by sammorrowdrums on 6/21/22, 4:23 PM with 760 comments
by cube2222 on 6/21/22, 5:44 PM
Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it.
Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder.
And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes.
But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :insert shut up and take my money gif:
It's excellent for quickly writing slightly repetitive test cases; it's great as an autocomplete on steroids that completes entire lines + fills in all arguments, instead of just a single identifier; it's great for quickly writing nice contextual error messages (especially useful for Go developers and the constant errors.Wrap, Copilot is really good at writing meaningful error messages there); and it's also great for technical documentation, as it's able to autocomplete markdown (and it does it surprisingly well).
Overall, I definitely wouldn't want to go back to writing code without it. It just takes care of most of the mundane and obvious code for you, so you can take care of the interesting bits. It's like having the stereotypical "intern" as an associate built-in to your editor.
And sometimes, fairly rarely, but it happens, it's just surprising how good of a suggestion it can make.
It's also ridiculously flexible. When I start writing graphs in ASCII (cause I'm just quickly writing something down in a scratch file) it'll actually understand what I'm doing and start autocompleting textual nodes in that ASCII graph.
by ascorbic on 6/22/22, 6:06 AM
And no, I'm not a beginner. I'm a principal with over 20 years experience. I don't really use it for the Stack Overflow-type stuff, but even as an autocomplete it's worth the money. As it happens I'm apparently eligible for free access as an open source maintainer, but I'd pay $100/year in a heartbeat for it. I'd pay for Intellisense if that was $100 too.
by thdxr on 6/21/22, 6:58 PM
No it doesn't "understand what I'm doing" or "get everything right" but that's hardly the point
It's often reducing the amount of labor I'm doing by hitting the keyboard by guessing 90% correctly what I was going to type
It also often saves me from having to google how to do something, it's effectively serving me a search result right along my code
I'm lucky to be getting it for free but would have immediately paid $10. It needs to only save you minutes a month for that to be worth it
Also the comments about it being "unfair their monetizing other people's work" are missing the point.
Github has created a product that many people use and through that effort created a large repository of code.
They are now releasing a product that is going to create a large amount of of value in time saved and are maybe capturing 2% of that. This is a great outcome for everyone
by Hamcha on 6/21/22, 6:00 PM
- It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well.
- It's terrible if you let it write too much. The biggest problem I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's that it think it knows how and then produce good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic.
- Relying on its outside-code knowledge is also generally a recipe for disaster: e.g. I'm building a Riichi Mahjong engine and while it knows all the terms and how to put a sentence together describing the rules, it absolutely doesn't actually understand how "Chii" melds work
- Due to the licensing concerns I did not use CoPilot at all in work projects and I haven't felt like I was missing that much. A friend of mine also said he wouldn't be allowed to use it.
You can treat it as a pair programming session where you're the observer and write an outline while the AI does all the bulk work (but be wary), but at what point does it become such a better experience to justify 10$/mo? I don't understand if I've been using it wrong or what.
by lsh123 on 6/22/22, 12:30 AM
by nikeee on 6/21/22, 6:00 PM
> body: `text=${text}`,
So it breaks if the text contains a '&' and even allows parameter injection to the call of the 3rd party service. Isn't that critical on a sentiment analysis API, but could result in actual security holes.
I hope the users won't blindly use the generated code without review. These mistakes can be so subtle, nobody even noticed them when they put them on the front page of the product.
by lveillard on 6/21/22, 8:01 PM
1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me". Too violent.
A "Hey, we are happy you're using Copilot. We want to inform you that in 2 weeks we will close the beta and we will need you to sign up. But don't worry, it will be free for 60 days"
I'm sure 99% of people here would just be happy to pay those 10usd/month
by zelphirkalt on 6/21/22, 4:45 PM
by jwpapi on 6/21/22, 7:49 PM
What is your time worth? You should easily get $60/hr, so you need to save 12 minutes per month to make it worth. I would pay that for all my employees.
CoPilot is not a replacement for writing code, but it’s incredible useful when you are stuck and or / write simple logic.
Often I don’t have the right method, function or logic on mind. Before I google, I write a comment of what I want and 8/10 CoPilot generates the right code.
Typing the comment, checking the solution, reformatting it is <<< less time than without it.
