Nearly a third of new code on GitHub is written with AI help
axios.com
axios.com
Doesn't say how much of the new code was generated by Copilot, just that it was used in the process of writing it.
edit: I read the article wrong, skimming it. I understood it as 30% of new code written by GitHub engineers uses AI help, which sounds much more reasonable.
The fact that the combo reached 30% of newly generated code doesn't make sense.
I don’t know about how the data was gathered, I was not involved, but the segment is 4 minutes in so you can see what the actual announcement claims here: https://youtu.be/etMvd9IKPH4
I have used copilot and watched a colleague writing comments and frequently getting great go code suggestions without loads of edits. I personally am sincerely very impressed.
How exactly does that translate into the claim being made? Is github asserting the 100% of users have the extension installed?
My guess is that some small number of trial users did their homework with it then ran to stack overflow when it did something other than what they hoped.
The gap between this statement and what's in the OP title and text is too big. It's just false misleading bad journalism.
I need to write an article titled "People who install Copilot only use it for 30% of the code".
That is a far different headline than the one on this post. WTH is wrong with journalists now days? FFS.
If you count white space, comments, variable and function declarations, and boiler plate code like creating loops, then maybe I could see how they got there.
Kind of related, but if I think about autocomplete, it probably writes about 10%-20% of the individual characters in my code. While it is totally misleading, it wouldn't be factually incorrect to say that autocomplete writes X percentage of my code. I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub is using some "misleading, but technically true" metric for this.
>Nearly a third of new code on GitHub is written with AI help
May be true if you count VSCode's IntelliCode, JetBrains IntelliSense, CoPilot, and other similar tools together. But no way copilot has that much marketshare yet.
Yeah let me use this tool where 40% of its output is garbage. Toss this in the ever-growing AI Winter bin.
It sounds to me like that's not an inference that can easily be drawn. Copilot was trained on predicting code, it doesn't understand the code it produces syntactically. Security issues can be highly context dependent. For example, in most cases it's fine to log a variable, but when it happens to contain a password, it's a security issue. This is a flawed example as the algorithm may be able to learn that variables with names or contexts suggesting that they're secrets should not be logged, but I can imagine much more subtle issues can crop up.
There is no way to make these numbers work unless we assume that the people using Copilot are committing orders of magnitude more code. And if they are, how likely is it that they're really legit users?
a third of all code committed by active copilot users has been accepted copilot suggestions…
I've seen some of the suggestions in my workflow at this point and it's much slower than IDE assist stuff, and generally barely helpful. So I don't see any reason to slam the crap out of it.
I wonder if it's a mix of people feeling like they A) will lose their job, B) make the software around the world worse (it's already horrendously bad) or C) hate Microsoft?
I can't really tell why anyone would honestly hate this tool other than a lot of pent up whateverism.
Insofar as 0%-1% is a value compatible with “as much as 30%” e.g. <30%
Isn't a compiler a code generator? And isn't the stuff we humans write simply instructions to a compiler on what code to generate?
Compilers have tons of intelligence in them. At least when I was a CS grad (an ancient time ago) complex sets of heuristics were considered AI. And compilers use complex sets of heuristics to determine things like optimizations.
So I guess what I'm saying is that this news feels over hyped to me.
(Emphasis mine)
I wonder if what this really means is ~30% of code written in codespaces or the web/cloud version of vscode you can use within a repo is written with co-pilot. Which I find much easier to believe than 30% of all code uploaded to github was written with AI assistance (how would they ever be able to measure that).
Or maybe they just count what share of commiters have the Coopilot extension installed ...
Off-topic, but it's quite ironic to me that "cyber" had such a resurgence. In ~2010 to 2015, most people in my circle considered cyber to be a washed out joke, and yet, in the last few years, it gained massive popularity again. It's still hard for me to take anything "cyer-" seriously, though.
where is the reference link?
> For some languages, we already see about 30% of newly written code being suggested by Copilot.
It writes about 30% of Python and 20-25% for other languages.