AI and Coding - Is Github Co-Pilot Worth It?

Boss and Scott

Welcome to Syntax.

On this Monday, hasty treat, we're gonna be talking about Artificial intelligence encoding.

We're gonna be talking about are these tools, are they ethical? Is it secure? Is it worth the cost? Did they make you a bad developer and all sorts of things? We're gonna be talking about what the options are for AI coding because it's not just Copilot, And we're gonna be talking all about what we think about them. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is Wes Bos.

Hey, everybody. Excited to talk about AI encoding.

Yeah. Lots of questions about it lately. I use lots of tools like this, and I am a big fan.

So, I'm also a big fan of both of our sponsors today, one of which is Sentry, and the other is Sanity. Now Sentry has a conference, And deploying new code can feel a lot like making a really great sandwich. I think they wrote this for us, Wes.

They wrote this just for us. It already talks about sandwiches.

Taking a bite and having all of the contents fall out exciting, chaotic, and maddening. It. If you know the feeling, then Dex by Century might be for you. This is a free conference for developers where you'll get to sort Through the madness and look at the ways to improve workflow productivity.

Join Sentry in this event in San Francisco or virtually on September 20 And discover new ways to make your life easier. So head on over to century.ioforward/eventsforward/ DeX, d e x, or just Google Century DeX, and sign up today and check it out. It's free. Can't beat a free conference from, Century. Right?

Can't beat it. Also, can't beat one of our sponsors today, Sanity. They are a structured content platform. You've heard me talk about them many times. I'm gonna Focus on one of the pieces of Sanity today, and that's their image pipeline.

So with Sanity, when you upload an image to Sanity, you can transform it In literally any single way that you want because you simply just request the URL of the image you want and you can put parameters on it. And that parameters will be width and height, and you can put a background color on it. You can blur it. You can crop it.

You can scale it, fit, fill, max, min max, flip it, literally Anything that you're used to with any of these image things, it just comes baked into Sanity. It's just one part of Sanity, and it's it's unreal that you just get that as part of using Sanity.

You're gonna wanna check it out for your next project, sanity.i0forward/syntax.

We've got a bunch of starters there, and they're gonna give you double the free usage tier. Thank you, sanity, for sponsoring.

Can you work it? Is it flip it and reverse it? Can you do a buff of those things?

I'm sure you can flip it and reverse it. Yep.

So AI encoding, this happened, I don't know, about a month, month and a half ago is that GitHub Copilot Has been out for, I don't know, maybe 6 months, a year. I'm not sure how long it's been out for, but I've been using it, and now they have Gone paid. So, like, everybody was kind of in trial for the longest time, and people are getting really used to it. And now they flipped it over and said, Okay. Well, now it's $10 a month, because it's coming out of beta.

And that that starts the question of saying, Is it is it worth it? You know, like, so let's let's talk real quickly about, like, what is GitHub Copilot for anyone not listening who hasn't tried it before? And then we'll get into all the questions that everyone seems to ask as a follow-up of it. So GitHub Copilot is artificial intelligence for your code. So as you are writing Your code, it will suggest to you code snippets and code completions and all kinds of stuff For you, based on what you're writing, you might be thinking, yeah, I have snippets, Wes. It's good. It's it's not snippets. It's not code completions. It's not auto suggestion.

It's next level. Wow. This is amazing that it can do it, and it is both for accuracy and speed, As well as just for being able to scaffold out code extremely. I guess I said speed. It's very, very quick and very accurate, for for using it. And I have been amazed at how useful and how good it actually is. What about you? Yeah, I think it

the I have 2 modes with Copilot.

I'm either fawning over how incredible it is. Like, I just wrote some code, and I have no idea how it was able to infer so, easily whatever a conditional or whatever thing I'm trying to write, even sometimes while writing the comment scaffolding or even, you know, just occasionally just being like, Dang. I cannot believe this figured this out, and it's perfect. And then other times, I'm typing, and it pops up with some hugely irrelevant thing, and I'm like, Get out of here. Go away.

Yeah. So I'm I'm either absolutely enamored with it or I would like it to leave.

But for the most part, I would say 90% of the time, I'm enamored with it. And I'm I'm was that the skunk from the Looney Tunes, and I got Hard eyes, and I'm looking at it all. Oh, yeah.

Pepe Le Pew. And I'm like, oh, that's so good. I love you, GitHub Copilot. So let's let's

As soon as you talk about GitHub Copilot, you get either people who are, like, unreal, amazing, I love it, or on the flip side, people say, I'm not that bad of a developer. I think it makes you dumb. I'd rather write it myself.

