Copilot is closing | Hacker News Reader

Copilot is closing

meet.copilot.com

74 pointsrjmunro84 comments

It's a screensharing thing, not the GitHub thing

Clickbait

How is this clickbait?

Copilot, a software product created and named 7 years before GitHub came out with a different product using the same name, is shutting down.

Because 'Copilot' will (obviously) cause people to think GitHub Copilot. Nobody can seriously claim to think this is the most prominent 'Copilot' out there.

A data point: I had never heard of either one before seeing this post.

While researching, I found a third copilot: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copilot-the-smart-money-app/id...

That's the one I thought this article was about.

Did you actually look at both? The article is about a remote support app and my link is to a spending and investment tracker. I'm pretty sure those are not the same thing.

Don't forget about the AWS copilot: https://aws.amazon.com/containers/copilot/

And these as well (having to do with aviation of all things):

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/miracheck-copilot/id1183839722

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copilot-gps-navigation/id50467...

And these, 3dvideocopilot.net 401kcopilot.com advertisingcopilot.com agencecopilote.ch agentcopilot.com appcopilot.com beerismycopilot.com bicopilot.com bizcopilot.com campuscopilot.com caninecopilots.com cannabiscopilot.com ceacopilot.org cmcopilot.com cocopilots.com collegecopilot.com commercecopilot.com communicationscopilot.com copdcopilot.org copdcopilottraining.com copilot-auto.ro copilot-building.com copilot-consulting.com copilot-racetech.de copilot-ventures.de copilot.ai copilot.cc copilot.ch copilot.de copilot.eu copilot.fr copilot.ir copilot.it copilot.jp copilot.money copilot.org copilot.se copilot19.fr copilotacademy.com copilotalert.com copilotbuild.app copilotcreative.com copilotcrew.com.au copilotdating.com copilotdogoutfitters.com copilotdogtraining.com copilotdogwalks.com copilote-actu.com copilote-chr.fr copilote-logistique.fr copilote.be copilote.ch copilote.com

And more https://gist.github.com/alexyorke/4ee414e71c9abc473b04cf8561...

Github has something called Copilot? I never knew, even though I'm a paid github subscriber.

The old Fog Creek Copilot, that I know about from following Joel's blog.

Your bubble is not everyone's bubble.

> Your bubble is not everyone's bubble.

Search Google for 'copilot' and take peak outside your own bubble.

I searched copilot and got 5 different products back-to-back with the same name.

Yeah... but the point is which is the top one? And which gets called out in the info box?

https://imgur.com/a/JEGuiXk

I mean you don't have to take my word for it - see how many other comments there are here saying the same thing.

Agreed with this. It would be disingenuous to argue that Github's Copilot is not the most widely known one.

True but also highly context dependent, logged in/out, incognito, vpn, timezone, geography, os, recent searches of others on your network, neigherborhood etc all seem to influence what you see.

Google just reflects your bubble. DuckDuckGo top results:

    1. "CoPilot-Buy Smarter: Cars, SUVs, & Trucks" - some sort of Android app
    2. GitHub Copilot
    3. copilot.com - TLS thing
    4. CoPilot GPS (app)

So yeah, GH is an option, but it's hardly "the" meaning.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=copilot gives:

- CoPilot Buy Smarter (copilot.app)

- GitHub Copilot (copilot.github.com)

- Copilot (copilotgps.com)

- Copilot (copilot.com)

- Copilot (copilot.search)

- Copilot (copilot.money)

- CoPilot (copilotai.com)

- CopilotIQ (copilotiq.com)

It would be interesting to find out if the fact that GitHub came out with Copilot, and effectively taking over the term for many users (such as yourself), contributed to Copilot's demise (eg. by speeding it up).

I now use a tool called Shortcut on a project. It used to be called Clubhouse until recently. Then (the other) Clubhouse became popular.

These things happen (through no ill intent on anyone's part), and can have substantive impact on the less popular products or sites.

Yeah I'm sure it can be brutal when a giant comes in to overshadow your brand.

