Speaker: Rizel Scarlett @blackgirlbytes
For more, see the table of contents
Notes
- AI pair programmer
- Not magic
- Compare to Gmail smart compose – suggests continuations
- Draws context from comments/code
- Suggests lines/functions
Open AI
- Powered by Open AI Codex – translates natural language into code
- GPT-3 – generative pre-trained tranformer 3 – deep learning to produce human like text
- Duolingo GPT-3 uses for grammar correction
- Codex code based
- Played with https://beta.openai.com/examples – Movie to Emoji and Mood to Color (many others).
- There is also https://beta.openai.com/playground (if you login) where it can generate code from a comment. Even lets you specify a language
- Also learned you can paste a hex code into google and have it show you the color
Copilot Labs
- Hover over suggestion to get more
- Experimental feature to include an explanation of what code does
- Plugins – VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim
- Can choose not to include public code
- Can do some (human) language translation
Benefits
- Code faster and clear – good at patterns, syntax (ex: regex) so don’t need to google, write better comments so copilot can give good suggestions
- Write good docs – in markup
- Be a better mentor – avoids nervousness of someone watching you type because don’t have to worry about syntax, helps mentor people in languages don’t know
- Gain context for new concepts – studying for interviews (leetcode), explain new code base, create short demos in new languages as dev advocate
Tips
- Turn off when writing initial structure. Turn on once have pattern going. Comments not useful at first.
- Good when writing unit tests.
Cost
- $10/month
- Free if open source or student
My take
Rizel has a lot of energy and is very relatable. She also did “group play” with openai early. All of that helped engage the audience. I’ve read about co-pilot but it was really cool to see it and the features/benefits/use cases. I enjoyed seeing her passion for the tool and the examples. I also liked how she avoided it from devolving into an argument about the ethics of co-pilot. Rizel didn’t let the wifi problem throw her. It was unfortunate that the demo didn’t work even though other internet stuff did. [block? too bandwidth heavy?] The code to tweet was cool
For co-pilot, some looks cool. Some of the comments were longer than the code. So in real life, I imagine you wouldn’t use it for everything.