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Comment by kachhalimbu | Hacker News Reader

I like this take. Copilot to me seems a glorified (very intelligent) auto-search-paste/autocomplete service. It is just mimicing what usual devs do which is to copy-paste code from StackOverflow/github for many mundane types of codes like for loops, mongo find queries, callback func definitions etc for JS devs for eg.

The idea of auto-attribution if copilot surfaces licensed code is best because then it keeps the copilot user honest where the code is coming from and honor the original license.

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> It is just mimicing what usual devs do which is to copy-paste code from StackOverflow/github for many mundane types of codes like for loops, mongo find queries, callback func definitions etc for JS devs for eg.

I’m genuinely disturbed to see how many people in this thread think that casual plagiarism is the norm for “usual devs”.

> I’m genuinely disturbed to see how many people in this thread think that casual plagiarism is the norm for “usual devs”.

I'm disturbed it is likely the reality.

Dunno what devs you work with, but I’ve someone care literally never.

None of the code I work on is public, so attribution is pointless in the first place.

Again, I get the argument, just think it’s overstated. First, when referring to stack overflow and blogs, generally, that’s intentionally shared with the express purpose of people copying it- hopefully while learning from it at the same time. Second, again with some code bits it’s not really plagiarism any more than all iambic pentameter is plagiarizing Shakespeare.

Devs often look at code to see basic syntax, understand algorithms, etc. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. One should draw a line somewhere, but to say I need to attribute […somevar] every time I use it because I happened to see it one time on a blog post is silly.

A thought experiment may help: Scrape Github for all unique strings longer than X and store in a file with a timestamp and owner. How large does X have to be before attribution is required? If not length, then how do you determine whether attribution is required?

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