Fully respecting the licenses this code was published under, one would hope?

It blew my mind half of the times. It was like it knew what I was going to do.

The other times it was dumber than the standard auto complete. It doesn't have any awareness of already defined variables and doesn't use them to complete halfwritten variables. Hope this gets better soon.

- What areas/languages/tasks is it good at and what is it bad at?

- How often is it generating code with bugs?

- How often is the code that gets generated used as is vs immediately edited?

- What are the new frustrations that this causes that existing IDE code completion doesn't?

I work with trained models daily and I know that their failure cases are unintuitive, unexpected, and exasperating. I'd like to know as much about the failure cases of this model as possible before diving in.

- Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code?

- Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much about the process of creating code, but mainly about the output (i.e., does the running program solves the issue at hand?)

- Senior developers who don't like to write boilerplate code?

I don't see myself as the target audience of Copilot or Ghostwriter. I do work as an employee, but I'm not a "feature machine". Usually the hardest part about my job is solving problems while communicating with other people. I don't need to write code "fast", and by the time I hit the keyboard to start coding, I don't really need that much help (granted, I'm not working on code that goes into space rockets... just normal e-commerce stuff)

I like to work on side projects and learn new technologies. When I was starting with programming, as part of the learning I liked to write boilerplate code (actually, that's how I learnt programming. I remember writing C boilerplate code by reading "The C Programming Language". Skipping the "boring" parts wouldn't have helped me in my learning).

If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code (because, when I work on side projects, 50% of the satisfaction comes from actually writing code for the sake of writing code. The other 50% comes from the ability to solve a problem). So, yeah, maybe for the people like me who does find the act of writing code for the sake of writing code (you know like painting or taking photographs), Copilot seems like an unneeded tool?

If you are doing something new, you need to let people see what it will do, before they will give you money.

But as long as these are tiny parts of codebase (which will most probably be the case), I doubt anything can be done with that. No one will go to court because of a few generic functions.

I've gotta let you know that people copy code snippets from all sorts of codebases with little regard for licenses anyway, because they're toothless in 99% of cases, AI or not. It's a nice illusion that anyone respects licenses, but it's just not true.

It's been proved in court that AI does not infringe on copyright or licenses since it generates things from an understanding of the whole, instead of directly stealing, just like the human brain does.

I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe.

If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happens in my head, putting it into an editor is just process. I still also have to check it's work whenever I use it, so I'm still deeply embedded in the coding process.

I believe it's akin to an easel vs Krita/Photoshop. Some people enjoy interacting with the physical medium, others enjoy the creative process.

I would strongly recommend trying it out in anger (i.e. a reasonably real codebase), at least for 30 minutes. Form a better opinion after that (which may well be the same as yours right now).

For reference: I've been coding since I was 8 (almost 30 years).

My primary UX issue with copilot is that it is trying too hard to be helpful, often suggesting code that I don't need. You also can't trust it with more complex cases but that's actually pretty reassuring : - )

So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It's gotten very annoying and our pace is far slower than what we would like, here something like this makes quite a lot of sense.

Though the problem with such specific tools is they can't generate any customized code for our codebase, we can finetune other codegen models and that's what we plan to do down the line, but this specific tool just not really useful if it can't specialized for our codebase.

For me, same as writing actually, the thinking of what I want to do is everything, and the doing it is nearly trivial. I don't picture having copilot write nontrivial code for me and then reviewing it would be different than writing it, even if I didn't know the exact syntax and had to look it up. So I agree, it feels like a solution to a problem I don't have, like is solves something that I don't spend time on.

Cynically, like GPT-3 probably help write content farm stuff, copilot probably helps write some junk code for something, but there are probably domain specific low code tools that do that better as well

See it as a better autocomplete for people who don't want to or can't learn by diligently doing the boring parts.