GitHub Inc. said today that its artificial intelligence-powered Copilot tool, which is designed to make life easier for developers, is now available to individual developers for $ 10 a month or $ 100 a year, with a free trial of 60 days offered.
The company released Copilot in beta in June 2021 and describes the tool as an “AI peer programmer.” Copilot aims to help developers by suggesting the following line of code as they type into an integrated development environment such as JetBrains IDE, Neovim, or Microsoft Visual Studio Code. In addition to suggesting code, you can also present complete methods and more complex algorithms when needed.
In a blog post, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said GitHub Copilot was designed as an editor extension to make sure nothing gets in the way of what developers are doing.
“GitHub Copilot distills the collective knowledge of developers around the world into an editor extension that suggests real-time code, to help you focus on what matters most: creating great software,” he said. .
According to Dohmke, about 1.2 million developers have tested Copilot throughout its preview phase. Apparently, it has also been quite useful, with Dohmke claiming that he has written up to 40% of the developer’s code written in popular languages such as Python.
“Like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe that AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new, easier and faster tool for writing code,” Dohmke said.
Code automation could become the next competitive field in software development. Last year, DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google LLC’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., demonstrated an AI system called AlphaCode that is also very capable of writing software code. DeepMind tested AlphaCode compared to a third encoding platform called Codeforces and achieved an estimated rating that placed it within the top 54% of human encoders, not perfect, but certainly an achievement to build.
That said, there has been some controversy over the use of AI in coding. In the case of Copilot, the tool is powered by OpenAI Codex, which is a language model that has been trained in billions of publicly available source code lines and natural language data, as well as code that is available in GitHub public repositories.
This reliance on open source training data seems to have upset the Free Software Foundation, which has called Copilot “unacceptable and unfair”. The foundation has questioned whether co-licensed co-pilot training constitutes a “legitimate use”. This is a problem because Copilot is not free in itself, but a paid service that is used as a substitute for software, the foundation said.
Aside from copyright issues, a December study showed that Copilot can be a security issue, as up to 40% of its coding output contains vulnerabilities.
GitHub didn’t seem to address any of these complaints today, but at least it acknowledged its debt with open source.
“GitHub Copilot would not be possible without the vibrant community of GitHub students and creators,” Dohmke said. “To support and return these communities, we make GitHub Copilot free for students and verified maintainers of popular open source projects.”
Image: GitHub