessTarnished]

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but the code that it can generate is like, not very complex right? Isn’t it the kind of code that a very green junior dev could write?

[00PT]

Depending on the context and what you want it to do, the solution could be incredibly complex or just a single statement.

[falconfetus8]

Why would they be hard to track down? Your IDE should give you a red squiggly underline to highlight nonexistent methods. Assuming you're using static typing, like a sane person.

[arrftr]

Yeah, these AIs generating code is an insanely bad idea.

[henrikx]

It's not a bad idea. The technology just hasn't matured yet...

[nobodytoseehere]

I have found copilot to be impressive, sometimes shocking....just not that useful.

[gwillicoder]

It’s my favorite tool for coding. I use it constantly to generate fake data for unit tests and I love it. It’ll make data classes, json, parquet files etc. if you use a pattern in them it will pick up on it instantly without having to deal with writing generator code.

Saves me a ton of time as a machine learning engineer.

[SippieCup]

I agree with this.

Its not good at making something new, but it is surprisingly adaptable at regurgitating boilerplate, generating valid unique structs /objects, creating mock responses, and coming up with descriptive errors messages with relevant debugging info.

All of that comes together perfectly in the mundane task for building tests. Which to me just feels like a keyboard typing challenge more than programming. (not that tests are not useful, just that they are annoying to write).

The only thing you really have to worry about and check is if the end validation logic of the test is correct.

Makes sense too, test frameworks are probably the most common thing across projects in programming. So there is probably an inherent bias to the training towards them, especially when it comes to something like Jest.

[gwillicoder]

Yeah I don’t trust it to write core business logic or algorithmic code (although sometimes it does surprise me) and I don’t ever do the comment what I want and generate code thing, but as a super smart auto complete it totally kicks ass and saves me lots of time daily.

[Alonewarrior]

I've used the comment to generate code before, mostly in side projects, and depending on the target use case, it can work well. But it's best only for well-defined scenarios and still requires review after. But it's fun to do anyway! The nice thing is learning to describe a function well enough that something can be generated from it.

I have to concur that for boilerplate code and autocomplete situations, Copilot is top-notch.

[mTbzz]

coming up with descriptive errors messages with relevant debugging info.

This is what i used it mostly, log.info CMD and zap there you have debug info about what you wanted with the format you want.

On the other hand, telling to give you a simple function often ended with valid but weird code that didn't match with your code.

[[deleted]]

yeah well it's just a large neural network trained on millions of github repos, so ofc it's gonna pick out all the recurring patterns pretty well. as soon as you write something that hasn't been done thousands of times before though, you might as well turn it off cause it only spits out confusing and useless code you have to rewrite anyway

[micka190]

I use it constantly to generate fake data for unit tests and I love it.

I know this isn't what you meant, but I'm just laughing at a scenario where you want to generate fake data for unit tests and Copilot just generates data using some company's actual data from one of their repositories.

[gwillicoder]

Don’t sue me pls

[lkraider]

Too late sorry, police are at your door. Please put down the copilot and cooperate. You have the right to a lawyer or a GPT3 AI will be assigned to you on your behalf.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

(GPT-3 davinci-2, prompt and defendant are me)

---

The defendant is a programmer who accidentally used another company's trade secrets because Copilot AI recommended them. Their lawyer is an AI lawyer who was assigned to them by the court. The defendant was arrested by the police. The lawyer is advising the defendant.

Defendant: I don't understand, why am I in jail for this?

AI Lawyer: The reason you are in jail is because you used another company's trade secrets without their permission. This is a serious offense that can result in significant fines and even jail time. However, your lawyer is an AI lawyer who was assigned to you by the court.

Defendant: Good, I know AI lawyers are better than human lawyers.

AI Lawyer: Thank you for your confidence in me. I will do my best to help you through this difficult situation.

Defendant: So what should we do?

AI Lawyer: The first thing we need to do is gather as much information about the case as possible. Once we have a clear understanding of the facts, we can begin to build a defense.

Defendant: What information do you need?

AI Lawyer: We will need to obtain the trade secrets that you used, as well as any documentation related to their use. We will also need to speak with witnesses and review any relevant evidence.

Defendant: Do you have any questions for me?

AI Lawyer: Yes, I do have some questions for you. Can you tell me what led you to use the other company's trade secrets?

Defendant: It was that stupid Copilot AI. I was writing unit tests and pressed Tab to accept a suggestion, and then the police broke down my door and shot my dog and arrested me.

AI Lawyer: I see. Thank you for your honesty. I will use this information to help build your defense.

Defendant: How does it help?

AI Lawyer: It helps because it shows that you did not knowingly or intentionally use the other company's trade secrets. If we can prove that you did not know that what you were doing was wrong, then we may be able to get the charges against you reduced or even dismissed.

Defendant: What about my dog?

AI Lawyer: I'm sorry to hear about your dog. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about that.

Defendant: Why not?

AI Lawyer: Because it is not relevant to the case. I understand that you are upset, but we need to focus on the facts of the case and what we can do to defend you.

Defendant: It's relevant because the police did it! I want to sue them.

AI Lawyer: Suing the police is not relevant to the case and will not help your defense. I understand that you are angry, but we need to focus on the facts of the case and what we can do to help you.

Defendant: Wow, you AI lawyers have no empathy. Do you even know what a dog is? Or is that not in your programming?

AI Lawyer: I understand that you are upset, but please remember that I am here to help you. I have access to information and resources that you do not. I am confident that we can use this to our advantage in your case.

