from Hacker News

Replit's in-browser coding AI

by bauerpl on 10/31/22, 3:29 PM with 82 comments

• by giansegato on 10/31/22, 3:41 PM

  replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks

• by maep on 10/31/22, 5:44 PM

  If this tool was trained on open source code, what license does the generated code have? At least with Codepilot people were able to generate verbatim GPL code with typos and everything. More importantly, I wonder if companies behind these type of tools offer legal or financial protections in case GPL code sneaks in and leads to expensive law suits.

• by krono on 10/31/22, 4:43 PM

  > trained on publicly available code

  Fully respecting the licenses this code was published under, one would hope?

• by aryamaan on 10/31/22, 6:41 PM

  I was on beta list used this for golang.

  It blew my mind half of the times. It was like it knew what I was going to do.

  The other times it was dumber than the standard auto complete. It doesn't have any awareness of already defined variables and doesn't use them to complete halfwritten variables. Hope this gets better soon.

• by luxurytent on 10/31/22, 3:50 PM

  Does this differ from GitHub's CoPilot in any user-noticeable way? (outside of the platform it's available on)

• by iandanforth on 10/31/22, 4:03 PM

  Things I'd like to know about this tool:

  - What areas/languages/tasks is it good at and what is it bad at?

  - How often is it generating code with bugs?

  - How often is the code that gets generated used as is vs immediately edited?

  - What are the new frustrations that this causes that existing IDE code completion doesn't?

  I work with trained models daily and I know that their failure cases are unintuitive, unexpected, and exasperating. I'd like to know as much about the failure cases of this model as possible before diving in.

• by sdevonoes on 10/31/22, 8:11 PM

  Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools?

  - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code?

  - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much about the process of creating code, but mainly about the output (i.e., does the running program solves the issue at hand?)

  - Senior developers who don't like to write boilerplate code?

  I don't see myself as the target audience of Copilot or Ghostwriter. I do work as an employee, but I'm not a "feature machine". Usually the hardest part about my job is solving problems while communicating with other people. I don't need to write code "fast", and by the time I hit the keyboard to start coding, I don't really need that much help (granted, I'm not working on code that goes into space rockets... just normal e-commerce stuff)

  I like to work on side projects and learn new technologies. When I was starting with programming, as part of the learning I liked to write boilerplate code (actually, that's how I learnt programming. I remember writing C boilerplate code by reading "The C Programming Language". Skipping the "boring" parts wouldn't have helped me in my learning).

  If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code (because, when I work on side projects, 50% of the satisfaction comes from actually writing code for the sake of writing code. The other 50% comes from the ability to solve a problem). So, yeah, maybe for the people like me who does find the act of writing code for the sake of writing code (you know like painting or taking photographs), Copilot seems like an unneeded tool?

• by easrng on 10/31/22, 6:48 PM

  Is this in-browser as in running the model in the browser or is the model running on the server? (I assume it's on the server for size and people-not-ripping-off-your-product reasons, but actually running in the browser would be cool and it doesn't look like it's specified.)

• by Heleana on 10/31/22, 4:38 PM

  Is there any way that users will be able to tell the difference between this and GitHub's CoPilot?

• by machinekob on 10/31/22, 6:03 PM

  "Any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers and CEO in the near future" for developing this?

• by three_seagrass on 10/31/22, 4:20 PM

  Love using Replit but is there any way to try this before buying without having to wait weeks on a waitlist?

• by NicoleJO on 10/31/22, 7:56 PM

  A couple of questions here asked about the intellectual property rights. Has an answer been provided?

• by ignite on 11/1/22, 6:36 AM

  No free trial? Not interesting enough to pay for, if I have no idea how useful it is.

  If you are doing something new, you need to let people see what it will do, before they will give you money.

• by eliseumds on 10/31/22, 5:08 PM

  Is a VSCode extension on the roadmap? Refactoring existing code using AI looks extremely useful. Using Github Copilot I have to trigger synthetise multiple times.

• by make3 on 10/31/22, 9:06 PM

  how is it better than copilot?

• by VWWHFSfQ on 10/31/22, 4:26 PM

  Does anybody know the status of the legal action against that kid that supposedly stole all their good ideas and made a hobby project out of it? I would like to know how that resolved before I consider anything from this company again.