Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvcalder | Hacker News Reader

Apparently you stopped reading, but since I never claimed CoPilot is not useful, it wasn't because of that. My claim is, I think, more subtle. The tools of AI/ML are useful, and can solve many problems. But they can't solve all problems, and specifically, they can't solve many of the problems (well) they are currently targeting.

View on HN

Let a thousand flowers bloom, it doesn't matter "they can't solve all problems". There's enough space for traditional approaches, nobody's forcing anyone to use a neural net. Copilot is just a good code neural net, it's unique in its own way, but it's not even state of the art for a long time.

CoPilot helps me code (mostly Rails full stack stuff) a lot faster than ever, which is no small feat considering I've got 30 plus years of daily programming experience, half of that in Rails. Occasionally CoPilot produces output that is nothing short of miraculous, stunning even. Suggesting that it's a faulty area of research, that the creators of CoPilot were somehow overreaching (if that's indeed what you're saying) is imbecilic.

What's imbecilic is generalizing your own experience to others and their standards. I am yet to see current iteration copilot producing non-trivial code. But maybe "miraculous" for you means something else.

For me, miraculous is writing "trivial code" for me with a single key press where I would otherwise have needed to type out several lines of code by hand.

Copilot does that all the time. It's the best typing assistant I've ever used. And that's valuable to me.

Then I hope you described IDE autocomplete as "miraculous" as well. It's certainly saving me more time than copilot, that's for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com