Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Does copilot learn from and suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working, or does it just pull from the huge pool of projects on GH?

How well does copilot help with languages like Elixir that are less common? WIth TypeScript it's been remarkable, but that's one of the most popular and surely very familiar to devs and GH, so I would expect less popular like Elixir to not perform as well.

Does copilot work for shell scripts?

I'm a vim person and don't want to use VS code. Is copilot worth the hassle to get installed into vim?

View on HN

I've played with it a little bit:

Copilot did pretty poorly when I tried using it with Julia- it kept suggesting Python code. I suspect it would do something similar in Elixir.

I'm also a vim person who doesn't want to use VS code, but I've gotten more than enough value to get into my first IDE (with vim keybindings). A lot of tedious C++ code is getting correctly auto-generated.

I don't think c++ is even on their supported language? the copilot page lists python,js,ts,ruby,go.

From the “About GitHub Copilot” page:

“GitHub Copilot is optimized to help you write Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, or C++.”

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...

It has first class Neovim support, possibly a better alternative for Vim person than any IDE.

> suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working

Sometimes, with variable results. I think I've only observed it guess patterns from the current directory

> Does copilot work for shell scripts?

Yes, it gave me this earlier today while editing my .zshrc:

  # kill a process on a given port
  killport() {
    lsof -i :$1 | awk 'NR!=1 {print $2}' | xargs kill
  }

Can't wait for someone to integrate this into a shell. Does anyone know if such a project exists?

"Copilot, how do I fork in a shell?"

  :() { :|: } :&

Thanks copil[user disconnected].

Integrating into a shell, for immediate execution, seems very very dangerous. You still need to carefully test/scrutinize everything that comes from copilot.

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but Warp (a new terminal client) has "AI Code Search" built in that's powered by GPT-3. Quite useful for someone like me who tends to avoid the terminal when I can.

https://www.warp.dev

https://docs.warp.dev/features/ai-command-search

There's this cool blog on them testing it out against popular git commands:

https://www.warp.dev/blog/replace-git-cheat-sheet-ai-command...

them as in that’s you :)

lsof supports machine-readable mode:

  lsof -i ":$1" -Fp | tr -d p

> Does copilot work for shell scripts?

Oh wow—a language where there are: 20 ways to do something, three of them are common, but only three others actually behave, by any standard, correctly, while being among the least-common in public code, seems like exactly the wrong kind of thing to use this for.

Shell doesn't need machine-learning autocomplete trained on existing shell scripts, it needs a hand-built aggressive linter.

> Shell doesn't need machine-learning autocomplete trained on existing shell scripts, it needs a hand-built aggressive linter.

Something like https://www.shellcheck.net/?

Copilot seems to learn from elsewhere in my codebase, and is able to utilize patterns I've used elsewhere in the codebase when prompted in a different file. Isn't perfect, but it saves a ton of time.

My primary usage is shell scripts, as it seems to struggle on complex code, while shell scripts are typically a lot of simple code.

It doesn't learn from your codebase but it uses the context of your code so any pattern will be picked up.

… and variable name spelling mistakes!

which is actually good because then i just right click the variable in my IDE and then click "refactor > rename" and i'm done

Reply on news.ycombinator.com