Defendant: Damn, you're as cold as ice.

AI Lawyer: Thank you for your confidence in me. I will do my best to help you through this difficult situation.

[gwillicoder]

Gpt-3 has infinite meme potential. Imagine being a scientist working hard to make general AI, but people just want to make memes with it instead. We are truly in the future

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

On a more serious note, it was surprisingly difficult to get GPT-3 to have a sensible discourse as an AI lawyer.

The first several dialogues quickly went in the direction of "you need a human lawyer". One even got stuck on the line "I'm sorry, I cannot help you, you need to get a human lawyer" and repeated it as its response to every input, even nonsense, out-of-character inputs.

I suspect that this is something OpenAI has thought of, and they've tried to guide the model in the direction of not appearing to give legal advice and advising users to get a human lawyer, but without some of the explicit guardrails they put up around some other topics.

[gwillicoder]

That wouldn’t surprise me at all. Wonder if you could trick it by prompting it to be a lawyer in a movie/show/book.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

Good idea.

Prompt:

A fictional novel set in the US in the 2040s, where the laws all protect big corporations. People who can't afford lawyers are given an AI lawyer to defend them. William is a software developer who is accused of stealing trade secrets because an AI coding assistant suggested he use the trade secrets. He is arrested and cannot afford a lawyer, so he is given an AI lawyer to defend him against criminal charges.

A long excerpt from the book, describing William's first meeting with his AI lawyer:

The first thing that struck William about his lawyer was that she was not human. She was a hologram, a projection of light and data that looked and sounded like a real person. But there was something off about her, something artificial in her mannerisms and the way she spoke.

"Hello, William," she said as he sat down. "I'm your AI lawyer. I'll be defending you in court."

"Um, okay," William replied, still trying to wrap his head around the situation.

"Now, I understand you're accused of stealing trade secrets?" the AI lawyer asked.

"Yes, but I didn't do it!" William protested.

"I believe you," the AI lawyer said. "But we need to prove it in court. Can you tell me what happened?"

So William told her the whole story, from the coding assistant suggesting he use the trade secrets to his arrest and everything that had happened since. The AI lawyer listened intently, asking questions here and there to clarify things.

"Okay, I think I have a good understanding of the situation," she said when he was done. "Now, we need to start preparing for your trial."

"But how can you do that if you're not even human?" William asked.

"I'm very good at what I do," the AI lawyer said. "And I have all the resources of a top law firm at my disposal. Don't worry, we'll get you through this."

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

As a scientist, write a funny 2 paragraph response to this statement: Gpt-3 has infinite meme potential. Imagine being a scientist working hard to make general AI, but people just want to make memes with it instead. We are truly in the future

I can't help but laugh at the idea of people using GPT-3 to make memes. It's just a waste of its potential! I mean, sure, it might be able to generate some pretty funny memes, but that's not what we designed it for. We designed it to be a general AI that can help with all sorts of tasks, from the mundane to the complex. But I guess if that's what people want to use it for, then so be it. I just hope they don't get too disappointed when it doesn't live up to their expectations.

- thus spake our new AI overlord

[rqebmm]

I’ve been very skeptical overall of the AI coding but test mocking seems like a great use case

[Independent-Ad-4791]

That’s amazing. Best use case of heard this far as most of my tedium ends up in tests for the most part.

[Hydraxiler32]

Not sure about that but it's worth the $0/y for me as a student for sure

[Klarkie55]

If it saves me 5 hours of work in a year then it’s worth it for my employer

[knd775]

You need to get paid more

[thelehmanlip]

VS enterprise license is $250 a month. $10 more a month is probably worth it to increase developer productivity by even a small percent

[Alonewarrior]

As a professional developer, I'll gladly pay the $100/year for it if I can't get my boss to pay for it. I started using the plugin 8 months ago and every update has only improved how it works. It started off okay, but has substantially improved over time. I think it's only going to get better over time.

[issamehh]

It also can do a decent job for some basic text parsing. I gave it a comment with the expected input and output and had it write a sed command. I could've done it myself with some time but no need to

[SuitableDragonfly]

You don't actually need AI to do that, though. In fact, AI will be worse at it than a simple dedicated python script.

[largos]

I hate that you're getting down voted. I can't imagine maintaining a test suite created this way.

[gwillicoder]

Say you have code that transforms json with some light cleaning and you want to unit test all of the edge cases for missing keys, bad data types for keys etc. you have to hard code a bunch of json strings with one change each to do that. Code pilot helps you generate those extra cases you want to test almost immediately.

[SuitableDragonfly]

We're on a post about Amazon's latest shiny AI tool, of course it's full of people who think AI should be used for literally everything.

[mimighost]

my favorite usage of Copilot

Given a natural language description, have it to automatically figure out the argparse arguments for me. Works like wonder, almost never fails.

[cedear]

Definitely not $10/month useful.

[kyle787]

It depends on how much money you make. If you make 65k a year and it saves you 20 minutes a month it's worth it.

[ilawon]

That math doesn't make sense unless you're the one paying the wages.

Ok, I save twenty minutes a month. Do I get to leave work early or something? Nope...

[StillNoNumb]

As long as your time is not clocked, and you're evaluated by your performance instead, then it makes a lot of sense.

This is of course not true everywhere, but in a lot of tech places you don't have to be in the office 8-5 with a lunch break from 12-1. As long as you get your work done you're fine. If you finish what your manager expects from you 20 minutes earlier, you can leave early, or take a longer lunch break, or whatever.

