Comment by jwpapi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwpapi | Hacker News Reader

I’m honestly shook at all the comments here. I don’t make any money coding and I’m probably in the lower 25% of HN readers in terms of skills, but I’m more than happy to pay $10/m. I would pay Github $10/m for what they already give me.

What is your time worth? You should easily get $60/hr, so you need to save 12 minutes per month to make it worth. I would pay that for all my employees.

CoPilot is not a replacement for writing code, but it’s incredible useful when you are stuck and or / write simple logic.

Often I don’t have the right method, function or logic on mind. Before I google, I write a comment of what I want and 8/10 CoPilot generates the right code.

Typing the comment, checking the solution, reformatting it is <<< less time than without it.

To me Github CoPilot is a standard part of my IDE and I wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. It saves me at least an hour a day of coding. Some stuff is really crazy. I invite you all to try to be open-minded. You have to experience it.

// You have to code for yourself

I don’t really like this argument, because if that argument would be true, we would also need to now how our codes translates to 1 and 0s and how the electronics build our application than. AutoComplete is part of our life on our phone and it can be with developing. Don’t make it harder as it needs to be.

Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it?

For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.

> For me the bottleneck is seldom typing

This is one of my pet peeves in this field. People create whole programming languages that are "expressive", just to save typing a few dozen characters and have huge tirades against "verbose" languages that require typing a bunch of boilerplate.

If typing the code is the bit that takes the longest for you in a project, stop and take a good look in the mirror. There's something else wrong in the process.

For a verbose language the problem isn't the typing it's the reading. On the typing side I agree with you: I don't mind spending 30 minutes typing a bunch of boilerplate. I do mind digging through 100s of lines of code to find the 2 lines that actually do something interesting.

Of course, copilot is only going to save you typing time, and you'll have to pay it back at reading time.

I spend 95% of my day reading existing code not writing it, I have no idea what these developers writing code all day work on

"verbose" and "expressive" are on two different axes. Go is neither verbose nor expressive, for example, while XQuery is both verbose and expressive.

People write languages at higher levels of abstraction not to type fewer characters but to reduce logical errors that can occur, and provide better abstractions over things.

An example here is an infinite list. It's far easier to do that in say Haskell and python, applying filters along the way using higher order and curried functions than it is to do it in say C.

There is a difference between higher levels of abstraction and having a separate symbol for every single operation imaginable just for the sake of "expressiveness".

Yes, you can shove a 20 line function into one line with a ton of weird symbols, but the one reading it after you will need to unroll it anyway to understand it so what's the point?

I code for a living and have done so for over a decade now, and I completely agree with their analysis.

Does it save you $10 worth of your time within a month?

Comments here are wildly uninformed. I see comments complaining about copyright that seem to have no awareness of either fair use doctrine prior law as it relates to partial usage nor the details regarding how infrequently Copilot generates identifiable verbatim results outside attempts to auto fill empty files in empty projects (which seems outside typical usage).

Or complaints that it makes mistakes, as if 90% of those mistakes aren't immediately flagged by the linter. Not only that, but I've found that often when it does make mistakes, it reflects a consistency smell in my own code, such as tripping up on a legacy naming convention that should really be refactored out.

If it doesn't save you $10 worth of time, obviously don't use it. Personally I was worried it was going to be more given the ways in which it cuts down on the most boring parts of a high value profession.

But insinuating that someone's positive experience of the tool reflects inexperience is a weird gatekeeper flex, and honestly I'm more inclined to think that all the curmudgeonly resistance I see in here to the inevitable march of progress instead reflects old dogs unable to adequately learn new tricks (like how to effectively prompt it).

It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it was just an observation based on the parent comment's own admission.

Please remember this from the guidelines

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it was just an observation based on the parent comment's own admission.

I don't think that's true.

When the parent comment made that observation, they attached the caveat they might not be as skilled as others. They were already fully aware their potential lack of skill might affect their opinion of the product. All you did was repeat that same claim back to them, as if they weren't already aware of it which is a pretty uncharitable interpretation. A steelman interpretation that you could've said would assume there are some low-hanging fruit new or inexperienced developers would benefit from greatly (not just typing as you suggest), but once you develop a certain level of skill, Copilot would become less useful for experts such as yourself.

If anything, you didn't respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what was said, since you willfully disregarded their own insight into the problem.

Then to try and morally lecture someone on their behavior by applying a rule you don't even hold yourself standard to is pretty astonishing.

No, I explained why I thought it didn't provide value to me, in the context of having a different background than the person I responded to. Nothing malicious intended in that.

I find you having to write 3 long paragraphs of bullshit about that to be the truly astonishing thing here. Holy crap.

Not commenting on the actual riff the two of you are having. However I dislike the come back of “you wrote so much”. I’m overly verbose. I have adhd. So what. Having to hear school ground retorts insinuating I care so much because I write too much is tiresome. Is it even a bad thing? Is it even logical to say writing more than average is somehow an inherent flaw?

Now you're just doing the same: reading something that's not there and accusing me of insinuating stuff...

Who cares really. If a person doesn't find it useful, then just don't use it but if other people find it useful that those people will use it.

> “I find you having to write 3 long paragraphs of bullshit about that to be the truly astonishing thing here”

What I wrote applies. An argument could be yours is diff because of specifying it is bullshit. Yet that’s what most responses are about. A mix of statements like:

“why do you care so much”/“lol you care so much” or “wow you really wrote that much” or “your long writing is all BS and excuses”.

I don’t want to attack you as a person or make you feel bad. No insinuation or implication. I am directly saying stuff. If I did read something that’s not there, I’m up for being shown how I am wrong.

> What I wrote applies

No, it doesn't. I didn't write the type of come-back you're arguing against. I didn't write "lol you care so much" or anything to that effect. You're just making up straw men.

DantesKite wrote "I don't think that's true." when I explained what I meant about a comment, and then spent three paragraphs twisting my words and making up a story about what I wrote. Which is dishonest, I know what I meant better than they. Me pointing out that they spent three paragraphs arguing in bad faith isn't me saying what you're accusing me of.

> I see comments complaining about copyright that seem to have no awareness of either fair use doctrine prior law as it relates to partial usage

My jurisdiction has no concept of fair use.

Counterpoint look at the bios lawsuits that IBM won against people who had just seen IBM's code

Or the windows xp leak and how that is a mess for wine/proton/reactos devs

There is no concept of fair use in code copyright

Copilot is 100% a ask for forgiveness later sort of project

When U say verify isn’t it just like 1 or 2 statement per completion? I’ve never seen it suggest more than that, a glance over the logic it completes with is lot more faster than typing it out in my experience. I spend more time thinking these days, than typing.

$60/hr? Maybe in the US, but really uncommon even in western countries like Germany.

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