zlacker

>>net01+(OP)
> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation.

Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work.

I think its somewhat telling that they can't share numbers for how they're using it internally. I want to know that Microsoft, the company famous for dog-fooding is using this day in and day out, with success. There's real stuff in there, and my brain has an insanely hard time separating the trillion dollars of hype from the usefulness.

>>taurat+O6
We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today.

So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot.

In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor - so we really are using Copilot coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;)

(Source: I'm the product lead at GitHub for Copilot coding agent.)

>>timrog+Oj
So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?

>>binary+Ml
What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks.

Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and complex problems.

>>timrog+ln
Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates

So they won’t like working on their job ?

>>bamboo+PY
You know exactly what they meant, and you know they’re correct.

>>tokioy+xZ
I like updating documentation and feel that it's fairly important to be doing myself so I actually understand what the code / services do?

I use all of these tools, but you also know what "they're doing"...

I know our careers are changing dramatically, or going away (I'm working on a replacement for myself), but I just like listening to all the "what we're doing is really helping you..."

>>bamboo+m11
I'd interpret the original statement as "tests which don't matter" and "documentation nobody will ever read", the ones which only exist because someone said they _have_ to, and nobody's ever going to check them as long as they exist (like a README.md in one my main work projects I came back to after temporarily being reassigned to another project - previously it only had setup instructions, now: filled with irrelevent slop, never to be read, like "here is a list of the dependencies we use and a summary of each of their descriptions!").

Doing either of them _well_ - the way you do when you actually care about them and they actually matter - is still so far beyond LLMs. Good documentation and good tests are such a differentiator.

>>insin+f91
If we're talking about low quality tests and documentation that exists only to check a box, the easier answer is to remove the box and acknowledge that the low quality stuff just isn't needed at all.