7 ms·

Replit's in-browser coding AI

163 points by bauerpl 4y ago

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
Does anybody know the status of the legal action against that kid that supposedly stole all their good ideas and made a hobby project out of it? I would like to know how that resolved before I consider anything from this company again.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#how-did-replit-respond-to-this-blog-post https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#how-did-repli... At the bottom of the original blog post. He put his project back online and it is still up: https://riju.codes/ https://riju.codes/
  - bdn_ 4y ago
    Even if this was settled, I consider this quote when thinking about Amjad Masad (Replit CEO). > When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. - Maya Angelou
machinekob 4y ago
"Any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers and CEO in the near future" for developing this?
giansegato 4y ago
replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks
- sithlord 4y ago
  any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers in the near future?
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Interesting, sithlord is an anagram for shitlord. While the behavior of the CEO wasn't cool, the issue seems to have been resolved between all involved parties and everyone has moved on - we don't need to bring it up every time repl.it is mentioned.
    - notwhereyouare 4y ago
      I'll admit, every time I hear of repl.it mentioned, I think of the time the CEO threatened the intern. The CEO did a huge disservice to himself and the company that day in my mind
      - googlryas 4y ago
        You're allowed to think that. My point is really about littering unrelated posts regarding repl.it with snipes about it.
      - still_grokking 4y ago
        Oh, internet drama. I love internet drama! So I looked it up as I never heard this story before. https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the social media fire all in all. Also he doesn't look very smart, imho: https://amasad.me/meta https://amasad.me/meta Big LOL here! The abstract things are the simplest, yeah! That's why progress in something like math or theoretical physics is made by the dumbest people, in contrast to something like sociology where you need genius level of intelligence to come up with some new ideas. Sure, sure. But that's of course not everything this dude got completely backwards. Would explain why replit is the most useless of all the online IDEs: It has no direction, no true value proposition. It's not a good cloud coding environment. It never was a good code snippet playground (actually one of the worsts). Now they even require accounts, so the quick code snippet aspect is also gone. Also they badly positioned in the education space… Of course I wish them luck! But I guess they have no chance against something like Gitpod, Github, or OpenShift codespaces, which are light-years ahead. OK, maybe the exit-strategy is "just" to be visible enough that at some point they get bought by one of the above. (Which doesn't look like the most ethical thing to do ;-)).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eachro 4y ago
  That's very impressive. Hats off to them! I dont think this is too out of the ordinary either though. I'd guess they started off with a LLM from hugging face, set up some pipeline to ingest code from replit repos to finetune the LLM. The ML aspect of this is not terribly hard given that they probably dont need to train a LLM from scratch. Figuring out how store and serve from replit repos (or publicly available code bases) is not too difficult. From there it's a matter of productionalizing: how to serve the model in real time, figuring out they want the product to look/feel like and I suppose this part of it might take a while. I'd estimate you'd need 1-2 ML engineers, 2 data engineers, 2-3 swes, 1 PM for the team for a minimal viable product.
  - giansegato 4y ago
    yep, true! however, the devil is in the details. from what i've been told, the big challenge was latency: they worked a lot to bring the latency down to acceptable levels - essentially to be usable in a cloud IDE iirc the team managed to bring it to a lever an order of magnitude lower than off-the-shelf models
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    8 weeks is impressive for something like that, and it goes to show just how powerful our off-the-shelf tools have become. I think it's also a bit scary, because 8 weeks is very little time for testing, tuning, and validation of something as opaque as a machine learning model. If it worked right the first time, that's great. But there is still a lot of inherent uncertainty in ML projects. Decision makers need to take that uncertainty into account when planning. That, or, the 8 weeks only covers the final training runs and the implementation/deployment, and doesn't include time spent developing and tuning proof-of-concept prototype models.
    - mradek 4y ago
      In 2022 you test live in production lol
    - conductr 4y ago
      It’s not life or death though. It’s just giving some useful boilerplate that you’ll have to touch to make useful. They can learn as they go.
- caprock 4y ago
  That's really neat to hear. Can you comment on how replit has managed to foster a culture of fast delivery? Are there any interesting trade offs?
- tephra 4y ago
  Curious, how large are teams in Replot usually? To me (programmer in Sweden) the largest single team I've been on was 14 people and that was _very_ large (indeed the largest in the tech department). We actually broke ourselves up into two more informal groups since we thought that was a more manageable team size.
  - dbish 4y ago
    Neat feature but yeah very small doesn’t seem like < 12 to me either (worked at big tech for a while). A two pizza team (standard amazon size) is 8-10, 12 starts to be on the larger size for a single team, but not abnormal. Very small to me would be if a team of 2-4 shipped it. Replit must be much larger then I expected for a startup.