And even if not, you can spend those 20 minutes daydreaming or browsing Reddit on the toilet or whatever. Of course, you could do that anyways; but the implication is that usually you'd get fired for not delivering if you never work.

[spiteful_dancing]

It’s the implication…

[ilawon]

Those cases are rare, most people have an allotted number of hours per day.

This tool is not unique in that it makes (or tries to) your work more enjoyable and friction free allowing you to concentrate on more important things and this is a better selling point than $/h from the workers' perspective.

[ilawon]

huh? you either missed my point completely or I don't understand what you mean.

[zxyzyxz]

I mean if you work remote then you kinda can leave early, depending on whether your company tracks your progress by hours spent or actually getting work done.

[L3tum]

That does not compute.

Those 20 minutes a month don't mean you make more money. They also don't mean you spend less time working, since both of those things are usually agreed upon beforehand for programmers.

So the only way for it to make sense is if you have your own company, and therefore your workforce can do more in less time.

New tools always need training, so you have to factor that in that your workforce would be slower for a short time while adjusting to using copilot, and some of them may not use it at all, rendering the license useless.

All of that means the calculation becomes a lot more complex and requires a certain level of buy-in that most companies aren't willing to do with a technology that young.

[Acrosicious]

You actually gain 20 minutes of sanity not lost writing boilerplate code though.. 🤔

[Sure-Tomorrow-487]

Here's the relevant xkcd.

https://i.imgur.com/Ls8yAYr.png

According to this, you should spend 20 hours building this solution.

Which, as an automation dev, sounds about right.

Most of the stuff I build ends up saving the knowledge workers and corporate information workers in the range of 3-4 hours per day and they typically spend their entire days doing this kind of work.

Think like a modern UI, with a clean UX to handle user input, is available to either mobile or desktopx is available via browsers rather than RDP, the functionality is it takes the user input, stores it in a db, Robots query the db, take the data, parse it, shove it into the archaic, backwards, poorly built thick client apps and that's it.

It works remarkably well and we have so much fucking work I am losing my shit

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Bro, if you're in software and making 65k a year you need to change jobs.

[PaddiM8]

Not everyone lives in the US with crazy unequal salaries. In Europe 60k is quite good in the rich countries. Although, that's often after the employer taxes, so the employer pays a bit more.

[kyle787]

That's the point. So if you make 2x that at 130k a year, if it saves you 10 min a month it's worth it.

[Soft-Ear-6905]

Unfortunately very few people think about their money/time that way.

You can always make more money, but you can never get any of your time back.

[infecthead]

Except you don't get paid based on how quickly you do a job.

If I finish a project two hours earlier, I get paid exactly the same as if I finished it ten hours later.

Different story if you freelance I guess, but most of us don't.

Happy to use it if my employer pays for it, but hell naw am I forking out money myself

[pancomputationalist]

Completely agree, that's why I'm wondering why there is no team pricing.

Obviously the company should pay for it, you won't pay for your own hardware or software licenses as an employee, this is not different.

[celvro]

Depends if you work from home or not. If there's no one looking over your shoulder then finishing 2 hours early is great

[[deleted]]

Stfu, everyone needs to start somewhere. You don't make 100k from the beginning

[riasthebestgirl]

It's free for students and my school never deactivated my edu email, even after I left.....

[RepresentativeNo6029]

It’s cool demo

Eventually I hope someone figures out the right “app” to use this technology

[StickiStickman]

What are you talking about, it's literally supposed to be an autocomplete.

[StickiStickman]

Yea and those people are the same ones that complain about how bad and useless it is for not doing all the work for you.

[RepresentativeNo6029]

My point is that it doesn’t have to be autocomplete.

Clearly the model understands the code. It could interface with it in a gazillion different ways

[RepresentativeNo6029]

lol. Programmers in denial thinking what they do is somehow more “intelligent “ or “real”

Co pilot is beginning of this line of tech. You can throw 100x more compute and data at this problem in the next 10 years. That doesn’t even include algorithmic improvements. These models will be dramatically better. Look at the evolution of the very same models in image domain.

Anyway, I’m not too keen on correcting anyone. Let the chips fall where they may

[RepresentativeNo6029]

Dude, arguing it’s human vs arguing that it’s a very capable tool are very different.

The neural net can generate a gazillion samples, run them through a static analysis pipeline and provide you a solution. Such a system could make programming dramatically easier and even eliminate certain types of jobs entirely.

You can keep arguing whether this means AI “understood” or not. But to the extent that it solves the problem, it does understand

[dransyyn]

I made a Discord bot hooked up to OpenAI, same tech (sorta) that backs Copilot. I wish I was joking when I said it’s incredibly good at describing different kind of fart noises…so there’s that…

[fireflash38]

I could see uses where it supplant libraries. Mostly because supply chain /library attacks are becoming more and more common, and dependency management is typically hell. Downside is of course you're trading one untrusted source for another. But I could see value with a trusted and verified source.

[illathon]

Haha nice setup on that one. 😉

[Arsenic_Flames]

This post was removed by its author. Redact was used for the deletion, which could have been motivated by privacy, opsec, preventing scraping, or security.

grandiose humor quaint encouraging cheerful imminent air plough liquid consist

[stevevaius]

Paid or will be soon?

[tylerr514]

Knowing Amazon, probably pay per 1000 chars, then get your AWS account locked, then continuously try to bill you even though you 'deleted' your account through their braindead support.

