I also don’t know any professional devs who have used tools like copilot and said they were anything but a toy. I am more bullish on LLMs than most of my coworkers. I think there is a lot of potential there. I do not see that potential in the current commercial offerings, and the financial outlay to fine-tune an open-source model and run it at scale is…prohibitive.
Really? I'm academic now but I find Copilot at least moderately helpful when I'm writing a library. It's pretty good a lot of boilerplate functions, docstrings, regex, etc. I certainly don't want to go back to not using it, my code is a lot closer to production quality now and looks nicer.
Thinking back to my days in back-end it seems like it would have been very helpful/sped things up so I'm surprised to hear it's just a toy but I've been out of the professional game for a while now. What's the main criticism?
Just like annual sexual harassment training - it's mostly corporate CYA on liability. If it ever goes to court, they'll plead ignorance and blame the employees who should have known better as they were trained/informed on what they ought not to do.
Paying for co-pilot could bite them though, so I suspect it's a case were the one part of the organization isn't aware of what the other is doing
The Copilot lawsuit should answer concern #1 more definitively.
#2 is already solved by running your own model or using Azure OpenAI.
The concerns are 2 fold - 1. We might inadvertently use someone else’s intellectual property. 2. Someone else might gain access to our intellectual property.
What you are describing would help alleviate the concern about issue 2, but I’m not sure if it would help alleviate the concerns with issue 1.