- swyx 4y ago
  very cool :) can i get a clarification - when it says "in-browser" i hear "on-device" as in it doesnt call back to replit to get the predictions. i assume that's inaccurate? for cost/compute purposes i'm wondering how small models have to get in order to run "truly in browser"
luxurytent 4y ago
Does this differ from GitHub's CoPilot in any user-noticeable way? (outside of the platform it's available on)
- Liquid_Fire 4y ago
  One thing I noticed is it seems to have an "Explain code" feature, giving you a textual explanation of a block of code you select, which I'm not aware of GitHub having.
  - pynappo 4y ago
    GitHub Copilot Labs (a VSCode extension meant to be installed with GitHub Copilot) seems to have an explain code feature. ref: https://github.blog/2022-09-14-8-things-you-didnt-know-you-could-do-with-github-copilot/#8-navigating-a-new-codebase-with-copilot-labs https://github.blog/2022-09-14-8-things-you-didnt-know-you-c...
  - WithinReason 4y ago
    You can just use the prompt "The above code does the following explained in English" in a comment to prompt CoPilot to explain its code. You could probably also engineer a prompt to translate code between languages.
    - lgas 4y ago
      Have you tried "This ruby code does the same thing as the following python code" in a comment?
      - WithinReason 4y ago
        I actually did something similar and it worked IIRC. It was python to C or the reverse.
      - ksaj 4y ago
        I wish I thought of that when I had the co-pilot trial. If that works, I might have had a different opinion of my experience with it.
iandanforth 4y ago
Things I'd like to know about this tool: - What areas/languages/tasks is it good at and what is it bad at? - How often is it generating code with bugs? - How often is the code that gets generated used as is vs immediately edited? - What are the new frustrations that this causes that existing IDE code completion doesn't? I work with trained models daily and I know that their failure cases are unintuitive, unexpected, and exasperating. I'd like to know as much about the failure cases of this model as possible before diving in.
- bardia95 4y ago
  Replit team member here: - Ghostwriter is especially good at Python and JS, but supports up to 16 languages (to varying degrees of effectiveness) you can read more here: https://docs.replit.com/ghostwriter/faq#which-programming-languages-does-ghostwriter-support https://docs.replit.com/ghostwriter/faq#which-programming-la... - As for tasks, it's great for reducing the amount of boilerplate code you need to write (Complete Code), writing React components (Complete + Generate Code), explaining code in plain English (Explain Code), translating code between languages (Transform Code), writing exhaustive tests (Complete Code) - No stats on how often its generating code with bugs or how often the code gets generated used as is vs immediately edited, we're interested in getting both to help improve Ghostwriter - Like any LLM, it can get stuck in a long-tail of repetitive loops; we're working pretty hard to improve and mitigate these issues, but, especially for new users, the repetition and hallucination type problems can be distracting.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
three_seagrass 4y ago
Love using Replit but is there any way to try this before buying without having to wait weeks on a waitlist?
- bardia95 4y ago
  If you sign up for the waitlist today, you should be able to get access within a few days.
Heleana 4y ago
Is there any way that users will be able to tell the difference between this and GitHub's CoPilot?
- bardia95 4y ago
  Ghostwriter also includes 2 features that Copilot does not have: Transform Code (translate between langs/refactor code), Generate Code (prompt Ghostwriter to write full programs in one shot) Plus, Ghostwriter is integrated with the Replit platform, meaning you get all the benefits Replit offers as a portable development environment you can take with you anywhere you go and host instantly.
  - TOMDM 4y ago
    One could argue Copilot can translate/refactor code. I can't count the number of times I've copy pasted a chunk, commented it out, then put a comment describing what I'm after. Copilot will get it exactly right ~40% of the time, ~40% of the time it gives me a good starting place, and the other 20% I just scrap.
krono 4y ago
> trained on publicly available code Fully respecting the licenses this code was published under, one would hope?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- googlryas 4y ago
  What do source code licenses say about using source code as training data? IANAL, I would imagine it's only relevant if the model spits out already existing licensed code, and that using the code as training data is largely irrelevant. For a simpler example than code-generating ML, if I write a program to recognize a directory of source code vs non-source code, and my logic is if (unbalanced parenthesis count in all files > X) { return "not source code"; } else { return "source code"}. And then I compute X by scanning over the linux kernel source and counting the amount of unbalanced parens, have I just committed a GPL violation if I don't GPL my source code recognizer?
  - serf 4y ago
    I'm not sure if the training data would constitute an aggregation -- given the usually non-reversible nature of it -- but I found this. "Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. "[0] [0]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation
  - krono 4y ago
    We're talking large scale commercial repurposing of source code with worldwide redistribution here. Not some project you whipped up in 5 minutes to learn from, or automate some minor annoying task. Unlicensed source code - the default - is still protected by copyright law. If it's hosted and served from a different jurisdiction where no exception exists for training data models. Then there are also licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial usage to consider. What it comes down to, as it always does, is that a small group of (practically) untouchable people are making money by abusing and thereby irreparably damaging the trust and good will of the collective. It's a complex topic eh