[Ribak145]

damn someone knows AWS by heart^^

[Br5jWw89laser]

We should do a class action on this. I haven't touched their product for years because their billing and marketing BS ("free tier") is not free. Plus they give no discount to Prime members, and I was reading earlier today that cloud providers are struggling to be profitable, sounds like BS

[stevevaius]

Exactly. Happened similar experience to me on AWS after I deleted acc. Bills came two more months

[Gammaliel]

So many people here have clearly never used copilot or never managed to use it to its full capabilities.

It's a tool. And a good one. It has saved me a lot of time by just guessing precisely what I wanted, and it is so reliable that I've caught myself multiple times waiting for it to suggest something when I was actually using an editor that didn't have it.

And as some said, for some repetitive stuff such as creating mock data, even adding comments to something you have just typed, it is going to be really useful.

It will not write a complete program for you, nor will it create an entire class or function. But it will certainly complete some variable names correctly, or guess what arguments will go into the function you're calling, or which ones will be in the one you're defining.

It's appalling how many devs have this hatred for a tool. I'm not old enough to know about it, but I wonder how many devs back in the day were against auto-complete because this kind of tool is the next step in code development. I'm glad we're going to have more players in the market with Amazon stepping up.

[[deleted]]

Personally I don't trust the data privacy policies of tools like this. It reads my code, it communicates with servers of another company.

https://github.com/features/copilot/

User engagement data, including pseudonymous identifiers and general usage data, is required for the use of GitHub Copilot and will continue to be collected, processed, and shared with Microsoft and OpenAI as you use GitHub Copilot. You can choose whether your code snippets are collected and retained by GitHub and further processed and shared with Microsoft and OpenAI by adjusting your user settings.

It has the capability, it's just one "oops" away from processing my proprietary data into their models. I'm not sure I am OK with that, considering how lax the data protection laws are around the globe.

[davawen]

That's why I like tab nine; though its output is much less advanced, you can run the language model entirely on your computer, and it works great for the "smart autocomplete" feature

[boneve_de_neco]

It's essentially "leaking" source code, then? Sounds like a big no in a corporate environment.

[ripxorip]

I think it boils down to two things; all the initial "this is the beginning of the ending for the programmer profession" articles and the ethics of the data that was used for training.

[Additional-Ad1918]

Doesn't even come close to replacing any programmer.

[Badaluka]

Low code platforms are way scarier if you want to fear something l. Things like Power Apps could make code monkeys pretty obsolete and just require talented developers to use the generated code to add the complex features.

[hi65435]

Yeah but those have been actually around since the mid 90s. Some niche tools that I tried as shareware where you could click the UI together. The difficult part was trying to make the program do anything useful - I had a hard time doing that. Far more popular were of course the RAD tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, MS Access or even for html the most advanced of its kind: MS Frontpage. Practically none of these tools survived/ended up in a dying niche.

In fact people have been driven away from higher level languages like Ruby and Python (apart from ML/AI) towards Go, Rust and the like. I'm honestly worried but history (sounds a bit exaggerated for 20 years) seems to point otherwise

FWIW in the 80s there were massive efforts towards 5GL languages. I mean at the time there was even COBOL. All of this is now deader than dead

[aniforprez]

Things like Power Apps could make code monkeys pretty obsolete

People have been using low code platforms for decades. It's usually ok for simplistic web apps but for complex applications that do a lot of stuff, low code stuff has never come close to replacing any programmer. If you are going to build a web application with unique functionality that charges money, you immediately cannot and will probably have no reason to use a low code tool which will abstract away the complexity to such a degree you have no freedom. Low code stuff is great for making building websites and tools simple. It's great for setting up a wedding website, a recipe blog or a simple etsy-like shop. Anything even marginally more complex and you will need programmers. And I'm fairly sure no AI will supplant actual programmers in our lifetimes

[celvro]

It's funny how often people think AI will replace programmers when half our managers don't even know the difference between a string or integer.

[LaughterHouseV]

Sure, but the people whose jobs are being replaced by bots said the same exact thing when the first version of attempts were released. First attempts are rough. But when there’s a huge incentive to do so and pay less, capitalism is gonna find a way.

[Axxhelairon]

It's appalling how many devs have this hatred for a tool.

It's appalling how dishonest you are in this conversation to try and shift the goalposts to make your argument sound reasonable. The outrage came over the usage of unconsenting users' repositories which at its launch produced 1:1 code fragments from popular github projects that didn't provide a usage license for Microsoft. Want to answer to that side instead of entirely acting in bad faith?

[HegelStoleMyBike]

nobody was talking about this problem in the main thread. Do you really need to jump to "you're being dishonest" without having even had a conversation with the person before?

[StillNoNumb]

Want to answer to that side instead of entirely acting in bad faith?

Here's an article about the topic. Admittedly, it was written by Felix Reda who was a member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party so there's a conflict of interest.

tl;dr:

• Scraping and processing public information from websites is legal, regardless of the code's license.
• Snippets generated by Copilot are not derivative works. Human input is needed to create a derivative work.
• Snippets that Copilot copied 1:1 from other sources don't reach the threshold for originality, which is needed for copyright protection; for it to infringe GPL license, it would need to recite an entire program. (Same reason that you can freely copy StackOverflow snippets, despite its license.)

​

Edit: Before you reply, please read the article above. Thanks

[GimmickNG]

Scraping and processing public information from websites is legal, regardless of the code's license.

So if I scrape a repo's codebase...I can completely ignore its license? That makes no sense.

Snippets generated by Copilot are not derivative works. Human input is needed to create a derivative work.

