Help me understand something.

I understand that the company should pay for Copilot in principle.

However, is paying $120 per year that much when it helps you in your at least mid-five-figures job? I would ask for the reimbursement if it was annual, but filling out a form to ask for $10 back every month seems a bit over the top. Maybe I'm a spendthrift?

Am I missing something here? Would you say I am being irresponsible with my money?

I just remembered to cancel my AMC membership. That one was definitely not helping me do my job faster, and I'm not particularly regretful of losing a few dollars.

> However, is paying $120 per year that much when it helps you in your at least mid-five-figures job? I would ask for the reimbursement if it was annual, but filling out a form to ask for $10 back every month seems a bit over the top. Maybe I'm a spendthrift?

It's a slippery slope. You can't start giving freebies to your bosses (who are almost certainly much wealthier than you are) or it'll never end, just like you can't ever pay blackmail

Any $ is too much $. I claim back $1.99 every month through the horrible SAP Concur.

i had to use that at a $prevJob. My condolences

On the flip side a company may want to buy a bulk license so that it is available for free to all their developers.

You don’t want Bob being less productive just because he didn’t want to spend $10 a month.

First of all. If I was the legal team of any company I'd tell developers to stay away from copilot, since the legal status is still undecided and microsoft has a disclaimer that any legal issues fall on the users (which is probably illegal but you'd have to sue microsoft to get it overturned).

Second… It's a work tool just like any other work tool, why should I buy it out of pocket? In the end it's to the advantage of the company if I'm faster at my job.

Now I'm thinking, precisely because it's not paid by the company but by the single user, in case there is legal action, the company might shift the blame on the developer. If they reimbursed they would have no way of claiming they weren't aware.

If it's a tool to do company's work, the company should pay for it.

You can pay yearly which is not as annoying.

This 100 times. Reimburse team members once year. Problem solved.

I reckon there's a reason why it's not available yet: legal uncertainty about the training data and generated code in a commercial context.

Right now it's only individual developers, placing the burden on them and preventing any major repercussions for Github.

This changes when (large) companies start using it, and when GitHub gives potentially copyrighed code to companies.

Personally I only use it for personal/OS projects right now, not professionally.

Are there any companies forbidding developers to use it?

If that was my role I'd totally forbid it, precisely for the reasons you indicated.

If a developer is paying on his own for it to work, who would have the legal responsibility in the end? The developer personally? Another good reason to stay away from it.

Our company is forbidding it too, for exactly the legal reasons parent posted

I see the concern here from a level perspective so I’d probably forbid it too just to be safe.

That being said…I think this line of thinking is probably mostly a nothing-burger at this point. My experience is that anything sufficiently complicated that Copilot outputs is likely to be somewhat wrong.

I’ve only really found it to be (quite) useful for speeding up small things like if statements, switches/matching, short documentation etc, which I don’t think you can copyright anyways. I wonder to what degree we can expect customization options in the future to forbid any complex code from being generated, or to constrain Copilot to helping with specific whitelisted

Perhaps, extending that last thought, there’s an ideological argument to be made that code that is so simple an AI can generate it isn’t worthy of being protected under copyright law anyways. I don’t know.

It can detect and remove any exact collisions with code from the training data now, by the way.

Would be nice, have not used it since trial because of this.