eliseumds 4y ago
Is a VSCode extension on the roadmap? Refactoring existing code using AI looks extremely useful. Using Github Copilot I have to trigger synthetise multiple times.
maep 4y ago
If this tool was trained on open source code, what license does the generated code have? At least with Codepilot people were able to generate verbatim GPL code with typos and everything. More importantly, I wonder if companies behind these type of tools offer legal or financial protections in case GPL code sneaks in and leads to expensive law suits.
- deworms 4y ago
  No they weren't able to generate the same existing code, both because that code is not included anywhere in the model, and because Copilot (not "Codepilot") has safeguards against this kind of situation, should it arise in the highly unlikely situation that a snippet is repeated thousands of times across thousands of repositories. I've gotta let you know that people copy code snippets from all sorts of codebases with little regard for licenses anyway, because they're toothless in 99% of cases, AI or not. It's a nice illusion that anyone respects licenses, but it's just not true.
  - NicoleJO 4y ago
    That's incorrect. CoPilot steals verbatim. Examples: https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism-links.html?m=1 https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...
    - hnusersarelame 4y ago
  - maep 4y ago
    I've spent hours looking over code before delivering to FAANG. Our company had put a clause into the contract that our code was free of any GPL'd code. It happened before and it was discoved. The whole thing was a very expensive excersice. I'm aware that many small startups, 90% of which go bust anyways, just ignore licenses but that doesn't work when you play with the big boys.
- m00x 4y ago
aryamaan 4y ago
I was on beta list used this for golang. It blew my mind half of the times. It was like it knew what I was going to do. The other times it was dumber than the standard auto complete. It doesn't have any awareness of already defined variables and doesn't use them to complete halfwritten variables. Hope this gets better soon.
- _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
  Have you tried Copilot? That seemed to work very well for me.
  - aryamaan 4y ago
    Will give a try. I like Replit's ready to use key-value db and also, a click deployment (running is deployment). Overall, I like my Jetbrains IDE but Replit is coming with appealing features for the side projects specially. Easy to use auth, db, analytics, deployment... I wish either Replit levels up its IDE game or Jetbrains(or community) build plugins to match the state of art/joyful experience of programming.
easrng 4y ago
Is this in-browser as in running the model in the browser or is the model running on the server? (I assume it's on the server for size and people-not-ripping-off-your-product reasons, but actually running in the browser would be cool and it doesn't look like it's specified.)
- ricopags 4y ago
  I am not certain, but my surmise is if in-browser GPT-3 inference was possible it would've made the news. Seems likely to be an API call.
NicoleJO 4y ago
A couple of questions here asked about the intellectual property rights. Has an answer been provided?
sdevonoes 4y ago
Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools? - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code? - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much about the process of creating code, but mainly about the output (i.e., does the running program solves the issue at hand?) - Senior developers who don't like to write boilerplate code? I don't see myself as the target audience of Copilot or Ghostwriter. I do work as an employee, but I'm not a "feature machine". Usually the hardest part about my job is solving problems while communicating with other people. I don't need to write code "fast", and by the time I hit the keyboard to start coding, I don't really need that much help (granted, I'm not working on code that goes into space rockets... just normal e-commerce stuff) I like to work on side projects and learn new technologies. When I was starting with programming, as part of the learning I liked to write boilerplate code (actually, that's how I learnt programming. I remember writing C boilerplate code by reading "The C Programming Language". Skipping the "boring" parts wouldn't have helped me in my learning). If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code (because, when I work on side projects, 50% of the satisfaction comes from actually writing code for the sake of writing code. The other 50% comes from the ability to solve a problem). So, yeah, maybe for the people like me who does find the act of writing code for the sake of writing code (you know like painting or taking photographs), Copilot seems like an unneeded tool?
- minraws 4y ago
  I would like to give some context, still not onboard with these tools but we have a lot of chore like work of adding some very similar things but with some changes, complicated or otherwise. So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It's gotten very annoying and our pace is far slower than what we would like, here something like this makes quite a lot of sense. Though the problem with such specific tools is they can't generate any customized code for our codebase, we can finetune other codegen models and that's what we plan to do down the line, but this specific tool just not really useful if it can't specialized for our codebase.
make3 4y ago
how is it better than copilot?
ignite 4y ago
No free trial? Not interesting enough to pay for, if I have no idea how useful it is. If you are doing something new, you need to let people see what it will do, before they will give you money.

