Are there any decent GitHub Copilot Alternatives?
I find myself, especially when I'm jumping between languages that I'm less familiar with, more reliant on copilot for boilerplate, or at least example code that I can modify. It really does come in handy and save time, but I'm not certain it's worth $10 per month, or I'm just a cheapskate, and would rather find a better deal if there is one.
I've tried Tabnine, but it's never been that great and it's a memory/cpu hog.
Just got a notice that copilot's 'preview' is ending in 3 days, so it's time to find a replacement or decide if it's worth it to keep it and pay the fee.
Related question: are there any alternatives which respect licenses like GPL? If I simply copy-paste code from a GPL project myself, I'm normally expected to preserve the license. It should be possible to indicate what license you're using so that you only get GPL snippets when they are to be included in a GPL project. Otherwise, you're violating the intent of the original authors and are on shaky ground legally.
I worry that, if Copilot-like things are ultimately declared to actually be legal, that many free software developers will withdraw their source code from public view, to avoid the code being used as mere fodder for proprietary developers to annex the code without being a part of the free software community.
I would give https://mutable.ai a shot. They have a VS Code and JupyterLab extension. I spoke to the founder a couple of times, super smart dude :)
I honestly think that $10/month is more than worth it.
I found that having copilot is cheaper than hiring a junior dev. I mostly use it for C++, python, and TypeScript and has been really satisfied with it.
It's not a pure CoPilot alternative, but I'd put https://codesearch.ai into the mix (disclaimer, it's my side project).
It is a semantic code search tool that can be queried using natural language. It provides decent answers to a variety of questions, and I've been finding myself using it quite often to "autocomplete" various mundane tasks. For example, plotting with matplotlib, making http requests in Go, running multiple goroutines, etc. - things where I would usually reach for Google. It doesn't provide a straightforward ready-to-run answer like CoPilot, but it does provide a way to help yourself. It all depends on what you prefer and how you learn. Arguably, having to read the code before you use it makes it more likely it will stick in your brain.
It looks like you used Tabnine local only model in the past (awesome for security, connectivity) if you used it in "cloud only" mode you would see much lower CPU and get longer snippets and completions. If you are with a company we are also happy to build and run all of this with custom models and in your own VPC or datacenter. Please contact us if you are interested and happy if you are also just an IC to get you Tabnine Pro.
Disclosure: I am from Tabnine.
What is your hourly rate and how much do you pay for a coffee? Is 10 a month really a significant factor here?
It's built on OpenAI Codex, which is free now, and likely to be charged on usage in the future (cheaper). It's not baked into the IDE like Copilot, but so far it's worked better than Stack Overflow at writing code.
Just write the code yourself, perhaps referencing public resources related to your problem and handling any license concerns appropriately. Don't needlessly risk introducing license violations into your code or supporting a tool designed to facilitate such license infringement on a mass scale.
How much would you pay per month, reasonable?
$10 a month is kind of reasonable given you need a cluster of GPUs to service the requests. The cheapest single GPU capable of responding relatively fast at the same performance of OpenAI is about $275/month. So basically 30 users at $10 a month just to break even on that cost. However, that GPU could probably handle only half dozen users, and 6 < 30. I could use cheaper older 1080ti but the response time/latency is going to be slower than copilot. And the electricity costs are now 4x.
I work with language models and build SaaS. If you can help me figure it out, I could build a solution for you.
The only angle I can think is charging $100-500/month, but for an ultra fine-tuned version specific to a framework tailored to a "no-code" crowd.
There's 3/4 and no real open source community efforts yet:
- GitHub Copilot (owned by Microsoft)
- Amazon CodeWhisperer (still in development)
- TabNine (just not there yet)
- Kite (no longer maintained)
Personally I can't see the point of paying for Copilot, I'd rather spend the money on resources to expand my knowledge of the areas I'm working in - if you like I'm training my own neural net to help with coding :)
You could write your own code, not use a tool that's already been shown to automate copyright infringement.
I don't understand why the problem is copilot and not a licence management system integrated to it, so you say what licence are you using and if the code blocks are licence compatible.
> I've tried Tabnine, but it's never been that great and it's a memory/cpu hog.
Which style did you use? Their local version is a hog yeah, but Hybrid and Cloud work pretty well.
I was going to suggest trying Kite, but it seems to be unavailable at the moment. I've never used it myself but it's the only other one I know of.
Can any of these be trained on your own codebase?
Yes. Actual human copilots.
Hello All, I am trying to build a libre and gratis A.I power code completion assistant https://gnughost.gitlab.io/
Not sure if I will succeed or if it would become serious, but let's see.