GitHub Copilot, your AI pair programmer

  • 2 minutes

The logo icon for GitHub Copilot that shows the Copilot icon in the middle with a blue and green swirl around the logo.

It's no secret that AI is disrupting the technology landscape. AI is profoundly changing the way the world works and how each organization and team operates. These advancements in AI serve as a catalyst and can dramatically improve the productivity of developers around the world as they use and apply it well.

The addition of AI features to the developer tools that you use and love helps you collaborate, develop, test, and ship your products faster and more efficiently than ever before. GitHub Copilot is a service that provides you with an AI pair programmer that works with all of the popular programming languages.

In recent research, GitHub and Microsoft found that developers experience a significant productivity boost when they use GitHub Copilot to work on real-world projects and tasks. In fact, in the three years since its launch, developers have experienced the following benefits while using GitHub Copilot:

  • 46% of new code now written by AI
  • 55% faster overall developer productivity
  • 74% of developers feeling more focused on satisfying work

Microsoft developed GitHub Copilot in collaboration with OpenAI. GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex system. OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code and is more capable than GPT-3 in code generation. OpenAI Codex is more capable, in part, because it was trained on a dataset that included a larger concentration of public source code.

GitHub Copilot is available as an extension for VS Code, Visual Studio, Vim/Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of IDEs.

GitHub Copilot features

GitHub Copilot started a new age of software development as an AI pair programmer that keeps developers in the flow by autocompleting comments and code. But AI-powered autocompletion was just the starting point.

Here are some features of GitHub Copilot that truly make it a developer tool of the future. With these features, GitHub Copilot is more than just an editor. It's becoming a readily accessible AI assistant throughout the entire development life cycle.

Copilot for chat

GitHub Copilot brings a ChatGPT-like chat interface to the editor. The chat interface focuses on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio. It's deeply embedded in the IDE, and it recognizes what code a developer has typed and what error messages appear. A developer can get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs.

Copilot for pull requests

OpenAI's GPT-4 model adds support in GitHub Copilot for AI-powered tags in pull-request descriptions through a GitHub app that organization admins and individual repository owners can install. GitHub Copilot automatically fills out these tags based on the changed code. Developers can then review or modify the suggested descriptions.

Copilot for the CLI

Next to the editor and pull requests, the terminal is the place where developers spend the most time. However, even the most proficient developers need to scroll through many pages to remember the precise syntax of many commands. The GitHub Copilot command-line interface (CLI) can compose commands and loops, and it can and throw obscure find flags to satisfy your query.

Subscription plans

The service is available through GitHub personal accounts with GitHub Copilot Individual, through organization accounts with GitHub Copilot Business, or through enterprise accounts with GitHub Copilot Enterprise.

GitHub Copilot Business

GitHub Copilot Business allows you to control who can use GitHub Copilot in your company. After you give access to an organization, its admins can give access to individuals and teams.

With GitHub Copilot Business, GitHub Copilot is open to every developer, team, organization, and enterprise.

With the following features, GitHub Copilot Business is focused on making organizations more productive, secure, and fulfilled:

  • Code completions
  • Chat in IDE and mobile
  • Filter for security vulnerabilities
  • Code referencing
  • Filter for public code
  • IP indemnity
  • Enterprise-grade security, safety, and privacy

GitHub Copilot Enterprise

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is available for organizations through GitHub Enterprise Cloud. This subscription plan enables your teams of developers to:

  • Quickly get up to speed on your codebase.
  • Search through and build documentation.
  • Get suggestions based on internal and private code.
  • Quickly review pull requests.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business, plus a layer of personalization for organizations. It provides integration into GitHub as a chat interface, so developers can converse about their codebase. It also provides action buttons throughout the platform.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization's codebase for a deeper understanding and for suggestions that are more tailored. It offers access to GitHub Copilot customization to fine-tune private models for code completion.

In the next unit, you'll learn about how to get started with GitHub Copilot and some common configurations.