GitHub CoPilot has been officially released with a free option for use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. Other developers will be charged $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. GitHub describes Copilot as an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor.

When Copilot was first announced, back in June 2021, Mike James described it as an AI-based system that will take notice of what you are coding and make suggestions for what it is you are about to type. You can think of it as IntelliSense on steroids.

Copilot is based on OpenAI's Codex which was trained on a large amount of publicly available code. The system has been trained to work out how to complete lines and sections of code by taking completed code, deleting parts of it, and training the AI to correctly fill in the missing part. The AI means that the examples used are remembered, along with the underlying principles so that the system is capable of extrapolation to things that it has never seen.

GitHub Copilot goes further than just suggesting the next line of code; it can suggest complete methods, boilerplate code and whole unit tests. Copilot has been written as an editor extension and it works with Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.

GitHub says the beta testers say that in files where it’s enabled, nearly 40% of code is being written by GitHub Copilot in popular coding languages like Python, and GitHub expects that percentage to increase. GitHub Copilot is optimized for use with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, or C++, but can also be used to generate suggestions in other languages and a wide variety of frameworks.

There's a free 60-day trial available, and GitHub Copilot is available now.

More Information

Copilot Website

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