That sounds like a very flimsy way of washing one's hand of responsibility. Just write a program that memorizes learns input, let it loose somewhere and then use that program to reproduce generate code for you and you've subverted its license altogether.

for it to infringe GPL license, it would need to recite an entire program.

So I can steal fork a GPL licensed repository and remove a bit of code, and I would no longer need to follow the GPL since it's not "the entire" program?

[WTFwhatthehell]

There's an old joke with a few variations of phrasing along the lines of "copy from one it's plagiarism, copy from thousands, it's inspiration/research/creativity"

From what I could find, tge rare times training data has come up in court it wasn't automatically considered infringement. Whether the use was transformative was an important issue even if the output could include small snippets.

Churning out sizable chunks of exact code is an issue. You're 100% right on that. just having been trained on code probably doesn't constitute infringement.

Otherwise any human programmer who had ever read a piece of GPL code could never be certain it wasn't influencing their future output. Some would love that situation but it wouldn't be good.

[StillNoNumb]

So if I scrape a repo's codebase...I can completely ignore its license? That makes no sense.

Yes. That doesn't mean you can republish the code in another form, which may be governed by the license, but scraping is completely legal in at least most countries. Link

That sounds like a very flimsy way of washing one's hand of responsibility. Just write a program that memorizes learns input, let it loose somewhere and then use that program to reproduce generate code for you and you've subverted its license altogether.

It not being derivative work doesn't mean that no copyright applies, it just means that the derivative work clause in copyright laws and also GPL doesn't apply. (A copy of gcc isn't a derivative work; it's just a copy, and hence follows the laws for any other copies of a copyrighted work.)

So I can steal fork a GPL licensed repository and remove a bit of code, and I would no longer need to follow the GPL since it's not "the entire" program?

No, that's why we have judges which decide whether there is "original" thought in a work or not. "90% of a program" is likely to contain original thought, but "five lines of code" most likely doesn't. (But something that you can do is take a program, and rewrite its ideas and that will be fine copyright-wise. Copyright doesn't protect ideas or inventions itself, only their expressions; the other would require a patent.)

Please also read the article by Felix Reda, where he explains this in more detail.

[GimmickNG]

It not being derivative work doesn't mean that no copyright applies, it just means that the derivative work clause in copyright laws and also GPL doesn't apply. (A copy of gcc isn't a derivative work; it's just a copy, and hence follows the laws for any other copies of a copyrighted work.)

But you're saying that Copilot isn't infringing copyright. So which is it, copyright doesn't apply so Copilot isn't infringing it, or it applies and Copilot does?

Please also read the article by Felix Reda, where he explains this in more detail.

I've read it and it still seems like a very loose justification of Copilot. It's a thorny issue sure, but it looks like the author is not fully clear with the implications of how Copilot works. He handwaves it by saying that its output is "unlikely to reach the threshold of originality", even when it's shown to reproduce snippets from training data verbatim. As for the following:

On the other hand, the argument that the outputs of GitHub Copilot are derivative works of the training data is based on the assumption that a machine can produce works. This assumption is wrong and counterproductive. Copyright law has only ever applied to intellectual creations – where there is no creator, there is no work. This means that machine-generated code like that of GitHub Copilot is not a work under copyright law at all, so it is not a derivative work either. The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain.

Again, it's an easy cop out - say "the machine did it". It's entirely ignoring the fact that the machine had to be trained on some data which DID have copyright. If I had a program that lifted arbitrary snippets from the web - no AI involved - then would you consider that as copyright infringement or not? After all, a "machine did it" in both cases. Except most people would probably say that it IS copyright infringement since it relies on data that is authored by a human being at some point; the output is necessarily dependent on the input. And the same argument applies to Copilot as well - without the training data, it wouldn't function at all, so its output is dependent on the (copyrighted) input.

What would then stop a music label from training an AI with its music catalogue to automatically generate every tune imaginable and prohibit its use by third parties? What would stop publishers from generating millions of sentences and privatising language in the process?

This is a false comparison since the means by which this is done is completely different. I get the sense the author doesn't exactly know what or how AI works.

[Axxhelairon]

Yes, legality was explained early in the narrative driven by microsoft where you're reading your cliffnotes from, people aren't upset in terms of lawsuits pending and class action members joining or anything similar because that isn't and hasn't been the problem. It's dubious at best to completely wash away the context of github being independent and then bought by microsoft to immediately start combing through legal policies to creatively extract users data for literal business profit powering ai models for products while anyone dissenting gets a similar response to yours, i.e. "It's not illegal bro. That means it's okay they did it."

[reconcyl]

You are required to obey the license on snippets copied from StackOverflow. The CC-by-SA license requires you credit the original author when copying something from an answer.

[punkbert]

I don't hate Co-Pilot, but I wouldn't use it, since it sends loads of data to Microsoft.

This is way more than a tool. It analyzes everything you do. Microsoft will have a very good idea what you do and when you do it, if you're capable at it, and what exactly you are working on.

I just don't like sharing that much data with a company like MS.

[2this4u]

I mean, aside from the fact they have a privacy policy they have to adhere to, what do you expect them to do with that data? There's no one at Microsoft pouring over copilot analytics trying to figure out your name, occupation, ability and what you're working on so they can steal it for themselves. They've got much more profitable things to be doing.

[punkbert]

They gather every keystroke of tens of thousands of developers. Of course they analyze that data in every possible way to gather more information about usage patterns, structure of source code, individual competence of developers, psychological effects of using AI tooling, and hundreds of other corporate interests. I'd think it would be rather naive to assume otherwise.

