Explained | Everything you need to know about GitHub Copilot

(Image Courtesy: GitHub)

Currently available as a technical preview for developers, Microsoft-owned, GitHub's Copilot code completion tool has been impressing developers, who have used it.

GitHub #Copilot just completed an entire block of bash code exactly how I intended.

Story continues below Advertisement

Remove Ad

// @amandaksilver@martinwoodward@matvellosopic.twitter.com/Eq2dSGEAQ6 — Bruno Borges (@brunoborges) October 29, 2021

So what exactly is Copilot and why is it blowing people's minds?

Copilot is AI-based auto completion tool for coding. It fully supports code in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Java and Go.

GitHub says that even if you code in a language it doesn't understand, it can still provide enough context for you to get things done.

Also Read: Indian-origin Ashok Elluswamy was first employee to be hired for Tesla's Autopilot team: Elon Musk

How does it work? 

Microsoft and GitHub's Copilot was trained with a repository of billions of lines of public code, made by a network of more than 73 million developers that exist on the GitHub platform.

It will understand and provide suggestions to finish code, and even let you adjust the suggested code to your liking. Copilot will also learn and adapt to your specific coding style using Machine Learning, offering you suggestions and solutions in context.

At its core, the technology is powered by Codex, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system created by OpenAI, and understands significantly more context, than other code assistants.

"Trying to code in an unfamiliar language by googling everything is like navigating a foreign country with just a phrase book," says Harri Edwards from OpenAI.

"Using GitHub Copilot is like hiring an interpreter."

Copilot's capabilities don't end at code completion either, it can also assemble code based on the logic you want, it can automatically take care of repetitive code by auto-filling them and even suggests the best tests for your code, based on context.

Also Read: India looks to broad-base AI workforce to meet growing demand

Is it a threat to originality? 

The Copilot team is aware of the concerns developer's have over job safety. If AI can write code, why do we need developer's?

For starters, as smart as it is, it still doesn't have human intuition and the creators have made it clear, that they don't see a future, where Copilot is about to provide code without human input.

“The truly creative part of coding is deciding what the software should do,” says Oege de Moor from GitHub Next, the team behind Copilot, speaking with Protocol.

“I don’t foresee a future where Copilot produces useful code without human input. I do see unbridled human creativity no longer held back by irrelevant details,” he added.

GitHub also stresses that Copilot is primarily a tool that provides context, and without human input to analyse, it has no function.