It's probably full of errors.

All kinds of stuff like that. It's not ethical. It's not secure.

So let's just kind of go through those those questions really quickly. Is it ethical? There's some questions about whether it's ethical or not because the model of GitHub Copilot was trained on GitHub, all of the open source code that is out there. And, not necessarily all of the licenses allow for use of that type of thing because there's different open source licenses out there.

So that is something that people are a little bit sore about, which is totally understandable as well.

Yeah. I'm not gonna make a decision, if it's ethical or not. What because Scott is. No. I'm not going to. I I honestly

For me, this is something that I don't know my personal answer for because do I like using it? And do I think it's awesome? Yes.

Yes. But in the same regard, do I also understand the ethical concerns? I very much do. And I think I I have a hard time with it.

It's like the the benefit meets the the concern level.

Yeah. But at the same time, if I put my code on GitHub, it's public and open source.

You know, did I give GitHub the explicit, permission to use that as the train a model? No. But, like, it's public. So how am I gonna prevent anyone from using that code to, scrape it and train itself on it. I I mean, I would I would assume that it. Literally, anytime you put anything publicly available on the Internet, you are not explicitly giving permission, but you're kind of inherently giving permission, to the greater world to use it in some kind of way. I I don't like it kind of, but it's See, that is how it is.

Yeah.

So the next one I have here is, is it secure? As a lot of people say, there's absolutely no way I'm going to let Some big company, Microsoft, Bill Gates, and all his vaccines, to be able to read all of my code and use that because they're just going to use that To create a competitor.

To that, I say, you mean the same company where you already store all of your code? It. So I think of which is this is mostly in jest, because I get it. If you have a A company and your source code is extremely important to you. There's lots of companies that will not even put a line of code up on GitHub because, As a third party, you're trusting them with your code. You're trusting that they're going to keep it safe. You're trusting that they're not going to read it themselves.

And for me, I don't really care that much, but for a lot of people, that's why they will use an alternative to GitHub Because they don't feel that way about security.

So to that, it doesn't actually send your code to the cloud.

It says it doesn't.

Whether you trust that or not, I guess, is up to you. Yeah. I

I I don't know. I don't I'm not I'm not the type of person that is, like, really suspicious of that type of thing even Yeah. If I probably should be. It. It just isn't something that bothers me that that much. I I know that some people are are definitely more bothered by it. I think that's going to be kind of my Line in this entire episode is that maybe I should be worried about it, but for some reason, I just, like, cannot find myself to be worried about it.

As long as they're not copying and pasting my project.

Yeah, exactly. I'll be mad when GitHub all of a sudden starts putting out I guess because I make all my courses stuff open as well. So there's

Yeah. To me, it's Creates It's not AI generated tutorial courses. Yeah. And it's Then I'll start Being mad. Hey. What's up? This is Wesley.

Not Wes.

Wesley, Bose, Thanks so much for tuning in.

Well, next question I have here, is it gonna take our jobs? There's that South Park. They took Gerdurbs.

This is something that I feel like a lot of the concern around is probably coming from is that, Like, I make good money right now because I know the arguments to an array or I know how to loop over these specific things. And if all of a sudden, someone is able to just write a comment, loop over movies, and display the title for each and an H1 tag. Literally, GitHub Copilot will do that for you.

And I think a lot of people that makes them anxious because that's Literally their job. So is it gonna take our jobs? It might. It honestly might. Like, there's a lot of things.

Like, That's the first time you've ever answered that question with it. By every single time we answer that question, it's like, I don't know. Yeah. But now it's like, yeah. Who knows?

I because there's a lot of things out there.

AI voice over, AI graphic design. It's Getting really good to a point where you're like, oh, it's actually just as good as if I were to pay somebody. And you can't help think, well, Probably, our us are are gonna be coming down the the tube as well.

But to to that, I say don't quit coding now because it's Probably what will happen is that this it makes the things like looping and scaffolding out code much quicker So that you can sort of focus on the next thing.

GitHub Copilot and all of these AI based things are tools that are Are like rocket boosters, meaning that they are going to help us perform at a much higher level, than than what we are normally used to. It'll Allow us to go much faster, much more accurate, things like that. And and to that, people are always like, okay. But, like, You have to pay for it. Is there going to be a larger gap now? Is there the has and has nots? The people who can afford a $120 a year, which is which is pretty pricey. I was surprised. I remember people saying, what would you pay for GitHub Copilot? And I said, Probably $6. And now they came out with 10.