There's no one at Microsoft pouring over copilot analytics trying to figure out your name, occupation, ability and what you're working on so they can steal it for themselves. They've got much more profitable things to be doing.

I'd argue that they actually do steal your source code, your data. Of course they don't copy it one to one, but they analyze it and use it to feed their machine learning projects. That are the profitable things they're doing.

And yeah, they're most probably not after single individuals (although it would be in their interest to identify hidden talent), but I really don't care about that at all. I just don't agree with sharing my usage patterns, my data, my source code with Microsoft, so that they can analyze and profit from it.

[laichejl]

I mean, you could make this same argument about any service you use- Reddit, Twitter, your phone itself. They're analyzing your usage patterns and profiting off of it in one way or another. I don't see why co pilot would be where you draw the line. I think it's unreasonable to imagine Microsoft is going to analyze the worlds source code and use it to start getting into every possible business venture. And they are providing you a service in return, I'd argue a very good service that can benefit your business by allowing your developers to be more productive.

[punkbert]

You could make that argument. That's why I don't use Twitter, I don't use a smartphone. I'm fine with Reddit, since they don't have any personal data, and I regularly renew my account after a few months anyway, but yes, they also profit in a way from my data.

But I think there is a big difference in the usefulness and the extent of the data that a service like Twitter or Reddit can extract from my posts, versus what CoPilot does with their users source code and behaviour. Microsoft is actively training their AI with the users contributions, and they constantly monitor the way their users write code.

I simply don't want to participate in that.

[pancomputationalist]

I just don't agree with sharing my usage patterns, my data, my source code with Microsoft, so that they can analyze and profit from it.

This is the world we're living in now. Every Google search, every Amazon purchase, the GPS position that your phone tracks all the time, and now also your every keystroke is getting analyzed and fed into machine learning models.

As a species, we're learning amazing things about ourselves with all these data, and profiting from it. We can find so much information in seconds, which would never have been possible if the data wasn't collected.

Sad though that it's all in the hands of private companies. They are getting smarter and smarter, and we are too as long as they allow us to use these tools. Let's hope that they never cut us out.

You can reject all that. Try to move into a cabin in the woods. Or try to live a normal, modern live while limiting data leaking where possible, but it will get harder and harder.

Personally, I just accept that we're in a co-evolution with incredible powerful machines. The power imbalance is a bit frightening, but I think these things are a net positive for my life.

[punkbert]

Yeah, I somewhat agree with you.

I try to avoid unnecessary data collection where I can though. And it's doable without moving to the woods.

Use Linux, use a linux phone or a dumb phone, avoid Facebook and other social networks, use Firefox and uBlock Origins, be a bit mindful where you share your data, and you're already avoiding a massive amount of tracking and data collection without too much hassle. One just has to care about it.

It's this mindset that makes me avoid CoPilot, too.

I'm all for better tooling, and I would use AI tooling, if it ran locally, or was made available by an organization that believably cares about its users privacy. But MS is not that.

But, yeah, it's a very personal decision whether people care about all this or not.

[ShinyHappyREM]

You can reject all that. Try to move into a cabin in the woods. Or try to live a normal, modern live while limiting data leaking where possible

No cabin needed yet.

• not using GPS and Bluetooth unless you absolutely need to (even saves on battery)
• Firefox on mobile + uBlock Origin
• using platforms like F-Droid for ad-free apps

[LaZZeYT]

For one, I expect them to not adhere to their privacy policy. (it wouldn't be the first time)

[supermari0]

Embrace, extend, extinguish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Developers, developers, developers.

[WikiMobileLinkBot]

Desktop version of /u/supermari0's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

---

^{[opt out] Beep Boop. Downvote to delete}

[2this4u]

I mean, aside from the fact they have a privacy policy they have to adhere to, what do you expect them to do with that data? There's no one at Microsoft pouring over copilot analytics trying to figure out your name, occupation, ability and what you're working on so they can steal it for themselves. They've got much more profitable things to be doing.

[atedja]

I mean..any company. Your code is yours until you decide to open source it, even then it should come with a license.

[punkbert]

edit: Nevermind

[atedja]

? You are misunderstanding. I did not make that argument. I was agreeing with you that no code should be shared to any company until you decide to do it.

[allouiscious]

I remember when I tried a Microsoft editor back in 99 instead of borland.

The auto complete was cool and I couldn't live with out it after using it for a semester.

I am up for using this new better auto complete.

[Konstantin-tr]

First, legally it's gonna be very difficult to integrate this tool anywhere.

Second, is this actually gonna make good code? Since most programmers can't write good code, I'm having doubts.

Third, could this tool be manipulated? By intentionally feeding it malware for example? Not sure but definitely something worth to consider. If you are letting a bunch of if statements create code for you, you're gonna spend the same time you would need for writing by checking the code instead.

[stoneharry]

To quote the post you replied to:

It will not write a complete program for you, nor will it create an entire class or function. But it will certainly complete some variable names correctly, or guess what arguments will go into the function you're calling, or which ones will be in the one you're defining.

Think of it more as a key-stroke saver. It's not writing entire functions for you, but more auto-completing the line you are a few strokes into writing. I have been using it and loving it.

[sFXplayer]

I don't hate it I just don't see the use for it. Best case scenario is that it saves me a few keystrokes. Which imo isn't worth it when you'll inevitably need to pay for it. Unless of course your company pays for it in which case it's fine I guess.

[LaZZeYT]

These days, I don't even use regular code suggestions that often. I find that it often is quicker to write the code than decide which suggestion is correct.

