Does anyone here get genuinely useful suggestions from Copilot?
I found it amazing for 1 thing: filling up verbose configuration like Terraform or Kubernetes manifests.
For code, it’s horrible, to the degree that I spend more time rejecting Copilot suggestions or having to extensively modify the ones I accept.
I stopped using it couple months ago
> Even Copilot loses money, to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal
Wow. Does that mean that once the VC money dries up that will be the real cost of the products ($30-$90 a month)? That is much less accessible than $10.
While it's clear that AI coding assistants still have a long way to go in general, I wonder how yet another startup, presumably based on the same technology at the back, is going to differentiate itself in a material way?
There are only so many axes along which improvements can be made in this domain, aren't there? What are the bottlenecks that, if solved, will produce a true breakthrough, exactly?
Doesn't the current approach have an upper limit that's inherent in the whole architecture, nay, even the whole foundational theoretical aspect of it?
Would love to hear from anyone who has come across one AI coding assistant that's obviously head and shoulders above everything else. I've tried Copilot, CodeWhisperer, and Ghostwriter.
I look forward to anything better than Github Copilot. The implementation in VSCode is horribly slow, constantly injects a lightning bolt icon near my cursor, and interferes with intellisense-style LSP language hints/docs.
I’ve found it mostly helpful for saving time on obvious boilerplate code, but the annoyances above plus the occasional inexplicable errors it introduces in said boilerplate code, I’ve just cancelled the entire thing.
If anyone from Augment reads this, the careers@augmentcode.com email address (from the "Apply Now" button on the careers page) is bouncing with a "does not exist" error.
Edit: Seems to be fixed now!
I wonder if the name was inspired by Doug Engelbart's system: https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/155/
I really want groq to compete in this space.
It’s the obvious application for their ridiculous speed. Quality of suggestions sure but waiting breaks your flow
The only thing more hilarious than these articles is how funny it will be when the companies either close because they can't possibly solve "Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile" as a problem set or they don't make enough money to justify the $1B valuation (and rising!).
The writers of this article don't even bother doing any introspection into these claims or ideas. Is it important to know that programmers have been using AI for the last 50 years? I'm sure it isn't.
>"Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers.
Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent).
Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together?"
Well, we don't know!
We do know however that there are a lot of AI coding assistants, and there will probably be many more in the years to come...
The excerpted text above -- makes for a reasonably good list as to what's available as of the current date...
>In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify.
The other problem is they may have built a solution that was state of the art at the time but the SOTA has passed them by.
A lot of AI codegen/completion solutions were inspired by general transformer (Bert or GPT2) approaches without any type of chat tuning models.... and then OpenAI dropped ChatGPT. So what was a revolutionary demo in 2022 is now just a couple of CoT prompts in the latest openAI api call.
The article says "Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort" - correct me if i'm wrong (happens often! :) ) - but does this mean that they're using some open model from huggingface, wrapping some UI around it, and voila they're worth a billion dollars? Hmm.
Even OpenAI can't make a better coding copilot than ChatGPT 3.5.
I'll be surprised if this one is better.
Just to clarify, this is augmentcode.com , not augment.co ("Personal AI assistant")
I haven’t used copilot. Isn’t it collecting a lot code from the Internet and combining to make auto complete suggestions?
I just don’t see how it could think and write new code like a human developer would.
Any feedback from copilot users?
Is Eric Schmidt still relevant?
They collected my email when I signed up to try and then told me I couldn't try it. Unethical.
Anyone tried it?
It's hard to imagine how a company raised a quarter-billion dollars off the same idea everyone had --and many already acted on-- after we all saw chatgpt in 2022. There's how many copilots already?
What on earth is the point of doing “stealth”? This just sounds to me like a way to burn money and scale before finding product-market fit.
how did they raise so much?
Just another blow of air into the AI bubble. Can’t wait to see all these stupid companies and their VCs go bankrupt.
Hope it's not another Devin situation...
First Eric Schmidt colluded with executives at other large employers to suppress software developer wages and job mobility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Now he's trying to get into the business of reducing software developer headcount and professionalism, through copyright-theft-laundering LLMs.
Hopefully copilot will compete. I mean, it's not exactly new product already and it still:
- tries to insert triple backquote in my code for some weird reason
- does not do continuous code review, highlighting likely errors and typos
- does not do any code edit or delete, only code insert
I want AI to work along with me. I feel that Copilot has huge potential, but this limited UI keeps that potential untapped.
> Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows.
I'm really curious about this. I honestly don't see a case where I would use a coding assistant and everyone I have spoken to that does, hasn't been a strong coder (they would characterize themselves this way and I certainly agree with their assessment).
I'd love to hear from strong coders — people whom others normally go to when they have a problem with some code (whether debugging or designing something new) who now regularly use AI coding assistants. What do you find useful? In what way does it improve your workflow? Are there tasks where you explicitly avoid them? How often do you find bugs in the generated code (and a corollary, how frequently has a bug slipped in that was only caught later)?
I'm always a bit surprised when startups come out of stealth mode with no product demo videos and only a press release. My guess is they're either wanting to raise more money before official launch, or just wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist. Is there any strategic reason in 2024 to not include more details on the website?