Well how would you prefer they make an announcement? "Copilot.com, no, not that one, don't worry, the one you've never heard of, is closing"?

> Nobody can seriously claim to think this is the most prominent 'Copilot' out there.

To be fair, no one is making that claim.

Whoever submitted it without any extra context must have thought it was unambiguous.

What would you have suggested instead? Adding a caveat doubling the length of the title? It’s the name of the linked post, all in line with the HN guidelines.

Calling it ”clickbait” when it is exactly what it says on the tin with no deception involved seems silly.

A story of Github copilot shutting down would be very unexpected, which is what made most people click.

I saw the "copilot.com" domain and an absence of the term "GitHub" and clicked with the assumption that it was not GitHub Copilot.

As did I.

phew!

I typically open the comments first before I read the article, so that I can more easily preserve the link between content and discussion by opening the article from the comments page.

Thank you for limiting my "Nooooo..." to only 5 'o's.

Product made by Fog Creek interns

note: The link for a discount on the suggested replacement works for anyone, not just copilot users. Grabbed it, might be useful to help family.

There was a documentary about the creation of copilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

Relocating for an employment - so old school :)

I was given a DVD of this when I visited Fog Creek one day.

What became of Fog Creek? It's all gone a bit... NFT.

https://glitch.com

Wow, that's a flashback.

I was active on the Joel On Software Forums prior to that (hi, Patio11) and loved watching the development of Copilot unfold. It was even better that one of the interns was from my tiny undergrad: Rose-Hulman

I remember buying this on DVD and following this little startup with fascination!

I was just starting my own software business so it was quite inspiring at the time.

"Fog Creek" seems to be all gone.

----

CoPilot -> shutdown (intern project)

Fog Creek -> Glitch

FogBugz -> sold off

Trello -> sold off (Atlassian)

StackExchange -> sold off (intern project to create job board with was later moved over to StackExchange and became it's business model)

CityDesk -> shutdown

Kiln -> ???

----

Joel has been working on https://hash.ai but haven't heard much about what they are doing.

I wonder if any Wasabi transpiler code is still out in the wild. For those not aware, Wasabi generated PHP from ASP code.

I had no idea Trello was Fog Creek, interesting

I never heard of Fog Creek before, I didn't know that was the origin of StackExchange, Trello, and Glitch.me . So many good ideas at one company.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com was the go-to developer "blog", before blogs were even a thing.

No, it was a developer blog. Back when blogs were actually a thing. DailyWTF and Coding Horror are still around from then. And RaymondC's OldNewThing that shows up here once in a while, though initially I remember him blogging internally at MSFT, so maybe that doesn't count.

There were many others, now long gone.

> I wonder if any Wasabi transpiler code is still out in the wild.

It is. I still have a FogBugz account, and I saw a Wasabi stack trace in my admin notifications the other day.

> As a bonus, they're offering Copilot users 95% off the first year, meaning that you will get HelpDesk for a full year for just $24.98,

I don't know the particular of the plans but a quick visit to RemotePC and they're trying to entice me with "SAVE* 90% $1.95 First Year for 1 computer" if I switch. I assume the Copilot plan is not considered a competitor, or maybe has larger limits, also hopefully "1 computer" means one target, and not a total network of 1 computer :)

Regardless, the RemotePC website gave me intense GoDaddy vibes, which is not good.

Yeah - I get the feeling this is a paid endorsement...

You got the ad for the lowest plan, "Consumer one computer" (yes - that's only one computer, likely a parent or a grandparent). They're discussing here the highest plan, "Enterprise".

I remember fondly following the Project Aardvark blog posts through the summer of 2005-- it was such an exciting time! It's still online here: https://www.projectaardvark.com

Also, Joel's midterm report: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/07/project-aardvark-m...

I used to use Copilot and it worked well. While I moved out of a function needing this kind of service, I am surprised it is shutting down. IMO the leading product in this space (TeamViewer) is such a customer-hostile product that I would have expected Copilot, or some other alternative, to evolve into a strong competitor.