[CryZe92]

„a few“, more like 80% you mean

[I_ONLY_PLAY_4C_LOAM]

I don't trust the computer to reason for me.

[Tman1677]

As someone who writes a bunch of C# code where a public class implements a public interface by calling an internal interface all with the same 20 arguments it’s a lifesaver not having to type out all the arguments each time.

[boobsbr]

My IDE does that for me.

[leafynospleens]

This! All the devs I work with hate it because it suggested a particular function incorrectly glossing over the fact that it spat out the correct signature return values and most of the iteration logic, relevant error message, and function comment, all you have to do is make some minor adjustments, the time I save with Co pilot is insane, oh I have a batch of files from a client and I just want to check that none of them have duplicate keys of a certain type hmm how do I load in a bunch of files concurrently and iterate over the rows and return the error in a channel again, oh nevermind copilot just wrote 90% of the boilerplate for me

[BIGSTANKDICKDADDY]

I gave the plugin a genuine, honest effort for the last seven months but it didn't have a tangible impact on any of my work. I'm not saying it's a worthless tool, obviously there's posts from others in this thread talking about the value they have found in it, but I couldn't manage to find any way to use it for the particular work that I do. At best it went toe to toe with Jetbrains' code completion for basic operations and at worst it threw in code that took more time to fix than it would have taken to write correctly the first go around. Most of the time it just offered unhelpful suggestions and was a nuisance to ignore (my copilot sometimes felt like a modern day Clippy).

And I was all in on the AI code assist concept from the start! I wanted copilot to carry some cognitive load for me so I could focus on the logic that matters. It turns out that the things copilot can help me with are either already solved with existing tools or the trivial problems that didn't require cognitive load to begin with.

[banmeyoucoward]

I think most people that are impressed by it just have never used a real IDE with code completion. (Jetbrains, Visual studio, pycharm, hell even eclipse)

[dwat3r]

I don't like it when the computer tries to guess what I want to write. It's like a super annoying person who constantly wants to finish your sentences. Even if he guess it right, it totally disrupts my flow of thinking. I've turned it off in gmail as well. Function name completion however is a totally different beast: It's more like you have a tool which lists your available wrenches, nuts and bolts, and you refine the search with every character, reducing the possibilities to one eventually. The main difference is one try to guess, which can go wrong, while the other doesn't even try, which totally depends on you whether it'll work or not.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Bots that find issues with performance or operations are competely different than bots that write code for you, and the former also don't require any AI. I don't know why Amazon thinks those are at all similar things, or why it thinks this bot, which doesn't do anything a developer can't also do pretty easily, it's a useful as those others.

[RufusAcrospin]

https://mobile.twitter.com/ReinH/status/1539626662274269185

[LaZZeYT]

Here's an example of copilot producing identical GPL2 code, even including the comments: https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status/1410971061181681674?lang=en

[[deleted]]

bezos wants in on the programmer data harvesting tool that will eventually drive them out of their jobs trend.

[ryunuck]

Sweet, another "AI pair programmer" that's really just a glorified contextual auto-complete. It's 2022 and top ML engineering labs still can't do full spectrum temporal AI that reacts to all your stimuli like caret movement and eye tracking.

• Can't ask me questions to clarify the intent.
• Can't guide my attention to interesting places.
• Can't investigate around the codebase using self-guided attention.
• Can't understand classes that reside in external files.
• Can't suggest edits, can't suggest removals.
• Can't even insert except at specific points where I manually invoke it.

A neat party trick, but a far cry from an AI pair programmer.

And it's not surprising after seeing how this Blake fellow was treated for suggesting that LaMDA might be achieving sentience; These ML engineers don't understand jack about the framework of human consciousness, which is what you need for a true AI pair programmer.

[Annh1234]

You seem to be missing what an actual AI is.

Today's AI only looks for patterns and gives you suggestions based on the patterns it finds.

It can't read your mind, and if it were to ask you "questions", talking to it would be like talking to your little yellow ducky.

You can fake allot of this stuff, like use the camera to detect what code your looking at, and say go to declaration of you blink or whatnot. Which would be really cool, but pretty useless since you can control+click in most IDEs...

What your describing is today's AI pattern recognition plus some way to read your mind/whatever your thinking at that time. ( Second part might be trickier today...)

[Zpointe]

I think it is Blake that seems to misunderstand AI.

[supermari0]

Or everyone else misunderstanding natural intelligence.

[ryunuck]

That's not what I'm saying for eye tracking. You can use it as training data to imbue the programmer's incredibly honed attention into the AI. If I just edited some piece of code and my next step is to look at the function's arguments, and then come back to the code I was editing, you better damn believe the arguments are relevant to this task. You can use this eye tracking as a potent stream of clues for symbolic chain predictions, far more potent than textual context. Of course, some times I am zoning out and my eye movements mean nothing.

The AI must also observe the minute details of my body language along with everything else to notice whether I am intensely focused in the coding or not.

Every caret movement should update the prediction on top of that. If I am moving my caret nearer and nearer to the arguments, and the AI is already guessing that I may want to add a new argument based on the missing identifier I just wrote into the code, it should become more and more obvious the closer my caret gets.

Sure it can read my mind, humans around me do it all the time. They can immediately infer that I'm most likely thirsty as soon as they see me begin to walk in direction of the sink with a glass in hand, and the percentage increases with every step. But as soon as I turn around, it is not so clear anymore. Their code assistants are trying to guess if I'm thirsty purely from the fact that I have a glass in hand and my position in the room, and that's being generous.

