After a year of testing and running, GitHub officially releases Copilot, which will automatically complete your code
Image: Github
We have not yet met the programmer who would not want to save themselves writing a few lines of code, and starting today they can do it more easily. A year after it was first unveiled, Microsoft’s Copilot, GitHub and OpenAI are finally released to the general developer public.
You use auto-fill for everything else, so why not your code?
Copilot connects to your favorite IDEs like Neovim, JetBrains, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code as a plugin and basically makes you kind of AutoComplete for code. As you use such mechanisms to shorten ordering processes, filling out forms and even writing emails, Copilot harnesses its AI mechanisms to complete your code.
To do this, he of course connects to the public projects hosted in the GitHub repository and learns from them the regular patterns that many programmers repeat. Once CopyLot recognizes the context of your code (whether by the comments you write, function names or previous lines), it will be able to offer you completions that you can confirm or reject at the click of a button. It is able to offer you the following line of code, complete methods, boilerplate code, complete unit tests and even complex algorithms.
$ 10 a month, but there are those who can get it for free
According to GitHub, more than 1.2 million developers have tested the preview version released last year, and about 40% of their code is written using the plugin automatically – which is quite a bit. Now, GitHub is ready for prime time and fully launches the feature for individual programmers. The price is $ 10 a month, or $ 100 a year, and only later will GitHub offer plans to full organizations as well. Right now you can try Copilot for free for the first 60 days, so you do not have much to lose.
GitHub still leaves the Copilot free for two groups of users. The first is students (who have undergone a validation process in GitHub), and the second is the maintainers of popular open source projects. If you are a student, you can apply here. If you are running a popular project, you can check if you are eligible for a free Copilot by visiting the registration portal. If you qualify, you will see the option to add Copilot for free for 12 months (which will be renewed if you continue to meet GitHub’s terms). If you see a request for a charge on the registration page – a sign that you are not eligible.
Copilot raises quite a few ethical but also security questions. More than once we have dealt here with the problem of blindly copying code from open repositories, and how they lead to quite a few bugs and various security issues. Interestingly, one of the studies on the subject revealed that about 40% of the code offered by Copilot contained some security issues. So as usual and no matter where you copy or complete a code – check it out well.
And there is of course the Israeli question
Just a week ago, the Israeli Tabnine announced a round of recruitment. The Israeli company is also developing an Autocomplete mechanism for writing code, so we explicitly asked the CEO how they would compete with a giant like Microsoft and GitHub, and he claimed that “this is a closed-gene approach and one big AI model that controls everything.” According to him, Tabanin supports most IDEs, and allows a model to be run locally, so that your code is not sent to the cloud. “This is a zero-sum game and there is room for two winners,” the company said.
A good old age
Born with a joystick in hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. An unexplained hammer holder for calibrating device batteries. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot
