Copilot is useful because the cost to ask it something is effectively zero. If you have 2 lines of boilerplate code to write you aren't going to ask chatGPT to write it for you because just asking it costs more than solving the problem yourself.
>Copilot is useful because the cost to ask it something is effectively zero...
Copiolot requires you to enter payment details, to access the trial period. ChatGPT is available to use for free, as long as you're prepared to put up with the fact access may not always be instantly available during busy periods. So the reality is the reverse of what you say.
If I have a 10-100 line script to pump out, these days I don’t bother using an IDE + copilot I’m going to ask ChatGPT to do it and never leave the console until it gets it right. Then I might use chatgpt to draft up an email afterwards.
This makes me feel like it’s copilot that’s the one forcing me to disrupt my workflow rather than the other way around because ChatGPT already is being used so heavily by me.
I already see some DIY attempts at some level of editor integration like codeGPT and I’m aware chatGPT is more expensive but it provides several times the value of copilot. Not only do I find chatGPT more useful at coding it can also do things like draft emails amazingly well.
I cancelled my $10 copilot subscription after chatGPT came out and am happy to pay whatever ChatGPT is charging. I just can’t justify paying for both at current pricing.
Copilot made me faster at pumping out boilerplate but when ChatGPT is already being used by me to pump out boilerplate and so much more it feels too expensive for something so redundant. $120/yr to $240/yr USD is a TON to pay for a nice-to-have. Cut the price in half or even offer a Chatgpt+copilot bundle with a discounted price and I’ll consider it.
Why is it ~twice as expensive as a per-user license? Right now we just reimburse our analysts/developers the $10/month for the Copilot fees. I see no reason to go to a more expensive plan just so we can manage their licenses.
The following add-ons for an additional $108/year per person don't seem worth it at all. [0]
-Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?)
-Organization-wide policy management (huh?)
-Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person)
-Corporate proxy support (what even is this)
EDIT: How do you do single line breaks on HN, anyway? Markdown doesn't work (two spaces or backslashes) and the help docs don't specify:
Conversely, ignoring that your employees purchase on their own a tool which helps them with their job is a pretty poor policy. One might even think someone who doesn't ignore such a situation and instead says, "Hey, I'll reimburse you for that!" is being kind.
Why purchase a tool for the benefit of your job which your employer will not pay for? If I am less efficient at my job because they won't purchase it, then that is their decision. Less efficient it is.
> Why purchase a tool for the benefit of your job which your employer will not pay for?
This is shifting the goalposts. Your initial comment assumed[0] that the employer had an expectation that the employee would pay for these things and I was intending to provide an alternate perspective. You can make your own decisions but it doesn't make sense to act like other employees have no agency.
To answer the question, some people have a hobby that is also their job. Purchasing the tool for the hobby means they can use it for the job and an employer is being kind when they notice this situation and choose to reimburse the employee for their purchase.
The point is, there's more room for understanding that one likely doesn't have the full picture. It is worth checking assumptions from time to time.
[0] > Expecting your employees to provide you monthly loans ...
American software developers are put out by needing to buy up to $XXX/month in services which are reimbursed in their next paycheck, creating a short-term loan,
OR
The same developers are not at all cash flow sensitive to $XXX/month and rather enjoy the credit card rewards they get to harvest from these reimbursements?
If you work at a large corporation who forces the use of company cards over personal cards + timely reimbursements, the opinion is one-sided for the rewards alone. Much less the bureaucracy that usually accompanies the approval of using a company card.
This is especially true when it comes to airline travel. Individuals far, far more prefer to book travel on their own rewards cards - often travel-based ones, netting significant benefits like Delta's AMEX MQD waiver.
By the way, if it really matters to you, we will put Copilot and/or any other expenses on our own company rewards card if the cashflow is actually impactful. As I am sure most businesses would. It's just that employees vastly prefer the reimbursement methods for obvious reasons in today's rewards credit card environment.
The only time I got a corporate card, the company used a third option: a corporate AMEX that you had to pay off on your own + timely reimbursements + rule against plugging your own travel reward cards to collect miles and bonuses.