To me Github CoPilot is a standard part of my IDE and I wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. It saves me at least an hour a day of coding. Some stuff is really crazy. I invite you all to try to be open-minded. You have to experience it.
// You have to code for yourself
I don’t really like this argument, because if that argument would be true, we would also need to now how our codes translates to 1 and 0s and how the electronics build our application than. AutoComplete is part of our life on our phone and it can be with developing. Don’t make it harder as it needs to be.
by lancesells on 6/21/22, 5:05 PM
It's incredible that we're able to do these things but awful at the same time since this data was / is not theirs. Same as something like Dall-E.
by dannytatom on 6/21/22, 5:08 PM
Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.
by mcluck on 6/21/22, 7:46 PM
by msoad on 6/21/22, 5:23 PM
by longrod on 6/21/22, 6:44 PM
Copilot is marketed as a pair programmer but the code quality is often times just wrong, not just bad. It thinks it understands what I want based on the function name and parameters but the generated output is no where close to what I want.
Multiline AI generated suggestions are not a good idea anyway (not yet at least). AI based LSP/auto completer would be much better at this stage with a lot faster DX.
by CapsAdmin on 6/21/22, 8:12 PM
I've been in the beta since almost the beginning I have not really seen much improvement on the frontend side. Since its release, the changelog only mentions 10 small (or so it seems) improvements
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/GitHub.copilot-ni...
On the backend side, I feel like I've started to "figure out" copilot a little bit. One thing I'd like to see is inline completion which I think gpt3 can do now but copilot which I believe it's based on cannot.
I think I will pay to continue, but I'd like to see some frontend improvements and maybe some backend alternatives. Ideally I'd love this to be open source but compute power doesn't seem feasible (?) unless we start magically crowd sourcing our computers to run a model somehow.
by baby on 6/21/22, 5:15 PM
EDIT: looks like I'm getting it for free because of my contributions to open source o.o dope!
by cal85 on 6/21/22, 10:37 PM
I’m certain Copilot gives me more than a 2% productivity boost. That’s a conservative estimate (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more like 10-15%). If you consider 2% of what a developer makes each month, it comes to a lot more than $10. I’m not based in the US, but Levels.fyi suggests it’s not unusual for devs there to make $200K/year, that would mean $16.6K/month, 2% of which is $333. Maybe that’s a bit reductive, but the point is, $10/month is negligible if it gives you a noticeable productivity boost on a developer’s income.
And by the way, I don’t particularly love using Copilot. It can be annoying now I’m over the honeymoon period. But I think it’s pretty clear it speeds me up by a noticeable margin, and time is money.
by X-Istence on 6/21/22, 6:12 PM
by ilikehurdles on 6/21/22, 4:49 PM
by planb on 6/21/22, 5:37 PM
by amirathi on 6/22/22, 6:02 AM
When they keep giving out freebies (VSCode, npm etc.), I never know which direction the product is going to evolve (e.g. unnecessarily tight integration with Azure).
With this, there's at least direct alignment between end user & the product.
by ahnick on 6/21/22, 4:41 PM
by swalls on 6/21/22, 4:55 PM
by curo on 6/21/22, 5:54 PM
HN can set itself apart from Twitter and Reddit by celebrating great achievements rather than tearing them down.
Copilot stands on the shoulders of open source, yes. So do many of our personal and commercial projects. Copilot benefitted from having beta users. That relationship went both ways.
A big thanks to the Copilot team for letting us be a part of the beta. I will happily pay $10/m for this.
by glouwbug on 6/21/22, 4:51 PM
by freedomben on 6/21/22, 4:43 PM
How well does copilot help with languages like Elixir that are less common? WIth TypeScript it's been remarkable, but that's one of the most popular and surely very familiar to devs and GH, so I would expect less popular like Elixir to not perform as well.
Does copilot work for shell scripts?
I'm a vim person and don't want to use VS code. Is copilot worth the hassle to get installed into vim?
by beanjuiceII on 6/21/22, 6:55 PM
by MarquesMa on 6/21/22, 4:41 PM
No, it cannot make me write code I couldn't write before. It does not autopilot and does all the coding by itself. But it still boosts my productivity greatly, making me relaxed while coding and focusing on the important part rather than errands.
by esfandia on 6/21/22, 8:40 PM
by plondon514 on 6/21/22, 4:58 PM
by john_g on 6/21/22, 7:59 PM
It is very useful for things that I would call boilerplate, e.g. you have almost duplicated code (say in a view and a controller) and need to copy from one to the other.
