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Comment by tikkun | Hacker News Reader

My mind is blown by the people saying $10/month is too much.

$10 a month for this is an unbelievably good deal!

If you value your time, this is a ridiculously good deal.

If you're looking at it from the perspective that my employer pays me $X/hour to write code, and CoPilot is less than that price, then it might be a bargain in that sense. On the other hand, my employer pays me for my experience and knowledge. Most of my time isn't spent writing code, so I don't think it's fair to just look at an hourly dollar amount when deciding whether it's worth it.

That being said, my biggest issue with CoPilot is that it's a ML system trained from open source and public repositories. Also straight from the website, "By using GitHub Copilot [...] you help to improve GitHub Copilot." I'm now paying for the privilege of handing over my data to GitHub so they can combine it with open source code to make more money off of people who are convinced it's somehow saving their company money.

It is if you're not making any money from your side-projects. Seems like everything's a subscription nowadays, all adds up.

I used to be in that camp but honestly, as long as you keep a spreadsheet of subscriptions it's really easy to manage, and more convenient than the older one time purchase for a large amount model (at least for me)

> My mind is blown by the people saying $10/month is too much. $10 a month for this is an unbelievably good deal! If you value your time, this is a ridiculously good deal.

Maybe people who used it didn't find enough value in it? Is that their fault?

I haven't used it, but it's certainly not immediately clear to me that there is enough value there to justify $10/mo.

You should give it a go if you can spare the time. You'll need a credit card but they give you a free trial.

5 minutes in my IDE and I'm already sold on trying it for the next month.

Eh. I might use it if my employer obtained it for me, but I'm not gonna go out of my way to pay $10 to Microsoft for it.

I'm also still skeptical about the legal aspects of it. Microsoft says that training the model is fair use. Good for them, but that's not applicable to me in any way.

Honestly it puts the legal burden on YOU. Think of Github Copilot like a fancy pants search engine, it mixes and matches stuff to your query, and doesn't even tell where it copied it from! Indexing search results, fair use. Using that code in YOUR codebase without a license :)

The value from copilot seems to be very dependant on exactly what you are coding, in which language and what libraries/frameworks you are using. I've been using it on and off for about a year and on the whole consider it at best a net neutral in terms of value. For every 10 times it saves me 2-3 minutes typing out some boiler plate it costs me 20-30 minutes to sort out some weird bug or subtle gibberish it has introduced in my codebase. Half the time the suggestions are just obviously wrong.

Agreed. I was just thinking about it and I’d probably pay $100/month. Maybe even more.

(Shhhh don’t tell GitHub!)

Copolilot very rarely gives me relevant results, I definitely would not pay for it.

you're holding the phone wrong :P

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