Popular coding platform GitHub has introduced a new tool that helps developers out by suggesting lines and completing functions using AI. The new tool is designed as an autocomplete for coders, it learns their patterns and how they write while suggesting lines or functions when they need it. It works as an extension to Visual Studio and supports a broad set of frameworks and languages. For now, GitHub says it works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby and Go.
Copilot also lets you be in charge of the suggestions. You can cycle through suggestions, choose which ones to keep and reject or even manually edit suggested code.
The tool is not based on GPT-3 but is powered by OpenAI Codex, an entirely new system created by OpenAI. As per the blog post announcing the new tool, " OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code and is significantly more capable than GPT-3 in code generation, in part, because it was trained on a data set that includes a much larger concentration of public source code."
Copilot is available as a technical preview and the company says that the number of spots for people who want to try out the technology are limited for now.
