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GitHub Copilot Is actually Good

5 points by caseydm ↗ HN
My wife went to a conference recently where she learned about copilot. As someone who produces a lot of open source code, this immediately started me on a rant, talking about how it was reusing people's code in a questionable manner. I also thought writing comments to create code was a gimmick (still do).

However, I decided to try out copilot to see what it was doing and what the hell. I'm actually surprised how good it is. I'm use it for python within pycharm, and I'm surprised how often it's referencing patterns in other parts of my codebase. It's also autocompleting tons of patterns that I need for elasticsearch-dsl and some other python libraries.

I guess I've seen a lot of hate for copilot but maybe give it a try? I still don't know how to feel about the code reuse, but I'm surprised it works as well as it does.

6 comments

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acallaghan
I use it for Rails, and the most use I get out of it is with RSpec testing - tests with already descriptive spec names, it guesses correctly like 95% of the time what I was going to write anyway.

It's less useful around view code, but controllers/models it can be somewhat useful too. But to be honest, I'm happy to pay the price to let it write some specs for me

Kukumber
This sounds like an AD, but i'll still reply

The question about Copilot is not how good/bad it works, it is the fact that it trained on everyone's public code without taking into account the license, raising multiple concerns, including privacy ones

https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/

https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/github-copilot-rais...

yuppie_scum
I mean most of the devs I know were trained on StackOverflow.
nektro
It doesn't matter if it's perfect. It's still a Bad thing. The proliferation of AL/ML needs to stop.
thesuperbigfrog
What is the license for the generated code?

Are you using copyrighted code without attribution and in violation of the code's license?

Copilot is "auto-completion on steroids", but what risks does it introduce?

dtagames
Thank you for this, which matches my experience. What many people miss is that the most useful suggestions come from YOUR OWN code, not from anyone else's. They're not copyrighted or lifted from anywhere.