- No details at all on the official extension page in VSCode
- I bite the bullet and try anyway
- No immediate confirmation after setup
- Only one configuration option (log file path)
- After I start typing into a buffer, the onboarding notification requires sign-in
- Sure, why not
- "Link to IDE?"
- heck yeah, let's finally go
- Sign up for a trial
- um...
- Requires a CC for a 30-day free trial
Wow, that’s the same experience that I havr trying to use any app on the iOS App Store. Download, use one basic feature, use a second feature? Nope sign up first. Ok, signed up. Ok now? Nope, that feature requires a subscription. It is very sneaky because the app does not need to show in-app purchase on the App Store info. I have given up on Apps now because of this.
App developer here. Sadly, it’s what works. Put differently: when users browse for apps, it’s usually when their need for sth that solves the problem is relatively high. Which means you have a much higher chance of converting that user right now during onboarding than anytime later in the lifecycle of your app.
I wish Apple properly displayed prices though instead of this sneaky vague “contains in-app purchases” text.
I have a card with $0 on it for this purpose. Services count on you forgetting to cancel instead of you liking the product per se. If I like it I change the card, but most products I don’t so they bounce. Works well.
Aren't most payment systems making a $1 or $0.1 block/charge to confirm the card is real and has non-zero balance? At least that is my experience as an European user, whenever I try to subscribe to anything that came out of the US.
This goes against the guidelines for "Show HN". You can still post it, but generally it won't qualify for the Show HN moniker. You can review the rules for Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails.
"Without signups or emails" definitely implies without credit card authorization!
I can understand the business imperatives (I am a PM at a start-up :)), but can you please make a decision on actually having the sign up flow work without friction (Think Slack / dropbox etc). You can always iterate and find the right thing to charge for but developers are a demanding bunch especially with tooling!
How about just not having one? i am often interested to try things but I am not giving out my CC until I've tried it out, FOMO be damned. I don't want the burden of cancellation if I decide it's not for me, I've been burned before by forgetting and paying for a service I didn't want.
Excited to see this on HN front page! Unlike others, I didn't mind the CC + 30 day trial. 30 days actually feels generously long as I don't see many other projects offering that. I think it's ultimately right move for this project to live long.
After trying it for a bit on a very very large codebase(more than the context window supported, albeit I haven't done anything superr insightful yet), the code suggestion does seem better + faster than Copilot.
However, I'm not sure if the "completion" UX is the best way to enhance human programmers with AI. And within the completion realm, leaning on the speed, ie. inferencing on every keystroke, is not that attractive for myself. What attracted me is really the context length. So I'd provide much more examples of cross context code suggestion, similar to the 3js demo from gemini 1.5.
Back to the completion UX thing. I feel like often times seeing the completion pop up is a double edged sword. The moment it pops up, it distracts me from "outputting mode" into "evaluation mode" to see if the result is correct. If it's right, then great, you've saved me time. But for the times where it's wrong(which... was quite a bit for copilot), it's actually a net negative as I now have to re-enter the "outputting mode" and force myself to ignore the new output that will get generated as the new keystroke comes out. With Supermaven, this "switch" happens 10x more than copilot because of the speed as well.
Cursor/Zed with their CMD K code insert is obviously the other "big" ai coding UX.(along with chat) Personally I like them quite a bit and wish they had the speed and context window that supermaven is currently offering. But tbh, all of the UX's feel a little off at the moment...
>At Supermaven we've developed and trained from scratch a new neural network architecture which is more efficient than a Transformer (the current standard architecture) at integrating information across a long context window.
Clearly something proprietary, but in between this and Gemini's claimed 10M tokens, assuming there's no RAG... I'm curious what might be happening behind the scenes.
How do you guarantee you will not add GPL or similarly licensed code to my proprietary codebase? Microsoft committed to defending its customers from claims arising from CoPilot output [0]. Would you be confident enough to do likewise?
Obfuscation tools does that too. It doesn't changes the fact that generated code is based on other people copyrighted code. M$ doesn't use their own code in the training of ChatGPT, but steals other people copyrighted work instead.
>While a model like GPT-4 offers unmatched suggestion quality, it's impossible to run on every keystroke (unless you charge users $1,000/month)
Still alot less than the average SWE salary and this cost will go down over time.
Anyway, jokes aside, I usually don't use copilot tools in my IDEs. I have zero difficulty with coding itself. I would not enable one unless i'm trying to learn a new language or something. I can see how they would be helpful for more junior level engineers, but they'd still need someone senior to check for security vulnerabilities and the like.
Where LLMs come in handy is more complicated scenarios like understanding legacy spaghetti code, learning a new API without having to read the documentation, finding out how do to X in a new framework, undocumented behaviours and as a solo founder, non code tasks like marketing copy, mock customer interviews, writing data science type SQL queries to better understand my metrics, naming my subscription plans etc which I otherwise would not be that great at.
