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GitHub Copilot: My experience after one week usage

Tapajyoti Bose on July 18, 2021

Unless you were living under a rock, you must have come across some article or video about GitHub Copilot, the AI Pair Programmer which a lot of pe...
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Tapajyoti Bose • Edited

I appreciate your view point. The aim of Copilot is to make the workflow faster, but the use of it might indeed lead to WET code base

Ps: This is a significant con I missed. Thanks for pointing out :)

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Smit Ray

I very much agree with you on this

"Copilot overrides automatic parenthesis closing, which turned out to be a major pain for someone like me, who heavily relies on it"

Kinda force you to work more 😡

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Tapajyoti Bose

😂

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Izanaziz

I think there will be another product that will be like Github Co-Pilot which is GPT3. GPT3 is now being develop. I've seen some video and example that GPT3 will create our code from scratch, we just tell what you need only.

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Phil Nash

From the GitHub blog:

Developed in collaboration with OpenAI, GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code and is significantly more capable than GPT-3 in code generation, in part, because it was trained on a data set that includes a much larger concentration of public source code.

It’s largely the same technology as GPT3, but trained on source code. So better than GPT3 at generating source code.

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Tapajyoti Bose

Will keep a lookout for it as well :)

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Martin Häusler

There are some non-technical issues with copilot as well. For example, the basic code snippets to train the AI were drawn from github projects. If you ask copilot to add something to your code - what's the license for that snippet? The repo it came from may very well be aGPL licensed while you're working on commercial closed-source software.

Also, the FAQ already discloses that a commercial version of copilot may come in the future. I wouldn't get too used to it. Just yet.

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Shubham Battoo

I kinda felt the same while using it, no way it can replace programmers. It will definitely improve our experience of writing code more efficiently. If the code will be production ready or not remains to be seen though?

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Tapajyoti Bose

I absolutely agree!

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Aman Agrawal

I am still waiting for my preview access. How does it work with TDD style of working? If you are writing test first would CP also help there? Does it know the difference between test code and behavioural code? If not then my initial and may be unfounded worry is, that it might incentivise writing a whole bunch of production code without thinking about testability! Wonder if you experimented with this?

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Tapajyoti Bose

No I haven't tried writing tests

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Johan Lejdung

Thanks for a good article!

I'm also annoyed by the "automatic parenthesis closing", seems like it's fixable by going into vscode settings: stackoverflow.com/questions/683476...

I wonder if it affects the suggestions in any way.

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Tapajyoti Bose

Thanks a lot for sharing this :)

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Wim

Isn't it annoying that you have review the suggested code to see if it does what you want?

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Aman Agrawal

Part of a developer's job! Human thinking, reasoning and intuition have no substitute and you have to rely on all of these to make engineering decisions. I would be very worried if a developer just accepted what poured out of Copilot without reviewing it.

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Tapajyoti Bose

For large blocks it might be an issue, but for small snippets, it's not much of a problem

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Ripal Barot

Thank You for the Insight. It looks like better code completion.
AFAIK, the human brain and computer work differently. Therefore human and computer languages are different. Two humans being speaking the same language do not understand each other entirely in moderately complex communication. Humans use tone and body language in their communication. By the time computer start understanding humans completely, I wish I am dead.

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Tapajyoti Bose

😅

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ranelpadon

What about the CPU/RAM usage? I tried Tabnine/Kite extensions before with Vim/VS Code, which is pretty similar tool to Copilot, but they are huge CPU/RAM hoggers.

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Tapajyoti Bose

Good point, but I didn't test this out. U don't think it would take up much resources as it provides the prediction from the internet

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ranelpadon

Tabnine/Kite also provide prediction from the internet.

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Nishchal Gautam

I just hope it doesn't learn from bad programmers.

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Tapajyoti Bose

They must have cleaned the data before training the model :)

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Marcelo Machado Araújo

I'm anxious to see it ported to Intelij ide

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Dreamepicpro

Where to download Githubcopilot for visual studio

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Tapajyoti Bose

It has to be installed as an extension

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Andrew Baisden

Its interesting to use for sure.

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Tapajyoti Bose

Yeah, it is