I was like, oh, that that's not nothing.

So, like, is there now going to be a greater divide between People who have are able to pay for it and not. I hope not, but,

potentially, you know? Yeah. And and your your employer can obviously pay for it if you're not employed and you're just learning. You're stuck writing everything by hand trying to get a job. Like, yeah, you're right. I mean, there is a total discrepancy there.

There there is ways to get Copilot for free, but most of them are also kind of, like, privileged ways. Right? You have to be kind of like a open source project, Contributor of note. You have to have projects that people rely on or use. So, like, you could do that. But to do that first, you must have something that is actually Giving value in that way or, like, I get co I'm gonna be, you know, full full consideration here. I get it for free for being a GitHub star.

So, the fact that I'm a GitHub star, you know, I get it for free. So but if I didn't get it for free, you know, I I might feel Like, it was a big, big cost,

and maybe not necessarily one that I was Yeah. I'm I'm not one to love paying monthly for things.

So that's where we're at right now. Is it worth $10 a month? Or if you work in 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, is it worth 50¢ a day. Does it give you 50¢ a day worth of value? So if Sky, if you were not getting it for free, would you pay for it? Yes.

But I would have my business pay for it. And if I didn't have a business, would I pay for it? I honestly don't know. Maybe not, if I wasn't making money full time as a developer and I didn't have a job doing this stuff or whatever, and I was just trying to get a career, I probably wouldn't pay for it. That's a lot of money that, I mean, that I we always talk about this death by 1,000 subscriptions, but I saw I saw some Twitter thread a couple weeks ago, and some guy was like, here's all the productivity tools I use, and there was, like, 40 tools. And I would say most of them were, you know, an $8 a month subscription. And I was just thinking, Man, that guy's gotta be rich.

He got he got 40 subscription service tools. Like, I I It's it's really easy to just add another one onto the stack until you see your monthly bills or you look at your budget and say, holy cow.

I'm spending a lot more money on these extra additional subscriptions for stuff that I Yeah. Probably don't need. Because it's it's really easy to say,

it. 50¢ a day. Oh, yeah.

No prob of course. Like, I mean, if it saves me, you could do the calculation. Does it save me 2 and a half minutes a day? Then then it's worth it. And then it's another thing to look at it and, like, wow, I'm paying domain names and hosting and all this $250 a month just to maintain this Empire of, poop websites that I put online.

Yeah, right. Oh, you're right. So

to me, it's worth it. I think I was a little bit Shocked at the cost, like we said, but I think that if if it gives you one good swoosh a day of, like, oh, man, that just saved me us. 15 minutes, or I didn't have to stop and go look it up. Or to me, it's just like I didn't break concentration when I was coding. Oh, Oh, let's go to MDN, and then, oh, I'll open on Twitter. And and before you know it, I'm I have to look at the syntax or the technique. Exactly. And it's just like, Or even you don't even need IntelliSense on that type of thing. It just automatically scaffolds it out. So to me, it is worth it. It makes me move a lot faster.

CS. I almost wish that it would, like, bill it based on, like, how much you use it. I don't even know. But I think it's Absolutely worth it. I'm gonna pay for it myself.

This completion? Yeah. Yes. It's this completion costs a fraction of a cent. Yes.

I'll pay 8¢ for this completion. Sure. Whatever.

So the next question we have here is, does it make you dumb? This is another thing we hear from a lot of people.

I you're I need to write the code myself. I'm gonna forget how to do it. It's a crutch.

Absolutely not. Like, I I still know how to write this stuff by hand. I'm not gonna forget how to do it because I've I have learned it. I don't think that this is a good tool for learning.

Although, I could see it being helpful for giving you completions when you're, like, trying to figure something out, But I don't think it's something that is making you dumb. I simply think that it is something that makes you more efficient

it in what you are doing. Yeah. It is an efficiency thing, and you do have to know that the code that it's completing is correct beyond just, like, testing and seeing if it working if it works, it. Because you you sometimes sometimes it gives you really off the wall solutions, because it thinks you're doing something that you're not. So you really have to Understand the code that it's giving you, but sometimes it gives me nicer code than I would write myself.

And I say, oh, this is actually, kind of a a better solution than whatever I was planning on writing anyway. So

I don't necessarily think it makes me dumber. No. I think if you're not okay signing Sending your name to that code. And if someone were to come up and say, why did you do it this way? If you say, I didn't, the little Martian did it or the octopus thing.