It is annoyingly bad for autocompleting an api as it tends to be slightly (and plausibly) wrong.
I haven't found it very useful for anything else.
Working on a project where I have to do lots of the first makes me sad, so I tend to try to avoid those projects - but if I was forced to for some reason it would be worth $10 a month. However, if enough of the programming I did could be helped by github copilot for it to be worth that much I would start to get worried I was working on the wrong sort of problems and try to move into something different.
by DeathArrow on 6/21/22, 7:36 PM
I can't use it to generate longer chunks of code like methods or functions, because it will do it a bit wrong and I loose time to correct it.
It can somehow generate correct and fitting code, but it takes multiple tries and writing comments in which you describe exactly, with lots of details what you want to do. At that point I'm better off writing the code myself.
However, if the method should be small like VerifyIfNumberIsEven, it does a good job.
Probably I would pay 10$ for it.
by mark_l_watson on 6/21/22, 7:16 PM
I recently started a 100% Common Lisp job and it does not work nearly as well for Common Lisp. A lot of generated code is Emacs Lisp.
Two months ago I would have signed up for a payed account with no hesitation, but I need to re-evaluate it with Common Lisp again. BTW, I happily pay OpenAI for GPT-3 APIs instead of using it for free. For NLP work, OpenAI's APIs have high value to me.
by metadat on 6/21/22, 4:55 PM
Definitely does not seem worth paying for me to end up more stressed out, haha.
by hda2 on 6/22/22, 4:31 AM
by luckystarr on 6/21/22, 7:49 PM
The IntelliJ Copilot plugin became worthless just before the release. It borks up the formatting and requires almost more keystrokes to make the code work than it saves.
It sometimes works brilliantly, the result has almost always been either duplicated code which could use refactoring or simple minded attribute access code which could be solved generically. I have the fear that it will push developers to go the "easy route" and not think about the code too much while churning out more and more lines of generated code, so I'm unwilling to recommend it to junior developers.
by armchairhacker on 6/21/22, 6:55 PM
However I wish there was more competition. Github could rescind access to Copilot or charge $40/mo or it could slow down because their cloud is overloaded with new users, and I would be out of luck.
Tabnine and Kite are alternatives but I've heard they don't work nearly as well. I wish there were similarly-effective alternatives which charge similar rates for cloud hosting / profit, but open-source their datasets and algorithms, and just generally provide a fallback if Copilot's quality ever goes down.
by fartcannon on 6/21/22, 6:28 PM
Since this is derived from code Microsoft did not write, or ask permission to use, it should be at the very least free to use.
by Mizza on 6/21/22, 8:54 PM
"They gave away all their code, so we packaged it up and sold it right back to them, the stupid bastards!"
by pcj-github on 6/21/22, 5:38 PM
by jpomykala on 6/21/22, 6:47 PM
It’s also awful that they took free code (open-source), and now they want money for it. Make it open-source and free to use…
Some say it’s great for repetitive tasks, but if you write repetitive code (tests also) maybe you should look for other solutions than “auto-generating” unmaintainable code.
by lysecret on 6/21/22, 5:15 PM
.filter(table.deleted==False)
by sn0wtrooper on 6/21/22, 4:49 PM
by runeks on 6/22/22, 7:47 AM
That way it can capture code in a library instead of having thousands of developers copy/paste the same code snippets.
by albertzeyer on 6/21/22, 5:57 PM
Every human was just trained in the same way. Why isn't this a problem for every human?
I really don't see the difference. One is an artificial neural network while the other is a biological neural network?
by elashri on 6/21/22, 6:53 PM
I think I myself teached copilot a lot of things about supersymmetry :)
by netr0ute on 6/21/22, 4:43 PM
by paleite on 6/21/22, 7:40 PM
I guess that means I feel the level of expectation is in the name.
by ggerganov on 6/21/22, 8:32 PM
To everyone expecting Copilot to magically write the code they are thinking about - you are missing the point. There is a learning curve of using this service that allows you to be more efficient in expressing your ideas. It's not about doing all the work for you. It's like auto-complete on the next level.
