I don't think they are contradictory at all. Aside from the basic "it has value, just less than $10/month" option, they may also just be interested in the tech and are evaluating it in actual use, etc.

GPT-3 and AI-enhanced code completion has had a ton of hype going on, up to and including claims that software development as a job is at existential risk. Using Copilot non-stop to investigate and understand why there's so much hype and coming away with the opinion that it's not worthy of $10/mo is not contradictory. Would you rather someone who hasn't used a product extensively make value claims?

It’s always like this with the latest AI. You would think people would learn, but nope same exaggerated claims every time.

The claims are sound. It's the technology that is usually not sound, or mature.

But slowly enough many jobs are being automated, both with and without machine learning or whatever technique they are calling "AI" today.

You overlooked an even bigger contradiction! Namely:

> The biggest problem I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's that it think it knows how and then produce good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic.

I cannot rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement.

EDIT: upon careful rereading, I think I misunderstood. The intended meaning is likely closer to: the problem is less so that codepilot produces incorrect code and more so that its incorrect code appears correct at first glance.

You have my sincerest apologies. I leave this thread intact as a testament to my hair-trigger snark.

I won't rightly describe the confusion your post gives me. Nothing he says seems contradictory. It produces good looking code which upon further inspection has faulty logic.

You would expect that from a program that copies a database of all the examples in the world (or whatever) and then just does an autocomplete without any kind of comprehension of what the problem is that is trying to be solved.

No confusion or contradiction at all.

So, the problem is that it produces incorrect code…

Specifically, the problem is it produces _almost_ correct code, which is worse than incorrect code because it might fool you into trusting it.

Quite. So we agree that this code is incorrect, and thus, that we have a contradiction on our hands.

To be clear: we’re in agreement that incorrect code that passes for correct at a glance is even worse than obviously-incorrect code.

My read was that it produces code that is correct in some circumstances, but is incorrect for the author's use case.

I realize I misinterpreted the OP, but you’ve set me up for a snarky remark so perfectly that I can’t resist. Please forgive me… here goes:

> it produces code that is correct in some circumstances, but is incorrect for the author's use case.

That’s a mighty convoluted way of saying “incorrect code” ;)

Phew! I feel better, now!

"This code would be absolutely correct were it in a different program trying to achieve a different result."

Not OP - I use it non-stop for boiler plate filling as well.

I wouldn't use it for anything other than that, so I would say it's worth honestly at max $1/month.

$1 is worth what, one minute of your time? If you're using a tool that doesn't even save you one minute, why bother?

Most people don't make purchasing decisions based on the value they create but rather based on some ingrained assumptions about how expensive software is supposed to be. VSCode and many other complex pieces of software are free, autocomplete is built into my OS, and those subscription consumer software that does have a price usually are priced very low—so relative to those, $10/month feels like a lot (even though I hope that practically anything anyone makes the effort to subscribe to produces at least $10 of value for them).

Some companies seem to be leaning into higher subscription pricing (Superhuman and Motion come to mind) and almost certainly produce far more value than their subscriptions cost if you ask me, but there's definitely a mental barrier to value based pricing to consumers, as well as the fact that with so many companies offering cheap/free software, the market isn't solely determined by value created but rather comparison against other software.

You'd think "very smart" programmers would be equipped to do basic cost/benefit analysis. If it costs $900 and provides $1000 in value, that's $100 more than not buying it.

It depends if as a employee, your working time stays the same.

If you’re an employee your company should pay for it. If not, find a better employer!

You'd think "very smart" programmers would be equipped to consider additional factors such as the cost of getting reliant on a tool controlled by a single vendor as well as the effects on other things that they care about. You'd think they also understand that people are not machines and reducing a task by a certain time does not neccessarily mean that they can get that much more work more done overall.

If the amortized benefit is less than one minute per month, then it's probably best to simply pass instead of hoping for a price adjustment.

What proportion of people are making $1 per minute?

$1 per minute is approximately $120k annual salary, so... almost anybody doing software development in the US?

That's not true. The median annual pay for a software engineer in the US is a bit under $100k. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes good data on this.) That means most people doing software development in the US are making under $100k.

Almost anybody doing software development at a well-funded tech company is going to be making over $120k/yr, yes. But it turns out there are lots of other kinds of programming jobs, too.

And the USA is what, 4% of the world population?

I've had Copilot enabled since early beta. I think it has saved me ... 15 minutes of typing in total? A few times it has caught on to a repeating pattern and filled a tedious bit of [({}{})] -style javascript correctly.

Most of the things it does for me I could replace with a library of snippets if I could be bothered to set one up.

Not really worth a monthly cost equivalent to, say, Disney+ - which I use tens of hours every month just by myself.

If my employer paid for it, I wouldn't scoff at it, but I'm not paying a cent of my own money for it.

You probably write code in a way that’s hard for the AI to predict. Write stubs, name things first, wire things early, and watch the fireworks.

They gave it a fair shake, decided the price wouldn't be worth it. It's not inherently contradictory

I would consider it contradictory if they decided to continue using it while paying that price and unsatisfied

It's a trial run and the value isn't there for them

My interpretation is that it's fun to use so they use it a lot but not altogether useful (eta: and/or necessary): they didn't miss it on work projects.

It looks like they used it "non-stop" on hobby projects to see what's capable of

It's an extension... You'd have to go out of your way to disable it. It's also completely optional so it's (almost) only additive. The only harm is sometimes it generates suggestions faster than I can press tab to fix my spacing

At first, I read it as if he thinks it's worth way more.

It honestly might be the kind of product where it might make sense at a higher price point, with more customer buy-in (and support contracts!) to work around its quirks rather than accept everything it spits out at face value. It's a more common pattern than we're used to seeing, I think.