Thank-you for not titling the post 'Our incredible journey'.

Copilot was a very good implementation in it’s time. It was a pleasure to use.

I resolved many a tech issue for parents from several thousand km away, all thanks to Copilot.

It was really, really good for its time -- paying, deploying the agent on the remote end, tunneling through a shared publicly reachable host. Every time I paid my $5 I was happy to do it.

May be Github should buy the domain name off them?

Maybe there's already been an offer and that's part of the decision to call it a day?

I once worked at a startup where our only revenue ever generated was selling our domain name

When was this originally posted? Because telling your clients that you shut down everything three days later sounds rather not-nice.

January, from another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31193320

I almost got a heart to attach and realized that it is not Github's copilot.

> I almost got a heart to attach

To attach to what? I’d like to know more about this gruesome experiment of yours…

That’s like three days notice assuming this was released recently

They announced it on Jan 3: https://twitter.com/CopilotCom/status/1478109914585255940

Christ, my heart broke for a second there.

I thought it was GitHub Copilot.

The header scared the hell out of me.

This is not Github copilot? What was it?

Second paragraph.

First paragraph, third sentence.

Yes, I was disappointed to see that.

Why disappointed? Is copilot being an option detrimental to your own development?

Yeah, I don't get the hate. I've been using copilot since the release and it's pretty handy. It ain't god's gift to this earth yet, but it's pretty useful for boilerplate scenarios.

Github Copilot violates the licenses of the open source code that it uses as its source material. I, for one, am pissed off about that.

If you don't care about those authors, or don't care about copyright in general, or you agree with Microsoft's sketchy reasoning that copyright violation never occurs in Github Copilot (even though Github Copilot is perfectly capable of regurgitating big verbatim chunks of code from its training corpus)... then you won't get the hate.

> Github Copilot violates the licenses

Not even the FSF had made that claim yet.

They are still in research mode:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...

https://www.fsf.org/news/publication-of-the-fsf-funded-white...

The latest conclusions so far:

https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications...

"Copilot and its developer-customers likely do not infringe developers’ copyrights."

I find it takes me more time to evaluate and correct its suggestions than to just write the code using regular IDE autocomplete.

I use VS code which doesn't really have great IDE autocomplete. I'll agree with you when it comes to a proper IDE though or if you use a quality JetBrains product!

The existence of Copilot is detrimental to GPL-licensed projects that it steals code from.

I read a lot GPL licensed code, does it mean I stole it? Should I put everything I write under the GPL license?

The answer is straightforward. If the similarity is such that a court would judge that copyright infringement occurred, then that code would have belonged under the GPL.

Convincing a court to make a judgement of infringement is not an easy threshold to cross. But Github Copilot, like many AIs, is less judicious than humans about not reproducing its inspirations verbatim: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

If you're getting paid to memorize snippets of GPL-licensed code and rewrite them into a proprietary codebase, I'd consider that stealing.

If you copy-paste chunks of code, which copilot has been caught doing, then yes you absolutely are violating the licenses in question.

Do we have another example than the famous quake fast square root function?

Yeah, I'm not fully convinced it's as bad as a lot are making it out to be. What is even considered a copyrightable code snippet?

If GPL code had a function like `int add_1(int x) { return x + 1; }` and you copy and pasted it, is that really stealing?

What about if you wrote identical code without having looked at the GPL code?

Or even if you've seen the GPL code but type it from memory?

Or if you copy from someone that illegally copied the GPL code?

It seems very non trivial with small functions like this, which is exactly the kind of code copilot outputs anyways. It's not like you're stealing large and unique parts of the code.

I could try to find one, but I don't want to pay Micro$oft just to prove a point.

It's not just GPL-licensed projects, but projects under any license which requires attribution — which means nearly all FOSS licenses.

This is also not Copilot, the financials app on iOS.

Yeah i was looking forward to the schadenfreude of watching GitHub copilot shut down after less than a year.

I feel old. My first thought was to the PalmPilot simulator.

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