Copilot doesn’t work if profanity exists

[Nevrai]

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I’m unsure whether this is truly a bug, but it is frustrating. Whenever there’s profanity in a file, Copilot refuses to work.

If I’m ‘far enough’ away from the piece of code or comments that contains expletives, Copilot will work in that file, and it’ll also work in other files, but it won’t work near the profanities.

It’s quite bizarre, especially since Copilot is capable of generating profanities itself. I don’t understand why it decides not to work if it’s close to profanity.

[SamWarden]

It also doesn't work at all if the project directory name contains profanity #55378

[ggoonnzzaallo]

AI safety advocates have gone too far... I built a Copilot VS Code extension that handles all kinds of profanity, you can try it here if you're still looking for a solution. Will never censor anything, that's lame.

[AndreasOM]

We have been intentionally spreading profanity through our code bases to keep co-pilot from stealing. It has been very successful so far, and I hope it stays this way.

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

[axefrog]

That's a silly way to keep an unexpected benefit as a feature. If they want that to be a feature, they should have well-defined tokens you can use for that purpose. The use of profanity in a codebase is a personal choice and should not have any impact on Copilot's functionality.

[Lamby777]

That's a silly way to keep an unexpected benefit as a feature. If they want that to be a feature, they should have well-defined tokens you can use for that purpose. The use of profanity in a codebase is a personal choice and should not have any impact on Copilot's functionality.

🤓

[synap5e]

Just spent time debugging copilot not working because I had shorthanded an "assembly" variable to "ass" in a comment. I love the future.

[bmod]

Be sure to "unalive" your processes when they get "unparented"

[fireattack]

I was working on a small project which is for processing ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtitles#Subtitle_formats) and copilot refused to work due to variable name containing "ass".

This is ridiculous, ass as a word or shorthand is too common to be put into "profanity words list".

[andraz]

Refusing to work for paying customers because they're using an acronym to name the folder of After Sale Service library in their application is beyond insane.

What is next, everyone who "dare" to develop anything related to Advanced Sound System will need to use full name to not trigger the idiocy?

It gets worse, try generating some trivial user sample data, it will just stop working when it's time to generate an example@example.com email...

[Lamby777]

Yep. It also freaks the fuck out when you try to generate anything containing an IP address, even if it's a local one like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x

Nuts.

[cartoonandtravel]

The same problem (」°ロ°)」

[ggoonnzzaallo]

Found this pretty funny lol, but strongly believe that you should be able to have anything you want in your code...

Microsoft doesn't appear to have changed its mind on this 1 year after so I built my own Copilot extension that handles profanities (there are no words banned). You can try it here if you're still looking for a solution.

[tendiesfortwo]

Looks good, checking it out. Please never censor.

[Lamby777]

Is there a (neo)vim plugin version?

[Nikhil1qwer]

So Cool.

[Nikhil1qwer]

The reported behavior of Copilot, where it refuses to function properly in the vicinity of profanity within code files, is indeed concerning and frustrating. It's understandable for developers to encounter challenges with profanity filtering in code-related tools, but the described behavior seems inconsistent and puzzling.

[gradientjanitor]

Just discovered this. The irony is that when I start putting profanity in my code, it is because I am frustrated, then copilot stops working, which frustrates me further.

[fungiboletus]

While the completion quality doesn't seem to match Github Copilot yet, CodeGemma 2B has no issues with profanities.

I use it locally with Continue.dev and Ollama.

  "tabAutocompleteModel": {
    "title": "Code Gemma",
    "provider": "ollama",
    "model": "codegemma:code"
  },

Hopefully the existence of good and free models will make Github and Microsoft change their stance towards their quite excessive guardrails.

[SethRobinson]

Wasted 20 minutes trying to figure out why copilot wouldn't work... it was the print("Hello ass!"); statement, something I tend to type instead of hello world. Great. In addition to the horrible decision to be this sensitive, why on earth would it be a totally silent error so it just seems broken?!