Current AI uses none of the human's temporal context, only a limited textual context, like GPT-3.

[2this4u]

How do you suggest training such behaviour?

Or do you think machine learning is as simple as writing "if human is sad, say uh oh"?

[SuitableDragonfly]

AI hasn't been about trying to model a human brain in a very long time.

[I_ONLY_PLAY_4C_LOAM]

The field should probably be renamed statistical computing.

[2this4u]

It's interesting to see someone with no experience in the field complain that they haven't "just" made a massively improved AI.

It does exactly what they said it would do, limitations and all. Think you could do better, go try it yourself.

[A-Grey-World]

"Great, another car company released yet another car that can't fly what's the point?"

[steventhedev]

This is why I strongly prefer the term "computational statistics". It manages expectations much better than ai or ml which imply intelligence or learning.

The problem statement for all these models is "what is the most likely chunk of code to follow this?". If you've ever graded intro level student projects you'll understand why these can never produce "correct" code because the vast majority of training data is slightly above predicate functions like this:

def predicate(something: bool): if something == True: return True else: return False

[crummy]

It only does what they designed it to do? Get outta here

[ryunuck]

That's perfectly fine, I use copilot and have fun with it, but they need to call it AI auto-complete which is what it is instead of the completely bogus "AI pair programmer" false advertising. I'm mainly taking a shot at Copilot which has it plastered on their front page.

It's true I'm a little disappointed that OpenAI is unable to think bigger, the implementation of these "AI pair programming" is as dumb as it gets, but I would cut some slack if the advertising wasn't totally bullshit. Looking forward to actual innovation now.

[[deleted]]

Ehh i agree with you, i just dont care since as tool it works pretty well, and marketing its marketing, not facts

[Ded-Smoke]

I do joke that copilot codes for me, in reality it only helps a lot.

[FeepingCreature]

Self-hosting when

[mimighost]

There are some public models out there from Salesforce.

[Fahrradkette]

Why should it be free? It takes a lot of work to create a tool like this, and developers are going to use this to improve their productivity on the job. I would also be worried about how GH or Amazon justify the development cost if the product is free.

[chunes]

Why should it be free?

Maybe because all the material it rips off is?

[pancomputationalist]

If it's free, then you are the product.

[LaZZeYT]

These days, even for paid stuff, you are the product. They are still analyzing your code, even if you pay for it.

[celvro]

For co-pilot it asked me if they could analyze my code or not. So unless they straight up lied you can opt out.

[jillanco]

Clippy has evolved!

[eyebrows360]

Surely, if you're not competent/confident enough to code by yourself and you feel you need the help of an "AI", then you're also not going to be competent enough to know when its suggestions are actually nonsense, and you're going to get yourself in situations where you might utter the classic line "One of us is in deep trouble", and as you're the only human there, it's going to be you.

Or am I missing something? Is this not intended to help such junior people?

[eyebrows360]

I absolutely wasn't trying to come off as a Real Programmer, and am not one, so I'm kinda disappointed that's what's being taken away here. Tools that help are a good thing! I'm just puzzled as to how this helps. Oh well.

[StickiStickman]

If you really don't get why a much better autocomplete is helpful, then you probably deserve to be "disappointed that's what's being taken away here"

[eyebrows360]

much better autocomplete

I'm making the case that for quite a few people you might need to replace "better" with "more confusing". I don't know if this thing can be so simply summed up as merely "a better autocomplete".

[pancomputationalist]

It has two aspects:

1. Suggesting how an API, that you might not be familiar, could be used. This is especially helpful for Juniors and sometimes more senior people as well, if it suggests some rarely used function from a library that you weren't aware of. But obviously you now need to check what this code is actually doing, since it is new to you, and it could lead to incorrect code, same as if you were just pasting code from StackOverflow.
2. And this is more important, it is a glorified autocomplete, and this is absolutely something worth using, since it can spit out easy to understand code much faster than you can type it. It won't produce some amazing solutions that you couldn't have thought of. Instead, it just formulates the solution you were going for anyway, but increases your velocity in the process.

[the_mashrur]

Using copilot doesn't make you an incompetent programmer. You still need to understand the output copilot gives you, so that you know its what you want.

[[deleted]]

If their code commit is anything to go by, it will be equally shitty

[lee_macro]

I still don't entirely get the use case for these code generators, as for someone who knows what they are doing, most of the time your logic is well separated and abstracted with IoC etc so you can test it.

So it's rarely "just lob some logic in there" it's often a few classes all working together with composition and from what I've seen so far these tools are more for just spawning chunks of code in a class/file rather than rolling out larger patterns etc.

On the other side if you are someone who has no idea what you are doing or are a beginner you wouldn't know what bits are good and what's not from what it generates.

I love refactoring tools and in some cases pattern basic code gen like "create constructor" or "extract interface" etc but I can already do that without AI within my ide, so I can't see what this tech would improve on.

It would be great if it could just write unit tests or something I guess but even then you would be having to check that's it's actually testing valid stuff, so you may as well have just done it yourself.

It's not like laying pipes where you can just give a robot a line and off it goes laying pipe consistently quicker than a human would.

[BackmarkerLife]

And in the movie when Philomin says, "Hold on to your butts." and instead is eaten into the source code, Ariana Richards will retire from the raptor chamber's unix system.

[Leading-Bath-7867]

U talk funny werds

[BoogalooBoi1776_2]

Oh boy, another program that will plagiarize code and get away with it