idan

How many students / people early in career would benefit from having something to help them explore ideas?

How many don't have the advantages I had, of a four-year university, with professors and TAs and peers to help me stumble through something tricky?

How many have questions they feel embarrassed to ask their peers and mentors because they might make them look stupid?

Don't give up. This is a generational opportunity to lift up new developers. It's not perfect (nothing is). But if we sweat hard enough to make it good, then it is our chance to make a dent in the "why are there not more ______ people in tech" problem.

Exactly this.

When was the last time you wrote assembler?

We are indeed thinking about how to do that in a way that feels natural in VS Code. :)

Hello! GitHub Next here, happy to answer questions and unpack how we think about AI tools for developers (spoiler: it's less about codegen and more about helping with the rest of the dev cycle — building an understanding of how the system works, clearly specifying how it should change, etc)

So, part of the trickiness here is that there's a few different moving pieces that have to cooperate for success to happen.

There needs to be a great UX to elicit context from the human. For anything larger than trivial tasks, expecting the AI to read our minds is not a fruitful strategy.

Then there needs to be steerability — it's not just enough to get the human to cough up context, you have to get the human to correct the models' understanding of the current state and the job to be done. How do you do that in a way that feels natural.

Finally, all this needs to be defensive against model misses — what happens when the suggestion is wrong? Sure, in the future the models will be better and correct more often. But right now, we need to design for falliability, and make it cheap to ignore when it's wrong.

All of those together add up to a complex challenge that has nothing to do with the prompting, the backend, the model, etcetc. Figuring out a good UX is EXACTLY how we make it a useful tool — because in our experience, the better a job we do at capturing context and making it steerable, the more it integrates that thinking you stopped to do, but should have had some rigorous UX to trigger.

The opposite, we see these tools as mechsuits to help developers, and particularly newer developers, to do things that they would struggle to do.

Power tools did not result in fewer buildings built. I mean I guess some early skyscrapers did not benefit from modern power tools. But I don't think any construction company today is like "nah we'll just use regular saws thanks".

The allergy to hype is real; I don't think this or any tool is a magic wand that lets you sit back and just click "implement". But the right UX can help you move along the thought process, see solutions you might not have gotten to faster, and iterate.

No, it's a webapp, like github.com.

Absolutely. Copilot Workspace might not seem like it, but it's very much our first step towards tools to aid in comprehension and navigation of a codebase. I think a lot of folks have conflated "generative AI" with "writes code" when reading and understanding is a much larger part of the job

Hi All! GitHub Next here, happy to answer questions about Copilot Workspace and Next in general <3

It really is super clever! And the crazy part is that it's been possible for a super long time, just nobody thought of the technique. Mad props to Riley Cran and the entire crew at https://lettermatic.com for devising this technique as a part of this project.

Hi! I worked on this at Next.

Unfortunately, it's on the editor to support mixing fonts. There's never been multiple compatible monospaced fonts before so no editors really support this yet. Lots of editors also don't support variable typefaces properly yet (ahem, VS Code) but this is going to change.

Ultimately what you're describing is the future! But we have to release the typefaces to bootstrap that future.

We made a prototype extension that hack it into VS Code. But they're hacky af and not really releasable.

Correct! We know this is a terribly confusing thing. Hopefully by the next big launch we can work out a way to have GitHub Next things not bear the "not owned or operated" thing.

A couple of proofs!

next.github.com redirects to the site

You can see Blocks and Hey, GitHub! on https://github.com/features/preview

Watch Kyle's universe session linked elsewhere in the thread, he's going to be showing off a variety of projects from GitHub Next

There are some very good reasons why we exist outside the primary domain — mostly security-related! The blast radius of our experimentation should not include github.com :D

GitHub Next here!

Kyle Daigle's "Building with :heart:" session[1] in just under an hour is going to show this off, and we'll be getting people into the thing as quickly as possible! No long waitlist here.

https://githubuniverse.com/events/detail/virtual-schedule/a0...

We're a small team, and we don't have a whole marketing and web team to build stuff for us.

They're experiments! Think of this like an 0.1 of an open source project; it's gonna have bugs, it's going to have rough edges. We aren't going to pretend otherwise :D

Yes!

GitHub Next is a small research lab, formerly known as the Office of the CTO

GitHub Next here! Yes, we are legit. All of our things live outside of dotcom for a variety of reasons; mostly to contain the blast radius in case one of our experiments goes wrong! We also don't want our experiments to share a cookiespace with dotcom.

Our efforts are listed here too: https://github.com/features/preview

We'll be sharing some more about how we conducted this in an upcoming post! But no, the task was actually to write a little engine to process a limited subset of HTTP requests and return a valid response or relevant error.

We're thinking about review experiences! We're developers too, and we're keenly interested in how to make code more reviewable, how to help developers _make_ code more reviewable, and alternative interfaces to the notion of changesets.

Hi there! That's good feedback, and we updated the thing to make it clearer. Thank you!

Yup! When Jason departed, we couldn't be an OCTO without a CTO soooo rebrand! but the mission remains the same. Prototype things to figure out what should be!

Bingo

Used to be that way! But actually for security reasons, it was better for us to operate out of a separate domain. The github.com domain is very locked down for good reason.

Also, various boring realities around SSL termination made deployment difficult in a github.com domain. This was the expedient solution. Not phishing!

Hey! Thanks for the report, we're on it :D

This is totally unaligned with my experience.

Yes, the wealthy can afford to find ways to cheat on everything. But all segments of society are dodging taxes.

As a middle-class salaried employee, your income is taxed down to the last decimal place. But if you work in the trades, or anything else where many transactions are handled in cash, then tax evasion is _rampant_. And you know who is usually party to that? The tradespeople AND the relatively wealthier folks giving them envelopes of cash in exchange for a "discount" because the transaction isn't reported.

Will those stop? Probably not. But at least in larger sums it should make people afraid of dodging their tax burden.

Shameless plug for Copilot Labs, which offers arbitrary language-pair translations.

https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-labs/

Warning, Codex is nondeterministic and sometimes nonsensical! Good prompts are hard to find.

It physically hurt to read this story.

OK we added the pause/seek controls! Thanks for bringing this to our attention, it's way more accessible this way.

Hello, fellow internet old! I too remember Yahoo Pipes. :D

Are you https://github.com/adamcstephens?