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490 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.576s | source
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JonChesterfield ◴[] No.44382974[source]
Interesting. Harder line than the LLVM one found at https://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#ai-generated-cont...

I'm very old man shouting at clouds about this stuff. I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand and I don't want to merge code neither of us understand.

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1. phire ◴[] No.44383315[source]
I do use GitHub copilot on my personal projects.

But I refuse to use it as anything more than a fancy autocomplete. If it suggests code that's pretty close to what I was about to type anyway, I accept it.

This ensures that I still understand my code, that there shouldn't be any hallucination derived bugs, [1] and there really shouldn't be any questions about copyright if I was about to type it.

I find using copilot this way speeds me up. Not really because my typing is slow, it's more that I have a habit of getting bored and distracted while typing. Copilot helps me get to the next thinking/debugging part sooner.

My brain really comprehend the idea that anyone would not want to not understand their code. Especially if they are going to submit it as a PR.

And I'm a little annoyed that the existence of such people is resulting in policies that will stop me from using LLMs as autocomplete when submitting to open source projects.

I have tried using copilot in other ways. I'd love for it to be able to do menial refactoring tasks for me. But every-time I experiment, it seems to fall off the rails so fast. Or it just ends up slower than what I could do manually because it has to re-generate all my code instead of just editing it.

[1] Though I find it really interesting that if I'm in the middle of typing a bug, copilot is very happy to autocomplete it in its buggy form. Even when the bug is obvious from local context, like I've typoed a variable name.

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2. dawnerd ◴[] No.44384581[source]
That’s how I use it too. I’ve tried to make agent mode work but it ends up taking just as long if not longer than just making the edits myself. And unless you’re very narrowly specific models like sonnet will go off track making changes you never asked for. At least gpt4.1 is pretty lazy I guess.