For these tasks I always use GPT-4 which almost always gets good results. But its nowhere near the level where it could replace an actual engineer, even if you fed it an entire codebase.
> I can see how they would be helpful for more junior level engineers
I'd argue the opposite - give something like chatgpt/copilot to a junior engineer and they use it to generate a bunch of overly repetitive code that they don't understand. If they're trying to write anything even slightly non trivial it's not going to work.
In order to get value from AI code generation you need to be competent enough to properly review the output.
I have the total opposite experience. Give it to a junior and they churn out code riddled with subtle bugs and maybe it hampers their learning.
For more experienced developers it significantly reduces typing time, in my experience. So often I’ll simply write the function name only then scan the suggested output and accept, saving minutes and reducing RSI.
> I can see how they would be helpful for more junior level engineers
Honestly, I'm a senior dev and enjoy the copilot stuff. It gets shit wrong most times it needs to do something beyond simple-ish, but for doing boilerplate or repetitive stuff, it's been great!
I'm not ML practitioner, so idk, but could we get generative tool that operates on higher syntatic level (e.g. AST) instead of interpreting code as just plain text? I feel it's so dumb that something like copilot generates code that is syntatically invalid, that feels like low bar for any code generation tool to pass?
Have been using supermaven for about 5 days on a react project. It is way faster than copilot, suggestions generally feel better as well, less hallucinated. For instance, if I change a type in a src/bookingTypes.ts, then supermaven has no issues guessing that those updated types should be recommended in src/components/bookingform/Bookingform.tsx . Copilot sometimes struggles with this recommending it's own, hallucinated types
Readit News
Respectfully, this is a terrible experience.
I wish Apple properly displayed prices though instead of this sneaky vague “contains in-app purchases” text.
> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails.
"Without signups or emails" definitely implies without credit card authorization!
Deleted Comment
After trying it for a bit on a very very large codebase(more than the context window supported, albeit I haven't done anything superr insightful yet), the code suggestion does seem better + faster than Copilot.
However, I'm not sure if the "completion" UX is the best way to enhance human programmers with AI. And within the completion realm, leaning on the speed, ie. inferencing on every keystroke, is not that attractive for myself. What attracted me is really the context length. So I'd provide much more examples of cross context code suggestion, similar to the 3js demo from gemini 1.5.
Back to the completion UX thing. I feel like often times seeing the completion pop up is a double edged sword. The moment it pops up, it distracts me from "outputting mode" into "evaluation mode" to see if the result is correct. If it's right, then great, you've saved me time. But for the times where it's wrong(which... was quite a bit for copilot), it's actually a net negative as I now have to re-enter the "outputting mode" and force myself to ignore the new output that will get generated as the new keystroke comes out. With Supermaven, this "switch" happens 10x more than copilot because of the speed as well.
Cursor/Zed with their CMD K code insert is obviously the other "big" ai coding UX.(along with chat) Personally I like them quite a bit and wish they had the speed and context window that supermaven is currently offering. But tbh, all of the UX's feel a little off at the moment...
Just my 2c' as an amateur programmer!
Clearly something proprietary, but in between this and Gemini's claimed 10M tokens, assuming there's no RAG... I'm curious what might be happening behind the scenes.
People think Gemini 1.5 is Sparse Mixture of Experts. (SMoE)
Another One is self extend. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01325
This paper also refers back to other options like yarn, etc.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/Microsoft-Cop...
Still alot less than the average SWE salary and this cost will go down over time.
Anyway, jokes aside, I usually don't use copilot tools in my IDEs. I have zero difficulty with coding itself. I would not enable one unless i'm trying to learn a new language or something. I can see how they would be helpful for more junior level engineers, but they'd still need someone senior to check for security vulnerabilities and the like.
Where LLMs come in handy is more complicated scenarios like understanding legacy spaghetti code, learning a new API without having to read the documentation, finding out how do to X in a new framework, undocumented behaviours and as a solo founder, non code tasks like marketing copy, mock customer interviews, writing data science type SQL queries to better understand my metrics, naming my subscription plans etc which I otherwise would not be that great at.
For these tasks I always use GPT-4 which almost always gets good results. But its nowhere near the level where it could replace an actual engineer, even if you fed it an entire codebase.
I'd argue the opposite - give something like chatgpt/copilot to a junior engineer and they use it to generate a bunch of overly repetitive code that they don't understand. If they're trying to write anything even slightly non trivial it's not going to work.
In order to get value from AI code generation you need to be competent enough to properly review the output.
And to know what to ask.
For more experienced developers it significantly reduces typing time, in my experience. So often I’ll simply write the function name only then scan the suggested output and accept, saving minutes and reducing RSI.
Honestly, I'm a senior dev and enjoy the copilot stuff. It gets shit wrong most times it needs to do something beyond simple-ish, but for doing boilerplate or repetitive stuff, it's been great!
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/grammars
https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance?tab=readme-ov-file#c...
https://github.com/eth-sri/lmql/issues/172