Microsoft‘s GitHub has just announced that Copilot is generally available to all developers with a payment plan for $10/month or $100/year. But verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects are offered free usage of the AI pair programming assistant.
Trained on billions of lines of public code
Copilot technical preview was launched last year and GitHub states that Copilot can suggest complete methods, boilerplate code, whole unit tests, and even complex algorithms. Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Github said;
« With GitHub Copilot, for the first time in the history of software, AI can be broadly harnessed by developers to write and complete code. Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding 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 »
GitHub Copilot enables developers;
- Get AI-based coding suggestions: Get code suggestions that match a project’s context and style conventions, and cycle through different options to decide what to accept, reject, or edit.
- Use your preferred environment: Integrate GitHub Copilot with popular editors, including Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code as an unobtrusive extension.
- Code confidently in unfamiliar territory: Code in new languages or try something new, and let GitHub Copilot suggest syntax and code in dozens of languages—so you can spend more time learning by doing.
Even though GitHub Copilot has many supporters for improving developer efficiency, still questioned by many. It has been claimed that the tool’s creators training the AI to generate code without credits, on open source code hosted on GitHub.
GitHub charging $10/month for an A.I. feature trained on open source code hosted on their service is the software developer version of if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product.https://t.co/pdHcZPJauk
— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) June 21, 2022
Super high.
— Nate Finch 🇺🇦 (@NateTheFinch) June 21, 2022
In its technical preview state, GitHub had more than 1.2 million developers who began using Copilot and it became an essential role in their daily workflows. Developers either seem to like its capabilities or dislike its ethical incomprehensibility. And now, GitHub Copilot can be put to work in a preferred environment with a free 60-day trial.