Licensing concerns - oh come on.. what is the big deal? There are millions of "for (int i ..)" loops out there. Like anyone gives a damn about 5 auto-generate lines being _probably_ copied from somewhere. Moreover, if you used Copilot just a bit you would know that is not how it works.
by social_quotient on 6/21/22, 9:32 PM
Charge 10x more (or more) and let the dreamers help push the product further and faster. Once it’s awesome then charge a commoditized price for the service.
Charging 10x+ more means we have enough skin in the game to properly send feedback and improvement ideas. At 10/m/u it’s barely worth you reading my support tickets and it’s almost with me just not using it while paying for it.
Thoughts?
by cfn on 6/21/22, 9:59 PM
I suffer enough with legacy code created by junior programmers that long left the company. I imagine how much more fun will be to work with this type of code.
* I know Copilot is not capable of creating full systems yet but it is a matter of time before they evolve it to generate all the bolierplate code for you based on some comments you make or, even worse, some UML abstraction!
by jaremko on 6/22/22, 12:44 PM
I joined the Copilot beta and where it has helped me most is: 1) Ideas 2) Filling in the broad-strokes.
It's name does not deceive, it is only a co-pilot. It will not tell you where to go, it will push you in the right direction and let you focus on the more difficult parts of a task.
I signed up for it because at $10 per month the keystroke reduction is somewhere in ballpark of 70% or more. That's the real value in my use-case.
by jq-r on 6/21/22, 5:12 PM
by andrewallbright on 6/21/22, 5:30 PM
If most code is "bad" code (any definition works) and this AI was trained on all/most code on GitHub, does that mean that this AI mostly helps to produces bad code?
by lampe3 on 6/21/22, 7:36 PM
10$/Mo. Is way to much for what you get.
I mostly write js/ts code.
The suggestion feature / auto-complete feature is wonky at best and leads to bugs or just bad code in the worst case.
Even when you write comments or have a function like `addOne` and you want to add `subtractOne` it will not get it right a lot of times.
Then you have the cases were it throw 50 or more lines code at you for something very simple.
Catching errors or error handling is basically non existing.
I tried it for writing tests. It bad. It does not help at all.
I uninstalled and after some hours of work I don't really miss it.
by edub on 6/21/22, 8:00 PM
But I would be interested in me picking 2 of those 3 for me to do, and the AI can do the third for me. So if I love coding and test writing but don't like documentation, then the AI can do the third leg for me.
I think that the quality of results from the AI would be much better than what Copilot is capable of. Even if I focussed on test writing and documentation, I think that the AI should be able to write decent code based on those two inputs.
by emacdona on 6/21/22, 5:14 PM
I get to a "Confirm your payment details" screen, but there is no further action I can take (ie: no button to press or link to click to "confirm"). It does say "You will be billed $100/year starting August 20, 2022" -- but when I view my "settings", it tells me I haven't signed up for copilot.
I tried various browsers, including Edge on Windows 10 sans plugins (the combination I would expect to be the most supported for MS owned github.com).
by braingenious on 6/22/22, 3:57 AM
by zgway on 6/21/22, 6:20 PM
There would be no issue if they trained the model on Microsoft's closed source instead.
by danielrhodes on 6/21/22, 7:36 PM
Given that the cost of a software engineer's time is so high, $10/mo. seems very reasonable if Copilot saves you more than that in time per month. So in a vacuum assuming all dollars are spent with equal productivity, if I take the equivalent of $1000/mo. in time writing boilerplate, and I can reduce that to even $989 with Copilot, it becomes a good deal.
by stillsut on 6/22/22, 1:02 AM
Which means it's going to be harder to evaluate junior candidates code without actually running and testing that code because they'll have built a huge library that looks really well formatted but has logic gaps which are difficult to catch on a glance. As it stands currently, usually some style and organization tells you this person gets it.
by solomatov on 6/22/22, 1:34 AM
>What data does GitHub Copilot collect?
>...
>User Engagement Data
>...