From employee point of view, this setup had all the drawbacks of using your own card, with none of the benefits. Well, OK - it saved you a tiny bit of time when doing expense reports, by automatically pre-filling the expense sheet with transactions pulled from AMEX statement. So there's that.
As for software licensing, that same company had a system through which you could request software, and appropriate costs would be deducted automatically from somewhere (e.g. team budget, or more likely, your paycheck). So again, a third option.
Most people when given the option prefer to "take the loan" out for the company, since most employees will have rewards credit cards.
You get the full cost you paid in your next pay check plus the bonus points on your card, that will be at a minimum 1 percent of the cost and possibly up to 5+ percent if you're lucky and your expense is in a good category.
> Why is it ~twice as expensive as a per-user license?
Because enterprises are willing to pay a lot more. It’s the same reason the pro version of GitHub is $4/user/month while the enterprise version is $21/user/month. It doesn’t cost $17 to maintain the SSO features that enterprises can’t do without. But GitHub charges that because they know enterprises will pay.
It sounds like you have never worked in at a place like ${BIG_CORP}, which is totally fair. Let me break it down for you:
> -Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?)
Try doing that x100,000, every month. It gets annoying fast
> -Organization-wide policy management (huh?)
Only group X is allowed to use these features, and only group Y is allowed to use code licensed in that way, etc.
> -Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person)
This sounds like mostly marketing BS, but likely still better than personal copilot. Have you read to copliot EULA? I haven't. I would guess they are using code you write to re-train their AI. You know who has read the EULA? Corporate lawyers. They don't want Github reading their internal code, so I'm sure the license for Enterprise does not involve sending data back to Github.
-Corporate proxy support (what even is this)
If you work at any large company (not even a super big FAANG or something) you will have this. You don't want random employees being able to access any random site. E.g. in general devs should not be able to access their personal drop box account because its an easy way to steal data without the company knowing. So all their network will be behind a proxy and everything has to be whitelisted. This proxy support is basically integrating with that system.
I worked for a billion dollar company prior to running my own.
>> Try doing that x100,000, every month. It gets annoying fast
We didn't. Accounting did. Our company had a reimbursements-only policy, no corp cards. It was great, especially those of us who flew a lot and banked tons of airline, hotel, and credit card points.
The other stuff, sure. Doubling the price? I don't buy it. Are large corps really stopping people from buying Copilot on their own and using the personal license, BTW? Definitely not.
> Are large corps really stopping people from buying Copilot on their own and using the personal license, BTW? Definitely not.
I would imagine so, just because of the EULA difference. Personally I never used and wouldn't dare to use Copilot at work, specifically out of concern for leaking company IP.
(EDIT: That, and exports control. Regulations governing what can be sold to who around the world are complex, and come with huge fines and prison sentences for non-compliance. Large corporations take this very seriously. For software devs this, in practice, means that someone will be going over the dependency trees of your projects with a fine-tooth comb. I'm sure exports control people will be interested in your use of Copilot, though what they'd think of it I am not sure.)
My experiences with personal licenses in two different corporate environments so far were:
- A large multinational - they had an internal "app store" through which you could request specific software products. Licensing issues were handled behind the scenes and invisible to the user. If the software required a one-time payment or a paid subscription, you were informed how much money will be charged to what cost centre, and how often (in less corporate language: how much $ will be deducted from your salary, and when). I never tried to run software on personal licenses while there, but if I did, I imagine it would've been flagged by the same auditing system that occasionally pestered me about old JRE versions that need to be uninstalled.
- A mid-sized manufacturer with highly corporate culture - they had IT install software to do automated auditing, and flagged any unauthorized software being run. They made a huge stink about people using unlicensed IrfanView. I actually bought an IrfanView license for my work machine using my own money, just so I could keep telling IT to tell whoever was driving those audits to leave me alone, as the license explicitly allowed using the software in commercial / corporate contexts. They weren't happy, but they also didn't tell me to remove it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - but had I asked, they'd just say "no".
