GitHub's AI-Powered Copilot Feature Takes Off

pcmag.com:

GitHub has officially launched Copilot to help make coding a bit less painful.

The company started testing Copilot, which it describes as "your AI pair programmer," in June 2021. Now it's finally ready to release the feature to individual developers—Copilot won't be available to companies using GitHub's platform until sometime later this year—who are willing to spend $10 per month or $100 per year to have AI write at least some of their code for them.

"We specifically designed GitHub Copilot as an editor extension to make sure nothing gets in the way of what you’re doing," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says in a blog post(Opens in a new window). "GitHub Copilot distills the collective knowledge of the world’s developers into an editor extension that suggests code in real time, to help you stay focused on what matters most: building great software."

Dohmke says that 1.2 million developers tested Copilot(Opens in a new window) during its technical preview. It seems that Copilot has proven to be quite the capable programmer, with Dohmke saying that for popular languages such as Python, devs are trusting Copilot to write as much as 40% of their code. (At least in files where it's enabled; it accounts for a lower proportion in terms of total output.)

"Just like the rise of compilers and open source," Dohmke says, "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."

That mention of open source software is particularly important. GitHub said(Opens in a new window) last June that it trained Copilot on "a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including