Could Github Copilot help us write SAS code?

[YUXI]

Has anyone done some research on github copilot? This AI plug-in (in VS Code) can support many mainstream programming languages, so can it also help us write SAS code?   😊

[sbxkoenk]

Hello,

I am very curious about any responses to your post.

Personally I have never tried Github Copilot.

(GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI.)

GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories. For each language, the quality of suggestions you receive may depend on the volume and diversity of training data for that language. For example, JavaScript is well-represented in public repositories and is one of GitHub Copilot's best supported languages. Languages with less representation in public repositories may produce fewer or less robust suggestions.

I do not think there's an enormous lot of SAS code in public repositories ... so I doubt the quality of the SAS code returned will be good.

See also here:
How good is an AI chatbot at SAS programming?
By Rick Wicklin on The DO Loop May 10, 2023
https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2023/05/10/ai-chatbot-sas-programmer.html

Koen

[YUXI]

Hi, Koen.

I agree with you. To be honest,I don't believe that GitHub Copilot can help SAS coding too much. The GitHub Copilot is for IDEs (e.g. VScode), and the most popular languages should be python, java ,etc. Since SAS is not a mainstream language for development task, even we can use GitHub Copilot to generate SAS code, the performance would be bad.

But AI may be the 'future', right? And, the GitHub Copilot X will be released later, which based on GPT-4. Not like ChatGPT (can do anything but not domain specific), GitHub Copilot focuses on programming.

So, these days, I just want to try if I can use GitHub Copilot to generate SAS code on VScode. I know SAS has extension in VScode, but I fail to install and use it to test how GitHub Copilot could help us do SAS coding.

[PaigeMiller]

At the present time, I am skeptical about AI producing SAS code.

Here is an example where ChatGPT was asked to provide SAS code for a particular situation. It gives a sub-optimal reply (in other words, better code is possible and should be used) but you wouldn't know that, and if you go ahead and use this sub-optimal code, you get a syntax error, it doesn't work. 

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Extracting-year-and-month-from-date9-date/td-p/856421

[YUXI]

You tell the truth. At this stage (whatever GPT-3.5 or GPT-4), it is definitely not feasible to generate SAS code using chatgpt. I have actually tested using chatgpt to help me with SAS programming, and the results have been disappointing.

But I still agree that AI is the future. So I try to test different AI tools to help me write code, in order to be ready to embrace AI one day in the future. Although many tools are based on GPT model (or use ChatGPT API), i still think they have differences (because it will be fine-tuned for different areas). And GPT series will be updated to higher performance (GPT-5, GPT-6, etc.).

But, unfortunately, when I try to use GitHub Copilot to generate SAS code on VScode, I fail to install the SAS extension at the first step.....LOL