163 points by bauerpl 4y ago

Does anybody know the status of the legal action against that kid that supposedly stole all their good ideas and made a hobby project out of it? I would like to know how that resolved before I consider anything from this company again.

Jtsummers 4y ago
https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#how-did-replit-respond-to-this-blog-post https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#how-did-repli... At the bottom of the original blog post. He put his project back online and it is still up: https://riju.codes/ https://riju.codes/
- bdn_ 4y ago
  Even if this was settled, I consider this quote when thinking about Amjad Masad (Replit CEO). > When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. - Maya Angelou

machinekob 4y ago

"Any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers and CEO in the near future" for developing this?

giansegato 4y ago

replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks

sithlord 4y ago
any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers in the near future?
- googlryas 4y ago
  Interesting, sithlord is an anagram for shitlord. While the behavior of the CEO wasn't cool, the issue seems to have been resolved between all involved parties and everyone has moved on - we don't need to bring it up every time repl.it is mentioned.
  - notwhereyouare 4y ago
    I'll admit, every time I hear of repl.it mentioned, I think of the time the CEO threatened the intern. The CEO did a huge disservice to himself and the company that day in my mind
    - googlryas 4y ago
      You're allowed to think that. My point is really about littering unrelated posts regarding repl.it with snipes about it.
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      Oh, internet drama. I love internet drama! So I looked it up as I never heard this story before. https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the social media fire all in all. Also he doesn't look very smart, imho: https://amasad.me/meta https://amasad.me/meta Big LOL here! The abstract things are the simplest, yeah! That's why progress in something like math or theoretical physics is made by the dumbest people, in contrast to something like sociology where you need genius level of intelligence to come up with some new ideas. Sure, sure. But that's of course not everything this dude got completely backwards. Would explain why replit is the most useless of all the online IDEs: It has no direction, no true value proposition. It's not a good cloud coding environment. It never was a good code snippet playground (actually one of the worsts). Now they even require accounts, so the quick code snippet aspect is also gone. Also they badly positioned in the education space… Of course I wish them luck! But I guess they have no chance against something like Gitpod, Github, or OpenShift codespaces, which are light-years ahead. OK, maybe the exit-strategy is "just" to be visible enough that at some point they get bought by one of the above. (Which doesn't look like the most ethical thing to do ;-)).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eachro 4y ago
That's very impressive. Hats off to them! I dont think this is too out of the ordinary either though. I'd guess they started off with a LLM from hugging face, set up some pipeline to ingest code from replit repos to finetune the LLM. The ML aspect of this is not terribly hard given that they probably dont need to train a LLM from scratch. Figuring out how store and serve from replit repos (or publicly available code bases) is not too difficult. From there it's a matter of productionalizing: how to serve the model in real time, figuring out they want the product to look/feel like and I suppose this part of it might take a while. I'd estimate you'd need 1-2 ML engineers, 2 data engineers, 2-3 swes, 1 PM for the team for a minimal viable product.
