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Comment by crop_rotation | Hacker News Reader

I have used it and copilot both and it is a bit behind copilot.

First, Copilot supports a lot more languages (which is a big utility of such tools, that you are writing code in a different language much more quickly.)

Second, it fails more often with incorrect suggestions, and on non trivial things tends often to go line by line.

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Good enough for me :

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon CodeWhisperer for Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#—plus ten new languages, including Go, Kotlin, Rust, PHP, and SQL. CodeWhisperer can be accessed from IDEs such as VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, AWS Cloud9, and many more via the AWS Toolkit IDE extensions.

I was impressed that Copilot even works well on languages not advertised as supported.

Is copilot not gpt3.5 now (before I think it was gpt3)? It performs well even on languages it doesn’t even know. I write weird languages for fun and in VScode it quickly starts giving elaborate slabs of code for languages it only knows from my personal projects. I don’t use regular syntax generally (we have enough of those); my last abomination was a Unicode char apl like and it picked it up pretty fast.

They announced Copilot X as using GPT-4 but its unclear to me whether it's just the new features (the chat, etc.) or the code completion that will move to GPT-4 as well.

If it isn't, then Copilot has previously used OpenAI Codex (which is based on GPT-3)

Source: https://github.blog/2023-03-22-github-copilot-x-the-ai-power...

It goes beyond languages. Yesterday I was editing a markdown file that was to become a post on a static site with movies. After I entered the title of a Taiwanese movie from the eighties, I jumped to the frontmatter to add some metadata about it. It autocompleted the director even before I typed the first letter of his name.

It was so unexpected for me that I had to pause for a second to process what happened.

LLM's are Autocomplete all the things

We know each other so well we finish each other’s sandwiches.

I know someone who uses it with SAS, which isn't well known outside the analytics space. (Fun fact, SAS started out on punch cards.)

Just tried CodeWhisperer out. The line by line output is driving me crazy.

Definitely disappointing compared to ChatGPT based code creation. I love describing what I want very briefly and getting a nice block of code to start tweaking.

I wish there was an easy way to benchmark these tools and revisit them when they pass a threshold of competence.

> Just tried CodeWhisperer out. The line by line output is driving me crazy.

It's not necessarily the case, it can generate whole functions and even multiple functions.

Today I made a class called "DynamoUtils" and it suggested 2 full methods.

Third, Copilot supports vim.

This is actually the best selling point for me. With Sourcegraph joining the party, not supporting Vim is definitely minus points. And rightfully so.

FWIW we are actively working on support for Neovim.

Why even compare them when one is free and the other is not?

Because some of us are doing this for a living and happy to pay $10/month if it is better than the free option.

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