IANAL but my understanding of the licenses is that the difference between the personal and business license is that the personal license allows them to use any files you open in your IDE as training data, but the business license doesn't.
I'm curious to hear how others have found Copilot?
I've been using it the last few weeks and I find it kind of marginal in value.
It was quite helpful with filling out some kubernetes type details and it makes some decent guesses when declaring constants. I also had it rewrite a line of code to order keys in a string.
Otherwise I find you really have to keep an eye on what it's doing - even simple things like function invocations it can get wrong e.g. incorrect arguments being passed to a method (where argument types aren't even matching).
Also I guess results depend on the language - I tried to get it to write a simple golang http server with a handler and couldn't figure out how to prompt it to write one.
I'm actually looking forward to a better Gopilot. It seems like doomsdayers do well in getting publicity, but to me it feels more like a refactoring tool that can help to speed up the development process (and teach me a few things along the way).
I have a friend that's found ChatGPT helpful in a similar way... it's not quite right, but enough to get going in a direction. Dave's Garage on youtube did a decent walkthrough for working with ChatGPT, and was interresting.
It's definitely not at doomsayer levels, and don't think it will ever get there, you still have to understand enough to know if it's even right. Similar for general facts and writing things like research papers.
I'm using the davinci-3 model as a sort of programming macro. You need to know something about what you want to do and how you want to do it. Then you just poke the model so it gives you what you want. It's also very handy to have it mock test data and even write unit tests that aim to cover your cases as well. It's just fantastic.
It’s really good for rote stuff. In particular writing if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf(“helpful context: %w”, err) } in Go, or getting the structure for some YAML down so you can go off and edit it.
It’s also super helpful for languages whose ethe value building utility functions over importing them, like parsing environment variables into types in Python. So many people have written their own functions to do this that the training set is pretty good.
I can't seem to make copilot do very much. I can get davinci-3 to write all sorts of interesting functionality with a prompt, but copilot only wants to spit out a word or a line at a time rather than blocks of code. I signed up for code pilot thinking that's what I was going to get, and it has been really disappointing.
So, last year I paid $100 for a year of CoPilot. It works well enough for me. I am curious how much better this new product works, but I am not going to spend the money for it right now.
Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code) is horribly broken, and even at $10/month it wasn't worth it, let alone $19/month. Considering that Visual Studio is used by enterprises mostly, I don't know how many will jump into this $19/month subscription until the product is much, much, better.
It isn't the "AI" side that is broken. It is just a buggy extension, crashes constantly, and even when it does give suggestions it takes far too long to do so harming your workflow. Check out the less than 2.5 star average reviews on the VS Marketplace:
Honestly if you're a Visual Studio developer, I'd say ChatGPT Plus for $20/month is better value than Copilot in its current form which is should be free while they iron out all the bugs. Or if you REALLY want to use Copilot, then you'll need to switch to VS Code instead since the extension in that at least works correctly.
I've used Copilot for VSCode for a little over a week now and I can't say that it's "horribly broken" at all. I've had issues getting it activated but after that, it just works for me. I'd make sure you use the latest of both, VSCode and Copilot extension.
What's kind of funny is, I've gone completely the other route... I've been using VS Code almost exclusively, even for a handful of .Net (Core/5+) projects. I will say the .Net extension for VS Code is lacking though, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks it's intentionally borked by MS. I find the experience is generally better for everything that isn't C#/.Net
I just literally setup Copilot, though haven't really used it yet. I also haven't worked much with ChatGPT, but may give that a try as well. I'm starting on a Rust project and really unfamiliar with the language, even after reading a couple books at this point. The learning curve has been steeper than other languages I've worked with, so willing to try the leg up approach at this point.
On the one hand the business case is easy to make as it makes me at least $500/month more productive than without CoPilot, on the other hand I don't see why someone would use CoPilot for Business over the individual version.
42 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadAnd I suspect it would be too slow for use in an editor the way ChatGPT seems to be throttled.
