GitHub Copilot: Your AI-Powered Pair Programming Partner

It’s no secret that AI is transforming the tech world. AI is fundamentally changing how the world, every organization, and every team operates. These AI advancements act as a catalyst and can significantly boost developer productivity worldwide when used and applied correctly.

Integrating AI capabilities into the development tools you already use and love allows you to collaborate, build, test, and ship products faster and more efficiently than ever. GitHub Copilot is a service that provides developers with an AI-powered programming partner that works with all known programming languages.

Recent research by GitHub and Microsoft has shown that developers experience significant productivity gains when using GitHub Copilot in real-world projects and tasks. In fact, within the three years following its launch, developers reported the following benefits from using GitHub Copilot:

• 46% of new code is now written by AI
• 55% overall improvement in developer productivity
• 74% of developers feel more focused on meaningful work

Microsoft developed GitHub Copilot in partnership with OpenAI. GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex system. OpenAI Codex has extensive knowledge of how programmers use code and outperforms GPT-3 in code generation. It is more efficient in part because it was trained on a dataset with a higher concentration of public source code.

GitHub Copilot is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Vim/Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).

GitHub Copilot Features

GitHub Copilot has ushered in a new era of software development as an AI-powered programming partner that helps developers stay in the flow with comment and code autocompletion. However, AI-based autocompletion is just the beginning.

Here are some features that truly make GitHub Copilot a development tool of the future. With these capabilities, GitHub Copilot becomes much more than just an editor—it becomes an AI assistant accessible throughout the development lifecycle.

Copilot for Chat

GitHub Copilot offers a ChatGPT-style conversational interface within the editor. This chat interface focuses on development scenarios and is natively integrated into Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. It is deeply embedded in the IDE and understands the code a developer is writing as well as any error messages that appear. A developer can get deep analysis and explanations of what code blocks are supposed to do, generate unit tests, and even receive bug fix suggestions.

Copilot for Pull Requests

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

Copilot for the CLI

After the editor and pull requests, the terminal is where developers spend the most time. However, even the most skilled developers often need to look up the exact syntax for many commands. GitHub Copilot for the command-line interface (CLI) can compose commands and loops, and surface hidden find flags to fulfill your request.

Subscription Plans

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

GitHub Copilot Business

GitHub Copilot Business allows you to control who has access to GitHub Copilot within your company. Once access is granted to an organization, its administrators can assign it to individuals and teams.

With GitHub Copilot Business, GitHub Copilot is available to all developers, teams, organizations, and enterprises.

Key features of GitHub Copilot Business focus on enhancing productivity, security, and organizational satisfaction:

• Code autocompletion
• In-IDE and mobile chat
• Security vulnerability filtering
• Code referencing
• Public code filtering
• Intellectual property indemnity
• Enterprise-grade privacy and security

GitHub Copilot Enterprise

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is available to organizations via GitHub Enterprise Cloud. This subscription plan enables your development teams to:

• Quickly get up to speed with your codebase
• Generate and search documentation
• Receive suggestions based on internal and private code
• Efficiently review pull requests

GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business, plus a layer of customization for organizations. It integrates with GitHub as a conversational interface so developers can chat about their codebase. It also provides action buttons across the platform.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization’s codebase for better understanding and more personalized suggestions. It offers access to GitHub Copilot customization to fine-tune private models for code autocompletion.

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