What is GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer. GitHub Copilot is powered by a new AI system developed by OpenAI codex and coming soon to Visual Studio Code.
It aims to help Programmers code faster. It basically draws context from the code you’re working on, suggesting whole lines or entire functions.
OpenAI codex has a broad knowledge of how people use code and is significantly more capable than GPT-3 in code generation.
How does GitHub Copilot work?
GitHub Copilot suggests the code style’s complete lines or entire functions by analyzing your code style and how you code. It can assemble the code from the user comments and predicts your code by just reading the function name you have declared
GitHub Copilots allows you to cycle through alternative suggestions and manually edit the suggested code. It autofill repetitive code, or create unit tests for your methods.
How Good is GitHub Copilot?
It helps developers quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without tediously tailoring a search for answers on sites like StackOverflow and across the internet.
It is said to have tested against a set of Python functions that have good test coverage in open source repos by blanking out the function bodies and asked GitHub Copilot to fill them in. The model got this right 43% of the time on the first try, 57% of the time when allowed 10 attempts and it’s getting smarter all the time.
GitHub Copilot tries to understand your intent and to generate the best it can, but the code it suggests may not always work or even make sense. The algorithm consistently improves by recording whether each suggestion is accepted or not
GitHub Copilot draws context from the code you’re working on
Will it share your private code others?
A big NO! They claim to use telemetry data, including information about which suggestions users accept or reject, to improve the model.
How to get GitHub Copilot
For now, GitHub copilot only is made available to use in VS Code and the access is limited to a small group of testers. The preview version is available for free. The preview version is already installed more than 100k+ users and keep growing.
You can also register for a preview on its website – https://copilot.github.com/
Will GitHub Copilot affect the developer’s job?
GitHub copilot autocompletes the snippets and suggests the new lines of code and even can write whole functions based on the description provided by the developers and helps to complete work faster. The technology will enable existing engineers to be more productive, reducing manual tasks and helping them to focus on interesting works. I only suggest a piece of code, it still needs to be reviewed and tested manually, like you normally do with your regular code. but it doesn’t look like it will affect the developer’s job.
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