Is GitHub Copilot worth the cockpit?
One month ago, GitHub announced its latest, shiny product: an artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code by autocompleting code, but on the next level. It’s a machine learning-powered software that can write code by itself, generating quite impressive programming functions.
But…
Here is the catch, there are a lot of dislikes going on for this cute little fellow. Some criticism is legit, but mostly they are just dumb. Personally, I don’t get why so much hate for this, how can you not like something like this in the market, and that too for free. In a nutshell, these allegations are:
- They used public repositories to train Copilot.
- Copying (stealing to be specific) code from other LICENSED sources.
- Weird code snippets/suggestions
- They’re planning to charge for Copilot after you help train it further.
- After all, GitHub itself is not open-source! so who knows the future?
Let’s address them one by one
So many articles are flooding to criticize, just for the sake of writing something. Well here are some of my NEUTRAL opinions.
Training of Copilot
GitHub has always tried to make things as simple and clear as they are, but maybe this time they forgot to see things from a different perspective.
Because GitHub Copilot is all about perspective. Think about this with an example, you gave your friend a gift, and then he sold it to someone else (Silicon Valley reference). Now from your friend’s perspective, it’s legit. But you are feeling sad in the corner, coz you are hurt.
The same thing happened in the training of Copilot as well, GitHub was using billions of lines of code from public repos for training, and that should be OK, as it lies in their policy. But that policy cannot convince Flask’s founder to not leaving GitHub.
Developers don’t get mad when they hear “GitHub was using public repos”
Developers get mad when they hear “GitHub was using BILLIONS OF LINES OF CODE from public repos”
Stealing code from LICENCED sources
Not stealing but technically yes, the fact is sort of true, as GitHub is indeed not always writing all code on its own. Very often chances are that it can give you the code which is UNLICENCED and stolen from another source that is protected by LICENCE, then it can be a little trouble. But it’s not that much of a big deal, unlike other articles are saying, that it can get you sued. No, it’s not happening, first of all, no one is going to sue you, for your tiny little project. And second, you are crazy if you’re using Copilot for your gigantic project, as Copilot is itself in its beta version.
Charging for Copilot?
I don’t have much to say on this, but if GitHub will do this, I’m gonna go to IG and DM Bill Gates “Screw you and your Open-source mindset, I’m shifting to GitLab”
Just kidding (of course)
Weird Suggestions
(my personal experience)
GitHub Copilot has so much potential, I don’t know why people are not realizing it. Everything Microsoft has ever created is just great, except for Windows 😬.
Ok this was the last one😅, but trust me I’ve been using Copilot for a whole 1 month, and it’s just great when it comes to daily-to-day small coding projects. The best part is, that is is free to use (at least for now) and faster than any other autocompletion software I’ve ever used. It actually increases your speed to 2x, if you know how and when to use it.
But remember not to use it everywhere. You can disable it anytime, according to the usage.
Those who are complaining about weird suggestions and code snippets, let me tell you something, your code is weird man, you are just trying to make a meme out of it.
Here is an example:
There are 2 types of people when using something great
Number 1: BOOMERS
Number 2: PROS (who were used to be boomers)
And who told you to use Copilot in a large scale application in production, it’s in its early phase, also called beta-version. You are dumb if you are doing something like that.
Stop saying what everyone is saying and start using your brain.
And again, those saying it’s gonna snatch our jobs, come on, then you are not even a programmer, you are just a coder who knows println(“Hello, World”)
Who knows the future!
Well… ask Elon, maybe he does.
Neil Brown, a legal expert in the digital space, spoke about Copilot from an English law perspective. In his blog, Brown explained GitHub’s passage D4 of Terms of Service. As per this passage, GitHub can copy a user’s content to the database, create backups, show it to other users, parse a search engine, and analyse it on their servers. Brown writes: “The license is broadly worded, and I’m confident that there is scope for argument, but if it turns out that Github does not require a license for its activities then, in respect of the code hosted on Github, I suspect it could make a reasonable case that the mandatory license grant in its terms covers this as against the uploader.”
— source: analyticsindiamag.com (one for last para)
