[kfk]

Look, I am going to wait and see on this, maybe new facts will make me reconsider. In the meanwhile, github Copilot is just cost to my company, haven't seen much additional productivity. I guess my concern, given how hard is to hire developers and technologists, is replacing simpler job roles, like a customer service representative, with complicated new ones, like "MLOps Engineer".

[rafaelmn]

Copilot cost is a joke unless you're running a sweatshop - it has to boost productivity in minutes/month to justify the cost considering dev salaries.

Personally I think it's priced perfectly - it's a really good typing assistant for obvious code, and helps me stay in flow longer.

In fact I'd pay double for a version with half the latency.

[kfk]

No, it's a joke that you tell me it's ok to pay for something with no clear ROI. Feel free to live in fantasy land, but when you run a business cost counts, this is exactly what I dislike about tech, a lot of talk, but 0 accountability when it comes to how they actually impact the bottom line.

[rafaelmn]

>it's a joke that you tell me it's ok to pay for something with no clear ROI.

Can you measure the bottom line impact of using CI/CD, IDEs, static code analysis, source control, whatever tool ? If you don't know the exact numbers and are just guesstimating - are you actually accounting for the costs or just moaning because you don't like the tool ? Who even works with exact ROI numbers for these kinds of decisions ? I can't think of a scenario where accurately determining the ROI of any one thing is possible and it doesn't reduce to gut checks. Pretending it can be measured sounds as naive as people trying to measure developer productivity with fixed metrics.

Cost of Copilot is so low that it's under discretionary spending - it would take more time to figure out the actual value than to pay for people that want it. People already figured out that it's better to just allocate a budget to individuals, let them decide which tools work for them and go trough purchase requisition and approval dance for big ticket/external dependency items where the impact is worth the time spent on making the decision.

[TeMPOraL]

Isn't this the same failing that prevents us from funding basic research or infrastructure? It obviously has positive ROI, but because you can't estimate it more narrowly than between "big" and "huge", you assume it's negative and reject the idea?