Yeah. Octocad.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's you you can't do that. You gotta be able to put your name to the code that you eventually accept.

Last 1 we have here is does it get in the way? A lot of people say, oh, it's annoying. You know? Like, just let me focus on the code.

I do find that with comments, especially, where I'm trying to think something through. And as I'm thinking something through, I like to type it out into a comment, and I will find GitHub Copilot will try to finish the comment for me. I'm like, no. No. No. No. I'm trying to Part of my thinking process is writing the comment so I can understand what the code needs to do.

Don't do the comment for me as well.

So there's that. That gets in the way for me sometimes, but the actual coding part, I I don't feel like it gets in the way at all for me. I find it very useful.

I I find that the even when it adds comments, usually, comments are a nice way of saying exactly what I was going to say or it completes my thought. It's like auto completion for your thoughts sometimes Yeah. Which feels wild to say, but it does. It it kind of, like, almost it predicts what you're going to say. I actually just A fun little experiment here. I just typed in Scott Tolinski and Wes, and then it auto completed Boss talk about the best way to learn code.

That's awesome. Here, let me do it.

Let me open mine.

I think that would be great. I love doing these types of things when it tries to guess. That's fun. Yeah. Scott Tolentse is a great teacher.

Oh, that's nice. Did you really say that? Boss is Oh, a great teacher. Thank you. Oh. Cool. Citrix

podcast is

a great teacher.

Wow.

My my favorite kind of robot is the one that's complimentary to me. Yeah.

So You are looking handsome today. What? Wes Thank you. Boss is better

a at typescript and Scott Talinsky. Wow.

Probably real. That's probably a real sentence. I'm I'm writing it in a, TypeScript thing. K. Let's let's get another one. The syntax

Hello, guys. Scott Talinski is b, and it auto completed to being a little lazy here. I know I'm.

I can do that one. Okay. So West Boss is b, it it once you give it a couple things, Yeah. Then it it starts learning from it. So let me delete. Let me delete everything. Here we go. So the Syntax podcast is the same as the syntax above best Podcast ever.

Hey. Here we go.

That's kind of fun to to see what what it thinks.

Yeah. AI is in the the cute stage of it right now. We're like, oh, that's Yeah. Before

it takes our jobs and puts us out on the street.

So that is GitHub Copilot. Let's talk real quick about what are the alternatives to this type of thing.

There's tab 9, which is a pretty popular one. I've had that on as well. It is really good. So with a lot of these, they will have like a pro version That you can install and it will analyze your specific code base, which is really nice because if you Are you do loops a certain way or you make variables named a certain way? It will learn those types of things and write code that is similar to the way that your team writes it.

Kite is another one. I used Kite probably a couple of years ago for probably a year.

I was a big fan of that one. I can't tell you. I think GitHub Copilot is by far the best one, but Tab 9, Kite are very, very good. And then recently, we heard that Amazon announced one called Code Whisper. It's a good name. Which yeah. It's machine learning, machine learning based autocompletions.

Build applications faster with ML Powered Coding Companion.

Accelerate application development with automatic code recommendations based on the code in your comments in the IDE.

So maybe I'll I'll throw this on.

I don't love Amazon as much as I love GitHub.

So there's that. There's there's certain companies like if Yeah. Same with, what What are some other companies that just people like, if Facebook came out with a code Oh, yeah. Which is hilarious because React is from it. I'd be like, absolutely. Zuckerberg, no way. Yeah. I don't know if I got anywhere near my code.

Facebook came out with, like, a camera based tablet that, like, you put it That, like, follows you around the house. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's, like, absolutely not. No way.

No way. You should you should be self aware, Facebook, enough to know that people don't trust you already.

Yeah. But I don't think that GitHub Copilot will be the one forever. It's very interesting to see big players come into this spot, And I think that we'll probably see a couple more and we'll see how they get better and better over over the times. I'm very curious to see If as soon as these start getting integrated into the no code platforms Mhmm. You know, what is that? Is that the It's gonna be reliable. For us? You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I I just tried Amazon Code Whisperer, and I I I started typing, and it said, use s three bucket.

Please use this Amazon service To, Yan.

Oh, that's good. So that is AI encoding. Let us know what your thoughts are on it.

It's obviously early days, and we might be wrong about this. So tweet us at Syntax FM, and we'd love to hear your opinions on it. Yeah. Likewise.

Alright. Thanks it. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you on Wednesday.

Peace. Peace.

Head on over to s syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows.

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show.