>Code Snippets Data
>Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub Copilot may also collect >and retain the following, collectively referred to as “code snippets”: source >code that you are editing, related files and other files open in the same IDE or >editor, URLs of repositories and files paths.
It's possible to opt out, but it's not disabled by default, and this code snippets might be very sensitive.
by grassmudhorse on 6/22/22, 7:50 AM
At best, it is scary in it's ability to pre-emptively suggest context-specific implementations of functions before I have even considered what I might need to do. It probably helps that I am very particular about how I name variables, which seems to help copilot infer my needs.
But at least a couple of times a day, I am blown away by it.
by jacobedawson on 6/22/22, 7:16 AM
Will be paying for the public version, absolutely worth the money in a single day's coding alone.
by xmodem on 6/21/22, 9:56 PM
https://github.blog/changelog/2021-10-27-pull-request-merge-...
by yokoprime on 6/22/22, 9:13 AM
No bulk licensing of Teams? This makes no sesnse, so if a team wants to make Copilot part of their official tools, each member have to purchase this individually. Thats a huge PITA
by wilde on 6/22/22, 8:54 AM
That said, launching a dev tool without Orgs integration seems dumb. I work for a FAANG and so can’t use this professionally. It’s a totally different price calculation for “programming as entertainment”. Is this worth more than Netflix to me?
by nonethewiser on 6/21/22, 5:53 PM
by rubyist5eva on 6/21/22, 9:30 PM
by alphabettsy on 6/21/22, 6:09 PM
by gouda-gouda on 6/22/22, 2:24 AM
Having a type checker is critical for this, though. When I code Ruby I’m much more skeptical of Copilots suggestions.
by hyperzhi on 6/21/22, 5:27 PM
by iblaine on 6/21/22, 8:36 PM
by andretti1977 on 6/22/22, 6:40 AM
What i'm concerned with is that i think it can interrupt the flow of thoughts while programming since you have to review the generated code, but that is the price to pay to use such a formidable tool
by wokwokwok on 6/22/22, 12:05 AM
I was excited when it came out, but it ran slowly and annoyingly (crashes) and I gave up.
I already have a jetbrains license; when they release a similar feature I’ll consider uping my subscription to get it.
As it stands… eh. It’s not that great. I couldn’t really be bothering to continue using it for free, I’m not gonna pay for it.
by smcleod on 6/21/22, 10:56 PM
by hoosieree on 6/21/22, 5:39 PM
by dibujante on 6/21/22, 7:22 PM
by alfor on 6/21/22, 9:14 PM
It seem to understand the common boilerplates things in Django that always annoyed me and type them for me. It understand the structure and adapt them to my code: imports, connection between modules, etc.
For sure, you need to be carefull with it.
by 734129837261 on 6/21/22, 6:31 PM
So I'm probably taking it.
by theshrike79 on 6/21/22, 8:29 PM
They kinda know what they're supposed to do. Sometimes they do the right thing, sometimes they get it completely wrong.
In either case you can never let anything they do get committed without a review.
So are they really helping?
by redconfetti on 6/22/22, 1:18 PM
by londons_explore on 6/21/22, 9:50 PM
Right now, there is no competition, and an amateur developer will really benefit from copilot - certainly they will be more productive than a developer that demands just $1000 more annual salary.
by butz on 6/21/22, 6:29 PM
by gremlinsinc on 6/21/22, 8:06 PM
by kabaka on 6/22/22, 5:28 AM
by zbird on 6/22/22, 2:31 AM
Do the guys at Microsoft have any morals left?
by suyash on 6/21/22, 7:11 PM
by mfbx9da4 on 6/22/22, 12:41 PM
by zwilliamson on 6/22/22, 2:51 AM
Some counters for…
CopilotRecommendations CopilotRecommedationIterations (Number of saved changes to initial recommendation) CopilotRecommmedationSaves SkipToNextSuggestion
Metrics on my code that is used by copilot by others would be nice to see.
by DubiousPusher on 6/21/22, 10:34 PM
by ildon on 6/21/22, 10:22 PM
The VS extension could check if the current git repository is open, and if so, it should work without a subscription for that specific repository.
by godmode2019 on 6/21/22, 10:25 PM
I see this useful for non core languages, where you often need to look up common patterns.
by jamal-kumar on 6/21/22, 9:30 PM
by nsonha on 6/22/22, 3:30 AM
by ximm on 6/22/22, 4:39 AM
by ccbccccbbcccbb on 6/21/22, 7:28 PM
by k__ on 6/21/22, 6:40 PM
No.
