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0 pointsadamsmith3y ago0 comments

Yes, this was precisely what I was referring to. In small-enough programs (e.g. one file) Copilot has all the context. The other extreme would be something like the Chromium codebase. Because of this, Copilot looks better in quick demos than real-world use. (Though of course it is very impressive and this tech will get there, hopefully very soon!)

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lolinder3y ago

But what I'm saying is that it does use imports, at least in Rust. I'm assuming that somehow behind the scenes they're concatenating the contents of the imports into the prompt.

I can imagine this is easier in a language like Rust that has a really strict module system, and to be fair the project that I've been using it on is a side project that isn't over 10,000 lines of code yet. If I were up to 30 imports per file I can imagine concatenating would become much less effective.

adamsmithOP3y ago

Does it seem to only understand imports of public libraries? If so, it's likely that, rather than understanding the contents of those libraries, it's learning from others' use of those library APIs. If not, it is likely just understanding the words in the API at a shallow depth.

lolinder3y ago

No, it's imports from other files in my project. It's either using the import or the fact that I have another tab open.

There are definitely times where it produces a close approximation that's obviously just statistical, but there are other times where there's no question that it picked up something from a different source file that couldn't have possibly been in its training set.

I haven't yet decided if it's using imports or opened files in the editor, but it's definitely not just using the single file I have active.

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lolinder3y ago

But what I'm saying is that it does use imports, at least in Rust. I'm assuming that somehow behind the scenes they're concatenating the contents of the imports into the prompt.

adamsmithOP3y ago

lolinder3y ago

No, it's imports from other files in my project. It's either using the import or the fact that I have another tab open.

I haven't yet decided if it's using imports or opened files in the editor, but it's definitely not just using the single file I have active.

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