- giansegato 4y ago
  yep, true! however, the devil is in the details. from what i've been told, the big challenge was latency: they worked a lot to bring the latency down to acceptable levels - essentially to be usable in a cloud IDE iirc the team managed to bring it to a lever an order of magnitude lower than off-the-shelf models
- nerdponx 4y ago
  8 weeks is impressive for something like that, and it goes to show just how powerful our off-the-shelf tools have become. I think it's also a bit scary, because 8 weeks is very little time for testing, tuning, and validation of something as opaque as a machine learning model. If it worked right the first time, that's great. But there is still a lot of inherent uncertainty in ML projects. Decision makers need to take that uncertainty into account when planning. That, or, the 8 weeks only covers the final training runs and the implementation/deployment, and doesn't include time spent developing and tuning proof-of-concept prototype models.
  - mradek 4y ago
    In 2022 you test live in production lol
  - conductr 4y ago
    It’s not life or death though. It’s just giving some useful boilerplate that you’ll have to touch to make useful. They can learn as they go.
caprock 4y ago
That's really neat to hear. Can you comment on how replit has managed to foster a culture of fast delivery? Are there any interesting trade offs?
tephra 4y ago
Curious, how large are teams in Replot usually? To me (programmer in Sweden) the largest single team I've been on was 14 people and that was _very_ large (indeed the largest in the tech department). We actually broke ourselves up into two more informal groups since we thought that was a more manageable team size.
- dbish 4y ago
  Neat feature but yeah very small doesn’t seem like < 12 to me either (worked at big tech for a while). A two pizza team (standard amazon size) is 8-10, 12 starts to be on the larger size for a single team, but not abnormal. Very small to me would be if a team of 2-4 shipped it. Replit must be much larger then I expected for a startup.
swyx 4y ago
very cool :) can i get a clarification - when it says "in-browser" i hear "on-device" as in it doesnt call back to replit to get the predictions. i assume that's inaccurate? for cost/compute purposes i'm wondering how small models have to get in order to run "truly in browser"

luxurytent 4y ago

Does this differ from GitHub's CoPilot in any user-noticeable way? (outside of the platform it's available on)

Liquid_Fire 4y ago
One thing I noticed is it seems to have an "Explain code" feature, giving you a textual explanation of a block of code you select, which I'm not aware of GitHub having.
- pynappo 4y ago
  GitHub Copilot Labs (a VSCode extension meant to be installed with GitHub Copilot) seems to have an explain code feature. ref: https://github.blog/2022-09-14-8-things-you-didnt-know-you-could-do-with-github-copilot/#8-navigating-a-new-codebase-with-copilot-labs https://github.blog/2022-09-14-8-things-you-didnt-know-you-c...
- WithinReason 4y ago
  You can just use the prompt "The above code does the following explained in English" in a comment to prompt CoPilot to explain its code. You could probably also engineer a prompt to translate code between languages.
  - lgas 4y ago
    Have you tried "This ruby code does the same thing as the following python code" in a comment?
    - WithinReason 4y ago
      I actually did something similar and it worked IIRC. It was python to C or the reverse.
    - ksaj 4y ago
      I wish I thought of that when I had the co-pilot trial. If that works, I might have had a different opinion of my experience with it.

