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Comment by Anon84 | Hacker News Reader

And yet GitHub's copilot just crossed $100M ARR https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1711792178031460618

> The problem is that users pay $10 a month subscription fee for Copilot but, according to a source interviewed by the Journal, Microsoft lost an average of $20 per user during the first few months of this year. Some users cost the company an average loss of over $80 per month, the source told the paper.

$90 of inference time a month is... a lot. Are people just generating code in vscode to cause calls to copilot or something?

Copilot sends huge prompts continuously since it includes adjacent files for context. That's why it's so good at "figuring out" your own esoteric code.

I'm not sure why they don't charge per usage.

Because presumably the goal of copilot is not to make substantial amounts of money at this time, but instead to produce tons of training data for the tools that come after (and are significantly more profitable, because they reduce the amount of money firms spend on software developers.)

Yeah, so far this looks like home assistants which are all money-losing. There isn't yet a killer app, like google ads/search, which is sticky and pervasive and where an effective monopoly emerges.

Home assistants have no per-month cost to the customer, so introducing one would be a deal breaker for many users. Copilot is already a paid service, so it's easier to increase the prices if needed. The ongoing compute costs will also drop in a Moore's Law-like way

FWIW Nat Friedman says this is just completely false.

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712140497127342404

Is that true for the newer versions they’ve launched, since he left GitHub?

this is not a strong counter argument. Costs will come down. When there is insanely high demand for a product (like there is here) and the thing makes people more productive, costs always come down due to pure incentives to make it cheaper. This happened with electricity, the car, air travel, solar power, etc etc

But is it saving money on the user side. I’m less certain there’s real value in daily development. It’s something people are trialing still. Not sure who all will continue being subscribed in a year.

Have you used it? I’m never ever canceling my GitHub Copilot subscription. It’s revolutionary.

I used it for a while, but didn't find that it was beneficial enough to incorporate into my daily work. Perhaps I'm using it wrong, though.

It's best used for boilerplate, utility functions that are really simple but annoying to rewrite over and over. Or test harnesses, or things like that. Basically, things it's seen before, rather than application-specific stuff.

Basically: It can't think for you, but it can copy and paste for you. As long as you audit the output, which should be easy for this stuff.

Yeah, that's what I heard so that's one of the ways I tried using it. It's not compellingly useful in that role for me, though. I found it no quicker or easier than just writing (or copy/pasting from other code I wrote) it myself in the first place.

But I'll confess that I may be unusual -- I also don't find the old-fashioned code-completion stuff useful. That's for a different reason, though: it actively gets in my way.

I don't use it or find it useful either.

I dont find it useless but if it wasn’t for work giving if for free i wouldn't pay for it.

I’ve been using it a bit to learn rust. It often generates code that is correct or seem correct but is horribly inefficient and sometimes just wrong. I don’t feel I can trust it.

When I use it for programming languages I am experienced with, it often isn't giving super useful suggestions or just generates very ugly code.

The first I tried it, not impressed, but on some projects, it literally does 75% of the typing for me. I think it has to do with whether there is a similar open source project out there. The more unique your work, the less likely it is to find a good recommendation

Yes. I don’t get it. I don’t write tons of lines of code but when I do it has to be secure, readable, and well understood. Some of the answers from copilot are just wrong and others are less than useful.

Edit: I don’t write a lot of code, but I read a ton. I think that lines up with most mature code bases and senior staff.

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