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Comment by andersa | Hacker News Reader

They're free to sabotage themselves and miss out on this new wave of productivity, of course...

I wouldn't want to ever work without Copilot again. So frustrating to not have my magic autocomplete when I have to make some changes in a basic editor.

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I'll really don't understand all the people flexing their copilot subscriptions. It's kind of a huge self own... Congrats, the software you write is banal enough to be AI generated.

It's like all the kids who use it to write their papers. Great, you didn't get caught, your instructor agrees that you are the worlds most average and uninspired writer.

They flex their copilot subscriptions, but they are not flexing how they’ve done advent of code with common lisp. They flex how they can chat with a book, but not what they’ve learned from it. They flex how they can generate pretty pictures, but they can’t say what it means to them.

This sounds like you don't understand what Copilot is. It doesn't write software from scratch. It's just a fancy autocomplete.

I've used it, it's absolute trash for anything but boilerplate yavascript.

It seems to do pretty well with zsh, go, python, and rust when I use it. Even for more complex tasks - but "context-aware universal snippets/boilerplate suggestion" already sounds pretty valuable, doesn't it?

If the rate of change in the NetBSD codebase was 1/10th of what it is now, I'd be content. The idea that LOC or speed of change is a good measure for a 40+ year old operating system doesn't work for me.

You should get committer flag in NetBSD because of how LITTLE new work you bring to the table, and because of how MUCH code you REMOVE.

Then let me remove posix semaphores and replace it all with futexes. It'd be great to not need a file descriptor every time one of my threads wants to wait on a mutex or condition variable.

If that's your first target for removal, I'd wager a large amount of money that you're [unfamiliar](https://man.netbsd.org/compat_freebsd.8) with the NetBSD code base.

I only really have experience talking directly to the kernel abis, i.e. the stuff in netbsd/sys/kern/syscalls.master. I'm using sem_open / sem_wait / etc. as my futex replacement. What abi should I be using? https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/third_party...

It can be useful just for experimentation, too. You don't have to commit all the code it writes.

Most of the time it just feels like an autocomplete that is actually useful, it's scary good at writing the rest of the line exactly the way I was going to.

Anyway, your argument seems much more reasonable than the original post - they're just faffing about copyright which is completely pointless since Microsoft already declared they'll take care of any copyright lawsuits related to Copilot.

> Microsoft already declared they'll take care of any copyright lawsuits related to Copilot.

How very kind of them!

edit: it's almost like you, as a user, get a taste of having so much money youre legally untouchable!

> it just feels like an autocomplete that is actually useful

And a lot of us have been saying these LLM's are nothing but advanced autocompletes... and maybe that isn't a bad thing?

Microsoft declared they will assume liability for commercial customers who can prove they complied with all relevant requirements. You just showed why a broad policy is safer.

If Copilot significantly increases your productivity, you're either:

- statistically, a below average programmer, or - a really, really, slow typer.

Writing code is the easy part. Copilot, and transformers in general, are only able to generate "statistically average ish" output. A statistically average ish coder is also pretty bad at coding (this stands to reason, or else programmers wouldn't complain about how bad every other programmer's code is). So if Copilot makes you more productive, that's a bit of a red flag.

If, on the other hand, you're a really slow typer, then unfortunately you're out of luck, because nobody has figured out a superior input method to pressing buttons. I think in this case, Copilot is an OK solution, but you'll find yourself correcting most of the code it writes anyways.

It's not really that clear that LLMs would be particularly useful at generating the type of code someone working on NetBSD would find useful. They don't really seem to excel at writing memory safe(ish) low-level code or solving any novel problems

(and for boilerplate there isn't any fundamental difference between copy-pasting it from ChatGPT or anywhere else copyright wise since it's practically identical and unverifiable)

Little to early to praise the benefits.

Maybe we just get more of the same errors in more code because they all copy from the same faulty AI.

/s ?

I'm guessing you're still writing every line of character of code yourself in emacs or notepad or something like that?

Yes, copilots are really helpful, even if you do know what you're doing.

Or just wait to get left behind, while you sit on your ivory pedestal of superiority. Your choice.

If you think that what sets you apart from other developers is an AI autocompleting some of your code for you, then I'm not sure what your value proposition as a developer is. Typing the code is the easy part.

It's also the boring part, so we might aswell automate it, right?

I have no problem with that. But let's not kid ourselves that 'automating' a bit of typing elevates a developer to some godlike level. A good chunk of regular developers point and click their way through their day, use dogshit editors without knowing a keyboard shortcut beyond save/copy/paste/undo, and work with tech and codebases that they actively have to fight to be productive. They still exist despite all of the other productivity boons out there.

I'm not saying copilots aren't useful. I'm saying that this "you'll be left behind" rhetoric smacks of crypto esque hype.

it's already automated with a gizmo called "snippets".

Or “boilerplate generators”, I’m working on a laravel project and I think 90% of the code written so far is either generated or copy-pasted (from other files, from the css framework examples, from the docs). The trick is to know what to generate, what to copy, and keep it minimal. And that’s done by pretty much reading the entire docs and some of the framework’s code to understand how the pieces fit together. And what you need to replace/add on top to get your application.

I’m not tethering myself to a distant datacenter just to be able to write some code.

Yeah, not having to be attached 24-by-7 to some (pay-a-subscription) technology to just do a simple job is a great point.

I always find this ‘left behind’ thing funny - as if whipping out a credit card for an ai tool is a skill only gained by early adopters.

indeed. vi. not vim. not neovim. not vscode or emacs or anything complicated. i can use cat when vi doesn't work. why? because everyone can learn an editor of choice, and that just happens to be the one my fingers know. not because it's somehow better or something.

"while you sit on your ivory pedestal of superiority. Your choice."

ha! if only! i actually sit in a dim room with remnants of caffeine and pizza and wonderful half-broken computers and brand new ideas and code and interesting challenges and discoveries. and friends.

i did choose.

correctly.

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