Is it particularly smart?
Also, no.
But it really speeds up all the dumb stuff in coding. Especially UI code can be very chatty, and Copilot is a nice assitance here.
Also, it would be cool if it was part of GitHub Pro, which I'm already paying for, haha.
by phendrenad2 on 6/21/22, 6:07 PM
by low_tech_punk on 6/21/22, 4:57 PM
by prazgaitis on 6/21/22, 7:29 PM
Would be happy to pay for it (or expense it to my employer) if I was still an IC.
by az226 on 6/22/22, 12:37 AM
by wdb on 6/21/22, 7:59 PM
by chadlavi on 6/21/22, 6:42 PM
by anonymouse008 on 6/22/22, 2:02 AM
HackingWithSwift shows how this process gets rocket wings with Swift[0] (skip to the end for the mind melter)
[0] https://www.hackingwithswift.com/plus/high-performance-apps/...
by stepri on 6/21/22, 5:47 PM
by jsnelgro on 6/23/22, 3:40 AM
by SergeAx on 6/22/22, 1:14 PM
by jwilk on 6/21/22, 4:43 PM
by amelius on 6/21/22, 7:29 PM
by mg on 6/21/22, 8:46 PM
Preferably, I would like to try it in Vim. But anything that I can run in a container would be ok.
by iosjunkie on 6/21/22, 6:31 PM
by TedShiller on 6/21/22, 8:45 PM
by love2read on 6/21/22, 6:47 PM
by bibliographie on 6/22/22, 2:49 AM
by brunoqc on 6/21/22, 7:58 PM
by acdanger on 6/21/22, 5:11 PM
by jeffwask on 6/21/22, 6:40 PM
by mrfusion on 6/21/22, 6:44 PM
by plumeria on 6/22/22, 3:56 AM
by marcodiego on 6/21/22, 5:11 PM
by thebigspacefuck on 6/21/22, 8:26 PM
by steveneo on 6/22/22, 5:02 AM
by meowface on 6/21/22, 5:55 PM
by intrepidsoldier on 6/22/22, 12:11 AM
Do people want to see ads instead?
Or would they be ok paying for Google search (another service trained by all the information we willingly volunteer to them)?
Copilot adds tremendous value and they are justified charging for it.
by yubozhao on 6/21/22, 6:46 PM
by neximo64 on 6/21/22, 5:54 PM
Extension activation failed: "Unexpected end of JSON input"
by samorozco on 6/21/22, 8:31 PM
by fswd on 6/21/22, 7:58 PM
by unlog on 6/22/22, 7:40 AM
by lmarcos on 6/21/22, 5:52 PM
by nikolay on 6/21/22, 7:55 PM
by coding123 on 6/22/22, 1:29 AM
by jbaczuk on 6/21/22, 7:07 PM
by duxup on 6/21/22, 6:36 PM
I'll miss it for personal stuff but I'm not paying $10 a month just for my personal projects at home.
by bluelightning2k on 6/21/22, 5:26 PM
To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE".
Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get.
And no. They don't owe you anything.
In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE (for free). So this idea that they owe you something needs to be reassessed.
CoPilot is easily worth it and I think this is fair. I actually welcome it because I was nervous it might be like 80.
by BrandonJung on 6/21/22, 10:36 PM
TLDR: Tabnine advantages vs Copilot 1. Can run locally 2. As-you-type suggestions (mid-line) 3. Private model based on your code 4. Free plan available
Read more at https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
by WheelsAtLarge on 6/22/22, 12:14 AM
by drcongo on 6/21/22, 7:29 PM
by polyterative on 6/21/22, 9:13 PM
by d4rkp4ttern on 6/22/22, 11:27 AM
by lizardactivist on 6/21/22, 6:53 PM
by mrsmee89 on 6/21/22, 9:16 PM
Probably the best autocomplete I’ve ever used across multiple languages but it’s not reliable at all for the more complex tasks that their marketing makes it seem it’s good at.
by BrandonJung on 6/21/22, 9:34 PM
Usually, I suggest that my team start with the user value and experience, but for this specific comparison, it’s essential to start from the technology, as many of the product differences stem from the differences in approach, architecture, and technology choices. Microsoft and OpenAI view AI for software development almost as just another use case for GPT-3, the behemoth language model. Code is text, so they took their language model, fine-tuned it on code, and called the gargantuan 12-billion parameter AI model they got Codex.
