• @RonSijm
    link
    English
    5
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    I use Copilot, but dislike it for coding. The “place a comment and Copilot will fill it in” barely works, and is mostly annoying. It works for common stuff like “// write a function to invert a string” that you’d see in demos, that are just common functions you’d otherwise copypaste from StackOverflow. But otherwise it doesn’t really understand when you want to modify something. I’ve already turned that feature off

    The chat is semi-decent, but the “it understands the entire file you have open” concept also only just works half of time, and so the other half it responds with something irrelevant because it didn’t get your question based on the code / method it didn’t receive.

    I opted to just use the OpenAI API, and I created a slack bot that I can chat with (In a slack thread it works the same as in a “ChatGPT context window”, new messages in the main window are new chat contexts) - So far that still works best for me.

    You can create specific slash-commands if you like that preface questions, like “/askcsharp” in slack would preface it with something like “You are an assistant that provides C# based answers. Use var for variables, xunit and fluentassertions for tests”

    If you want to be really fancy you can even just vectorize your codebase, store it in Pinecone or PGVector, and have an “entire codebase aware AI”

    It takes a bit of time to custom build something, but these AIs are basically tools. And a custom build tool for your specific purpose is probably going to outperform a generic version

      • Eager Eagle
        link
        fedilink
        English
        2
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        I second this. GH Copilot for coding is an amazing tool, not just for boilerplate, but to fill complementary logic, brainstorm test cases, rewriting and refactoring, reducing typos or “copy and paste” errors, documentation, prototyping code from a human-written description, and probably several other things at different levels of competence.

        Makes me wonder what people that don’t find it useful are trying to do with it. Sure you’ll probably need or want to change some things, but that’s miles ahead of having to write it from zero.

        Hell, if you start declaring a function with a good name and good names + types for the arguments, it’ll often write an implementation that is mostly correct using the rest of the file as context.

      • @RonSijm
        link
        English
        18 months ago

        Well I have Copilot Pro, but I was mainly talking about GitHub Copilot. I don’t think having the Copilot Pro really affects Copilot performance.

        I meanly use AI for programming, and (both for myself to program and inside building an AI-powered product) - So I don’t really know what you intend to use AI for, but outside of the context of programming, I don’t really know about their performance.

        And I think Copilot Pro just gives you Copilot inside office right? And more image generations per day? I can’t really say I’ve used that. For image generation I’m either using the OpenAI API again (DALL-E 3), or I’m using replicate (Mostly SDXL)

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          28 months ago

          I mainly use it for troubleshooting stuff, which includes everything from bash to node and react, Python to …DNS. idk.

          Copilot Pro, confusingly, isn’t GitHub copilot related. I do have GitHub copilot, I agree gpt4 is better in general, just not in my IDE.

          Idk how Microsoft has bungled this naming… They own GitHub now right?!

          So there’s Microsoft Copilot, which is like bing chat for windows. But now there is Microsoft Copilot Pro for $20/mo, which uses gpt4 turbo. Haven’t seen much on it.

          And even more recently, Google Bard is now Gemini, but you can do Gemini Ultra for $20/mo. Supposedly trying to contend with ChatGPT 4 as well.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            0
            edit-2
            8 months ago

            Idk how Microsoft has bungled this naming

            You haven’t followed been following Microsoft for long have you? The first version of Windows was version 3.0 (there were technically earlier versions but they were “a work in progress” and weren’t really usable at all). The third version of Xbox was called “Xbox One”.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              28 months ago

              I have been using Windows since before 3.0.

              Your point, while comical, is kind of irrelevant as far as naming two independent products the same thing.