Technology

Copilot isn't actually bad for developers, it's just that you need to be careful with it and recognize its limitations.

Writing a bunch of REST endpoints for an API and need to implement all the typical http verbs, and you already have all the matching methods for reading, updating, and deleting values in a complex SQL database for each endpoint to call? Copilot can turn a ten minute chore into a ten second one. Very handy.

Writing those complex SQL methods in the first place? Yeah... Copilot will probably make a ton of mistakes and its work will need to be triple-checked. You'll save time just doing it yourself if you know how. (And if you don't, you have no business calling yourself a developer.)

Copilot is best for easy boilerplate and repetitive code. Problems arise as soon as you ask it to get "creative."

It’s funny that Microsoft fucked up the branding so bad that half of these comments are about GitHub Copilot — a specialized, useful tool for experienced developers to speed up rote tasks — and the other half about their whole “Shoehorn AI into everything.” strategy. And Bing Chat is also now Copilot, apparently? Is Cortana now Windows Copilot? Is there an Xbox Copilot that plays Starfield for you?

Similarly, other users told the outlet that the AI hallucinated wrong answers or miscalculated spreadsheets. AI experts, including The Wharton School professor, Ethan Mollick accused Copilot of making bizarre suggestions for weekend meetings.

It seems these users never used GPT

It's because it's not as good

... In contrast, Microsoft's corporate VP, Jared Spataro, told us that users are finding immediate value in Copilot

haha no really?

So people are surprised that GPT-4 is performing as well as GPT-4 always has?

What part of "early adopter" did you not understand before you wasted your money?

Yeah it's a classic case of Microsoft marketing. So far I found the office integration to be the least useful and most over hyped in marketing. However what it is good at is actually helpful. Join a meeting late it already has an update for what's happened on the meeting so far and it's really good for summarizing a meeting especially a key topics and a summary of action items. Tedious tasks like taking data copied from a PDF file and reformatting it correctly in CSV. And my favorite is making custom graphics based on a specific colour palette, though most images are really good for entertainment, demos and samples, but not production quality for final products. Weird results include creepy human images just don't look right in a disturbing zombie-like way.

As far as I am concerned Copilot is a giant theft of open source code and breaches the license. I expect in the future a lot of repositories will be used to poison these AI agents just as is happening with images. The agents will get better but the quality of what they produce will also be poisoned and get worse precisely due to the theft.

It's ChatGPT Open AI, but as Microsoft LoVES to do things, bloated as those old time web browsers infested of tool bars

I have not had a chance to test the office integrations (and the $30 price tag may keep it that way,) but I’ve been testing the web chat version, and once toggled to “precise” mode I find it close to chatgpt. Just a little more prone to lapse into acting like a bing chat app and very limited in conversation length…

I think the trick is to treat it like a junior assistant or maybe an intern who might make mistakes and not as a seasoned, experienced employee who always puts out perfect work.

Yes, but when will it make porn?

Trash company once again dumps trash on the market and attempts to sell it to morons.

This is certainly not about finding fools who not only are beta testers but also provide training data... And not only for free, but they pay also for this.. Win win win for M$

My favorite are the gigantic companies falling all over themselves to buy this for their workforces before it's even clear what value a bot that can't reliably do arithmetic is going to add to Excel