This makes me feel like it’s copilot that’s the one forcing me to disrupt my workflow rather than the other way around because ChatGPT already is being used so heavily by me.
I cancelled my $10 copilot subscription after chatGPT came out and am happy to pay whatever ChatGPT is charging. I just can’t justify paying for both at current pricing.
Copilot made me faster at pumping out boilerplate but when ChatGPT is already being used by me to pump out boilerplate and so much more it feels too expensive for something so redundant. $120/yr to $240/yr USD is a TON to pay for a nice-to-have. Cut the price in half or even offer a Chatgpt+copilot bundle with a discounted price and I’ll consider it.
In anycase, nothing I would ever use, not that M/S would care.
The following add-ons for an additional $108/year per person don't seem worth it at all. [0]
-Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?)
-Organization-wide policy management (huh?)
-Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person)
-Corporate proxy support (what even is this)
EDIT: How do you do single line breaks on HN, anyway? Markdown doesn't work (two spaces or backslashes) and the help docs don't specify:
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
[0]: Plus, the individuals don't get their credit card rewards. Employees love expensing things for free rewards.
This is shifting the goalposts. Your initial comment assumed[0] that the employer had an expectation that the employee would pay for these things and I was intending to provide an alternate perspective. You can make your own decisions but it doesn't make sense to act like other employees have no agency.
To answer the question, some people have a hobby that is also their job. Purchasing the tool for the hobby means they can use it for the job and an employer is being kind when they notice this situation and choose to reimburse the employee for their purchase.
The point is, there's more room for understanding that one likely doesn't have the full picture. It is worth checking assumptions from time to time.
[0] > Expecting your employees to provide you monthly loans ...
American software developers are put out by needing to buy up to $XXX/month in services which are reimbursed in their next paycheck, creating a short-term loan,
OR
The same developers are not at all cash flow sensitive to $XXX/month and rather enjoy the credit card rewards they get to harvest from these reimbursements?
If you work at a large corporation who forces the use of company cards over personal cards + timely reimbursements, the opinion is one-sided for the rewards alone. Much less the bureaucracy that usually accompanies the approval of using a company card.
This is especially true when it comes to airline travel. Individuals far, far more prefer to book travel on their own rewards cards - often travel-based ones, netting significant benefits like Delta's AMEX MQD waiver.
By the way, if it really matters to you, we will put Copilot and/or any other expenses on our own company rewards card if the cashflow is actually impactful. As I am sure most businesses would. It's just that employees vastly prefer the reimbursement methods for obvious reasons in today's rewards credit card environment.
From employee point of view, this setup had all the drawbacks of using your own card, with none of the benefits. Well, OK - it saved you a tiny bit of time when doing expense reports, by automatically pre-filling the expense sheet with transactions pulled from AMEX statement. So there's that.
As for software licensing, that same company had a system through which you could request software, and appropriate costs would be deducted automatically from somewhere (e.g. team budget, or more likely, your paycheck). So again, a third option.
You get the full cost you paid in your next pay check plus the bonus points on your card, that will be at a minimum 1 percent of the cost and possibly up to 5+ percent if you're lucky and your expense is in a good category.
Because enterprises are willing to pay a lot more. It’s the same reason the pro version of GitHub is $4/user/month while the enterprise version is $21/user/month. It doesn’t cost $17 to maintain the SSO features that enterprises can’t do without. But GitHub charges that because they know enterprises will pay.
> -Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?)
Try doing that x100,000, every month. It gets annoying fast
> -Organization-wide policy management (huh?)
Only group X is allowed to use these features, and only group Y is allowed to use code licensed in that way, etc.
> -Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person)
This sounds like mostly marketing BS, but likely still better than personal copilot. Have you read to copliot EULA? I haven't. I would guess they are using code you write to re-train their AI. You know who has read the EULA? Corporate lawyers. They don't want Github reading their internal code, so I'm sure the license for Enterprise does not involve sending data back to Github.
