HN Explorer

What if we boycott copilot?

10 points by what-imright ↗ HN
Arguably copilot was built using open source code against the spirit of the licenses. After all Microsoft has done to undermine open source in the past, can we allow them to have the last laugh? What if we organize a boycott?

8 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 16.9 ms ] thread
pacarvalho
I haven't played around with copilot for real yet. Though I did notice one my junior developers using it and he seems to find it helpful. My biggest question is: Does it overall (medium/long term) benefit the developer using it? Or does it create an over-reliance of a piece of software that may be very biased (given it was trained on open source projects which tend to look different than closed source repos)?
subtract-smiles
I used the beta for a while and I have to say, I honestly think my code quality went down when I used it. I started not even questioning the suggestions I was given and I'd end up writing spaghetti code that forced me to rely on Copilot to even understand what I was developing. Now that I've stopped using it, I feel like my code quality and maintainability has gone up now that I am actually thinking about everything I write.
anon2020dot00
I think I must be living in a parallel reality where-in everything innovative is shutdown for one reason or the other.

From the short-time I've used it, it's clear that Github Co-Pilot is just a fancy Google Search in that it helps with remembering syntax and keywords which is already helpful, in speeding-up the boiler-plate writing and so is really a big help.

No one is supposed to mindlessly follow the Github Co-Pilot suggestions and of course if judged by that metric it won't help with code quality; but if used properly to quickly type-out boiler-plate code then that is when it becomes useful.

How many times does anyone want to write a for-loop or remember the syntax of how to declare something, especially when juggling multiple programming languages? It's these kinds of things that Co-pilot is good at.

akagusu
I think we must do it.

We need to do it as individuals, as groups.

We need to alert employers of the potential legal consequences.

We need to educate developers to not use it.

CelticBard
Agree with educating developers about not using. Big step forward
CelticBard
I’m not really sure what it will achieve because I doubt Microsoft is going to pull the plug on it.
rurban
There's no need to boycott. You simply aren't allowed to use it, is it copies from various sources without knowing it's license. Chances are high that it is GPL code.