iandanforth 4y ago

Things I'd like to know about this tool: - What areas/languages/tasks is it good at and what is it bad at? - How often is it generating code with bugs? - How often is the code that gets generated used as is vs immediately edited? - What are the new frustrations that this causes that existing IDE code completion doesn't? I work with trained models daily and I know that their failure cases are unintuitive, unexpected, and exasperating. I'd like to know as much about the failure cases of this model as possible before diving in.

bardia95 4y ago
Replit team member here: - Ghostwriter is especially good at Python and JS, but supports up to 16 languages (to varying degrees of effectiveness) you can read more here: https://docs.replit.com/ghostwriter/faq#which-programming-languages-does-ghostwriter-support https://docs.replit.com/ghostwriter/faq#which-programming-la... - As for tasks, it's great for reducing the amount of boilerplate code you need to write (Complete Code), writing React components (Complete + Generate Code), explaining code in plain English (Explain Code), translating code between languages (Transform Code), writing exhaustive tests (Complete Code) - No stats on how often its generating code with bugs or how often the code gets generated used as is vs immediately edited, we're interested in getting both to help improve Ghostwriter - Like any LLM, it can get stuck in a long-tail of repetitive loops; we're working pretty hard to improve and mitigate these issues, but, especially for new users, the repetition and hallucination type problems can be distracting.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

three_seagrass 4y ago

Love using Replit but is there any way to try this before buying without having to wait weeks on a waitlist?

bardia95 4y ago
If you sign up for the waitlist today, you should be able to get access within a few days.

Heleana 4y ago

Is there any way that users will be able to tell the difference between this and GitHub's CoPilot?

bardia95 4y ago
Ghostwriter also includes 2 features that Copilot does not have: Transform Code (translate between langs/refactor code), Generate Code (prompt Ghostwriter to write full programs in one shot) Plus, Ghostwriter is integrated with the Replit platform, meaning you get all the benefits Replit offers as a portable development environment you can take with you anywhere you go and host instantly.
- TOMDM 4y ago
  One could argue Copilot can translate/refactor code. I can't count the number of times I've copy pasted a chunk, commented it out, then put a comment describing what I'm after. Copilot will get it exactly right ~40% of the time, ~40% of the time it gives me a good starting place, and the other 20% I just scrap.

krono 4y ago

> trained on publicly available code Fully respecting the licenses this code was published under, one would hope?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
googlryas 4y ago
What do source code licenses say about using source code as training data? IANAL, I would imagine it's only relevant if the model spits out already existing licensed code, and that using the code as training data is largely irrelevant. For a simpler example than code-generating ML, if I write a program to recognize a directory of source code vs non-source code, and my logic is if (unbalanced parenthesis count in all files > X) { return "not source code"; } else { return "source code"}. And then I compute X by scanning over the linux kernel source and counting the amount of unbalanced parens, have I just committed a GPL violation if I don't GPL my source code recognizer?
- serf 4y ago
  I'm not sure if the training data would constitute an aggregation -- given the usually non-reversible nature of it -- but I found this. "Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. "[0] [0]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation
- krono 4y ago
  We're talking large scale commercial repurposing of source code with worldwide redistribution here. Not some project you whipped up in 5 minutes to learn from, or automate some minor annoying task. Unlicensed source code - the default - is still protected by copyright law. If it's hosted and served from a different jurisdiction where no exception exists for training data models. Then there are also licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial usage to consider. What it comes down to, as it always does, is that a small group of (practically) untouchable people are making money by abusing and thereby irreparably damaging the trust and good will of the collective. It's a complex topic eh

eliseumds 4y ago

Is a VSCode extension on the roadmap? Refactoring existing code using AI looks extremely useful. Using Github Copilot I have to trigger synthetise multiple times.

maep 4y ago

If this tool was trained on open source code, what license does the generated code have? At least with Codepilot people were able to generate verbatim GPL code with typos and everything. More importantly, I wonder if companies behind these type of tools offer legal or financial protections in case GPL code sneaks in and leads to expensive law suits.

