Copilot was created last year by Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI.
GitHub and OpenAI introduced Copilot, a tool that delivers code suggestions inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio, in June of last year.
The service is a downloadable extension that is powered by Codex, an AI model that has been trained using billions of lines of public code to be able to suggest given existing coding context, as well as suggest an approach or a solution “in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish, drawing on its knowledge base and current model.”
Copilot was offered as a technical preview until this summer, when it was made freely available.
Copilot will also be free for students and “certified” open-source contributors, as revealed in Build 2022, with additional specifics to come later.
Developers will be able to “cycle through suggestions for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of other programming languages and accept, reject, or manually alter them,” similar to how they were able to do with the technical review.
The programme “matches particular coding styles to autofill boilerplate or repetitive code patterns and recommends unit tests that match implementation code,” according to the service.
Copilot extensions are provided for Noevim, JetBrains, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub Codespaces in the cloud.
In addition, with Copilot’s public release, a new feature called Copilot Explain will be available.
This tool helps rookie developers or those “working with an unfamiliar codebase” by translating code into natural language descriptions.
Furthermore, Github recently announced that the Sponsors programme is now open to Indian developers, allowing individuals or developer organisations to apply for worldwide financial assistance for their projects.