So here it is. Artificial intelligence (AI) has finally come to coding. GitHub has launched a technical preview of GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that helps anyone write better code.
This new program draws of millions of lines of code available publicly. GitHub Copilot draws context from the code you’re working on, then draws on its data bank of code to suggest whole lines or entire functions. It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, & explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the Internet. Incidentally, GitHub was bought over by Microsoft in 2018.
GitHub Copilot has been developed in collaboration with OpenAI. It is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code because it was trained on a data set that includes a much larger concentration of public source code. GitHub Copilot works with a broad set of frameworks & languages, but this technical preview works especially well for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby & Go.
Image credit: GitHub