-Corporate proxy support (what even is this)
If you work at any large company (not even a super big FAANG or something) you will have this. You don't want random employees being able to access any random site. E.g. in general devs should not be able to access their personal drop box account because its an easy way to steal data without the company knowing. So all their network will be behind a proxy and everything has to be whitelisted. This proxy support is basically integrating with that system.
>> Try doing that x100,000, every month. It gets annoying fast
We didn't. Accounting did. Our company had a reimbursements-only policy, no corp cards. It was great, especially those of us who flew a lot and banked tons of airline, hotel, and credit card points.
The other stuff, sure. Doubling the price? I don't buy it. Are large corps really stopping people from buying Copilot on their own and using the personal license, BTW? Definitely not.
I would imagine so, just because of the EULA difference. Personally I never used and wouldn't dare to use Copilot at work, specifically out of concern for leaking company IP.
(EDIT: That, and exports control. Regulations governing what can be sold to who around the world are complex, and come with huge fines and prison sentences for non-compliance. Large corporations take this very seriously. For software devs this, in practice, means that someone will be going over the dependency trees of your projects with a fine-tooth comb. I'm sure exports control people will be interested in your use of Copilot, though what they'd think of it I am not sure.)
My experiences with personal licenses in two different corporate environments so far were:
- A large multinational - they had an internal "app store" through which you could request specific software products. Licensing issues were handled behind the scenes and invisible to the user. If the software required a one-time payment or a paid subscription, you were informed how much money will be charged to what cost centre, and how often (in less corporate language: how much $ will be deducted from your salary, and when). I never tried to run software on personal licenses while there, but if I did, I imagine it would've been flagged by the same auditing system that occasionally pestered me about old JRE versions that need to be uninstalled.
- A mid-sized manufacturer with highly corporate culture - they had IT install software to do automated auditing, and flagged any unauthorized software being run. They made a huge stink about people using unlicensed IrfanView. I actually bought an IrfanView license for my work machine using my own money, just so I could keep telling IT to tell whoever was driving those audits to leave me alone, as the license explicitly allowed using the software in commercial / corporate contexts. They weren't happy, but they also didn't tell me to remove it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - but had I asked, they'd just say "no".
I've been using it the last few weeks and I find it kind of marginal in value.
It was quite helpful with filling out some kubernetes type details and it makes some decent guesses when declaring constants. I also had it rewrite a line of code to order keys in a string.
Otherwise I find you really have to keep an eye on what it's doing - even simple things like function invocations it can get wrong e.g. incorrect arguments being passed to a method (where argument types aren't even matching).
Also I guess results depend on the language - I tried to get it to write a simple golang http server with a handler and couldn't figure out how to prompt it to write one.
I'm actually looking forward to a better Gopilot. It seems like doomsdayers do well in getting publicity, but to me it feels more like a refactoring tool that can help to speed up the development process (and teach me a few things along the way).
It's definitely not at doomsayer levels, and don't think it will ever get there, you still have to understand enough to know if it's even right. Similar for general facts and writing things like research papers.
It’s also super helpful for languages whose ethe value building utility functions over importing them, like parsing environment variables into types in Python. So many people have written their own functions to do this that the training set is pretty good.
It isn't the "AI" side that is broken. It is just a buggy extension, crashes constantly, and even when it does give suggestions it takes far too long to do so harming your workflow. Check out the less than 2.5 star average reviews on the VS Marketplace:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c...
Honestly if you're a Visual Studio developer, I'd say ChatGPT Plus for $20/month is better value than Copilot in its current form which is should be free while they iron out all the bugs. Or if you REALLY want to use Copilot, then you'll need to switch to VS Code instead since the extension in that at least works correctly.
I just literally setup Copilot, though haven't really used it yet. I also haven't worked much with ChatGPT, but may give that a try as well. I'm starting on a Rust project and really unfamiliar with the language, even after reading a couple books at this point. The learning curve has been steeper than other languages I've worked with, so willing to try the leg up approach at this point.
Have any big companies set policies on employees using these kind of tools? Do they allow them?