GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot will help you write code for $10 a month

Image: GitHub

The new Copilot tool from Microsoft will help suggest lines of code to developers inside their code editor. The preview of Copilot was launched by GitHub and OpenAI last year, and is currently available to all developers.

As developers type in an integrated development environment (IDE) likeVisual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains, GitHub Copilot can be used to suggest the next line of code. Copilot can help with unit testing.

Over the past year, more than 1.2 million developers signed up to use the Copilot preview, and it will remain a free tool for verified students and maintainers of popular open-sourced projects. Almost 40 percent of the code is being written by Copilot.

Image: GitHub

According to Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub, artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool to write code easier and faster so they can be happier in their lives.

The creation of GitHub Copilot was the result of Microsoft's $1 billion investment into Openai. Openai Codex is a descendant of Openai's flagship GPT-3 language- generating algorithm. It's been controversial. Questions were raised about the legality of Copilot being trained on publicly available code. Around 40% of Copilot's output contained security vulnerabilities according to a study.

There are other companies working on automated tools to help with coding. AlphaCode is an artificial intelligence system that was revealed last year by DeepMind. AlphaCode was ranked within the top 54 percent of human coders after being tested against Codeforces. The challenges are different from what a regular coder would face, but they show how artificial intelligence can help.

All developers can try out the pilot for 60 days. The pilot will be offered to businesses later this year.