GitHub launches 'Copilot', an AI that can code with you

 Copilot was developed in partnership with OpenAi and Codex. With the help of AI, Copilot will analyze the context of the code you are writing to recommend a suitable line of code or an entire function. It will help you quickly discover different ways of solving problems, write test code, and discover new APIs.

However, GitHub emphasizes that Copilot is not designed to write code for programmers. At the same time, programmers can switch between suggestions or edit Copilot suggestions manually.

In addition, since Copilot makes recommendations based on the English language and source codes from public repositories on GitHub, there are some limitations. It's possible that the tool will initially make poor quality, unsafe recommendations or refer to old APIs.

In other words, you shouldn't completely trust the code suggested by Copilot. Before applying them you should test, evaluate and adjust carefully.

As an AI tool, Copilot has the ability to learn to improve over time. GitHub also added a filter to prevent Copilot from making sensitive suggestions.

Currently, GitHub Copilot is available as an extension for Microsoft's Visual Studio Code and both locally and in the cloud in GitHub Codespaces.

Lesley Montoya

Update 01 July 2021