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
Do you think you're putting yourself or your coworkers out of work?

If/when will this take over your job?

>>echelo+Ta1
I'm honestly surprised that Microsoft (and other similarly sized LLM companies) have convinced or coerced literally hundreds of thousands of employees to build their own replacement.

If we're expected to even partially believe the marketing, LLM coding agents are useful today at junior level developer tasks and improving quickly enough that senior tasks will be doable soon too. How do you convince so many junior and senior level devs to build that?

>>_heimd+cn2
When the options are "do what we tell you and get paid" vs getting laid off in the current climate, the choice isn't really a choice.

>>binary+2G2
That threat doesn't scale. I do get that many haven't put themselves in a position to stand behind their views or principles, but if they did the threat, or the company, would crumble.