Copilot’s architecture is monolithic: “one model to rule them all.” It is also completely centralized - only Microsoft can train the model, and only Microsoft can host the model due to the enormous amount of computing resources required for training and inference.
Tabnine, after comprehensively evaluating models of different sizes, favors individualized language models working in concert. Why? Because code prediction is, in fact, a set of distinct sub-problems which doesn't lend itself to the monolithic model approach. For instance: generating the full code of a function in Python based on name and generating the suffix of a line of code in Rust are two problems Tabnine solves well, but the AI model that best fits every such task is different. We found that a combination of specialized models dramatically increases the precision and length of suggestions for our 1M+ users.
A big advantage of Tabnine’s approach is that it can use the right tool for any code prediction task, and for most purposes, our smaller models give great predictions quickly and efficiently. Better yet, most of our models can be run with inexpensive hardware.
Now that we understand the principal difference between Microsoft’s huge monolith and Tabnine’s multitude of smaller models, we can explore the differences between the products:
First, kind of code suggestions. Copilot queries the model relatively infrequently and suggests a snippet or a full line of code. Copilot does not suggest code in the middle of the line, as its AI model is not best suited for this purpose. Similarly, Tabnine Pro also suggests full snippets or lines of code, but since Tabnine also uses smaller and highly efficient AI models, it queries the model while typing. As a user, it means the AI flows with you, even when you deviate from the code it originally suggested The result is that the frequency of use - and the number of code suggestions accepted - is much higher when using Tabnine. An astounding number of users accept more than 100 suggestions daily.
Second, ability to train the model. Copilot uses one universal AI model, which means that every user is getting the same generic assistance based on an “average of GitHub”, regardless of the project they're working on. Tabnine can train a private AI model on the specific code from customers’ GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket repositories and thus adjust the suggestions to the project-specific code and infrastructure. Training on customer code is possible because Tabnine is modular, enabling the creation of private customized copies. Tabnine "democratizes" AI model creation, making it easy for teams to train their own specific AI models, dramatically improving value for their organization.
Third, Code security and privacy. There are a few aspects of this. Users cannot train or run the Copilot model. The single model is always hosted by Microsoft. Every Copilot user is sending their code to Microsoft; not some of the code, and not obfuscated - all of it. With Tabnine, users can choose where to run the model: on the Tabnine cloud, locally on the developer machine, or on a self-hosted server (with Tabnine Enterprise). This is possible because Tabnine has AI models that can run efficiently with moderate hardware requirements. This means that, in contrast to Copilot, developers can use Tabnine inside their firewall without sending any code to the internet. In addition, Tabnine makes a firm and unambiguous commitment that no code the user writes is used to train our model. We don’t send to our servers any information about the code that the user writes and the suggestions they’re receiving or accepting.
Fourth, commercial terms. Microsoft currently offers Copilot only as a commercial product for developers, without a free plan (beyond a free trial) or organizational purchase. Tabnine has a great free plan and charges for premium features such as longer code completions and private models trained on customers’ code. We charge a monthly/annual subscription fee per number of users. All our plans fit organizational requirements.
Philosophically, Copilot is more of a walled garden where Microsoft controls everything. Copilot users are somewhat subjects in Microsoft’s kingdom. Tabnine’s customers can train the AI models, run them, configure the suggestions, and be in control of their AI.
In sum: both products are great; you’re welcome to try (Tabnine Pro) and see which one you prefer. for professional programmers, Tabnine offers in-flow completions, the ability to adapt the AI to their code, and superior code privacy and security.
For those who want to try Tabnine Pro, here’s a coupon for one month free https://tabnine.com/pricing?promotionCode=TWITTER1MFREE
Also, here's a detailed comparison table of Tabnine vs Copilot https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
by Shadonototra on 6/21/22, 6:22 PM
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