deworms 4y ago
No they weren't able to generate the same existing code, both because that code is not included anywhere in the model, and because Copilot (not "Codepilot") has safeguards against this kind of situation, should it arise in the highly unlikely situation that a snippet is repeated thousands of times across thousands of repositories. I've gotta let you know that people copy code snippets from all sorts of codebases with little regard for licenses anyway, because they're toothless in 99% of cases, AI or not. It's a nice illusion that anyone respects licenses, but it's just not true.
- NicoleJO 4y ago
  That's incorrect. CoPilot steals verbatim. Examples: https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism-links.html?m=1 https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...
  - hnusersarelame 4y ago
- maep 4y ago
  I've spent hours looking over code before delivering to FAANG. Our company had put a clause into the contract that our code was free of any GPL'd code. It happened before and it was discoved. The whole thing was a very expensive excersice. I'm aware that many small startups, 90% of which go bust anyways, just ignore licenses but that doesn't work when you play with the big boys.
m00x 4y ago

aryamaan 4y ago

I was on beta list used this for golang. It blew my mind half of the times. It was like it knew what I was going to do. The other times it was dumber than the standard auto complete. It doesn't have any awareness of already defined variables and doesn't use them to complete halfwritten variables. Hope this gets better soon.

_whiteCaps_ 4y ago
Have you tried Copilot? That seemed to work very well for me.
- aryamaan 4y ago
  Will give a try. I like Replit's ready to use key-value db and also, a click deployment (running is deployment). Overall, I like my Jetbrains IDE but Replit is coming with appealing features for the side projects specially. Easy to use auth, db, analytics, deployment... I wish either Replit levels up its IDE game or Jetbrains(or community) build plugins to match the state of art/joyful experience of programming.

easrng 4y ago

Is this in-browser as in running the model in the browser or is the model running on the server? (I assume it's on the server for size and people-not-ripping-off-your-product reasons, but actually running in the browser would be cool and it doesn't look like it's specified.)

ricopags 4y ago
I am not certain, but my surmise is if in-browser GPT-3 inference was possible it would've made the news. Seems likely to be an API call.

NicoleJO 4y ago

A couple of questions here asked about the intellectual property rights. Has an answer been provided?

sdevonoes 4y ago

Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools? - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code? - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much about the process of creating code, but mainly about the output (i.e., does the running program solves the issue at hand?) - Senior developers who don't like to write boilerplate code? I don't see myself as the target audience of Copilot or Ghostwriter. I do work as an employee, but I'm not a "feature machine". Usually the hardest part about my job is solving problems while communicating with other people. I don't need to write code "fast", and by the time I hit the keyboard to start coding, I don't really need that much help (granted, I'm not working on code that goes into space rockets... just normal e-commerce stuff) I like to work on side projects and learn new technologies. When I was starting with programming, as part of the learning I liked to write boilerplate code (actually, that's how I learnt programming. I remember writing C boilerplate code by reading "The C Programming Language". Skipping the "boring" parts wouldn't have helped me in my learning). If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code (because, when I work on side projects, 50% of the satisfaction comes from actually writing code for the sake of writing code. The other 50% comes from the ability to solve a problem). So, yeah, maybe for the people like me who does find the act of writing code for the sake of writing code (you know like painting or taking photographs), Copilot seems like an unneeded tool?

minraws 4y ago
I would like to give some context, still not onboard with these tools but we have a lot of chore like work of adding some very similar things but with some changes, complicated or otherwise. So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It's gotten very annoying and our pace is far slower than what we would like, here something like this makes quite a lot of sense. Though the problem with such specific tools is they can't generate any customized code for our codebase, we can finetune other codegen models and that's what we plan to do down the line, but this specific tool just not really useful if it can't specialized for our codebase.

make3 4y ago

how is it better than copilot?

ignite 4y ago

No free trial? Not interesting enough to pay for, if I have no idea how useful it is. If you are doing something new, you need to let people see what it will do, before they will give you money.