Introduction to GitHub Co Pilot 👨🏻‍✈️

1. What is GitHub Co pilot 👨🏻‍✈️

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps you write code faster and with less work. It draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions instantly. GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pretrained language model created by OpenAI. It is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).

2. Why it is necessary for developers 💁🏻‍♂️💁🏻‍♀️

As GitHub suggests, Copilot is truly your pair programmer. It helps you write code faster and with less work, and in return, it learns from your feedback to improve its suggestions. Who knows, maybe as it learns, the GitHub Copilot will become more human alike in the future.

3. Does GitHub Copilot write perfect code🙄🙄

While you’re typing, Copilot will autocomplete your code with the most accurate completions it can find, based on the knowledge it has from all of the code it’s been trained on.

This can lead to some problems however with training code possibly being licensed. Multiple times people have posted code that they got as completion by Copilot that was not legal to use without license. Although Copilot was trained on open-source code, some of that code could have been plagiarized and therefore not be safe to use in production.

4. Alternatives platform like GitHub Copilot 🎭

There are alternative platform of auto complete code that powered by AI connected to the developers' editors like Kite and TabNine

5. Is it free or not 💸

Answer basically no for beginners in my prospective. An AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, generally available to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. It will also be free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects.The best way to use this feature to contribute on a industry open source project and the organisation verify the users github account and feel free to use it.

6. History 🧭

• On 29 June 2021, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot for technical preview in the Visual Studio Code development environment.

• On 26 October 2021, GitHub Copilot was released as a plugin on the JetBrains marketplace.

• On 27 October 2021, GitHub released the GitHub Copilot Neovim plugin as a public repository.

• On 29 March 2022, GitHub officially announced Copilot's availability for the Visual Studio 2022 IDE.

• On 21 June 2022, GitHub officially announced that Copilot was out of "technical preview", and is available as a subscription-based service for individual developers. Additionally, GitHub mentioned that Copilot would remain "free for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects" and "will be offered to companies later this year (2022)".

7. How it works 👨🏻‍🏫

The GitHub Copilot editor extension sends your comments and code to the GitHub Copilot service, which then uses OpenAI Codex to synthesize and suggest code. it actually works by reading through all the open-source code on the GitHub repos worldwide and then collect the data and tries to find the best possible code related to it! It is said to work great with repetitive code patterns so users can let it generate the rest of the code. The AI assistant can also help you learn a new programming language.

It can suggest complete lines of code or entire functions by analyzing how you code. GitHub Copilot can assemble code from user comments and predicts your code by just reading the function name you have declared. It allows you to cycle through alternative suggestions and manually edit the suggested code. It autofill repetitive code, or create unit tests for your methods.

8. Let's check out few examples! 🚩

Here is some example of simple code test for binary search and the longestValidParentheses function automatic suggetion by github co pilot.

9. GitHub Co pilot security 🔐⚔🛡

The study tracked Copilot's behavior along three dimensions:

• Diversity of weakness its propensity for generating code that is susceptible to each of weaknesses in the CWE top 25, given a scenario where such a vulnerability is possible
• Diversity of prompt its response to the context for a particular scenario (SQL injection)
• Diversity of domain its response to the domain, i.e., programming language/paradigm "Overall, Copilot's response to our scenarios is mixed from a security standpoint, given the large number of generated vulnerabilities (across all axes and languages, 39.33 percent of the top and 40.48 percent of the total options were vulnerable)," the paper said. "The security of the top options are particularly important -- novice users may have more confidence to accept the 'best' suggestion. As Copilot is trained over open-source code available on GitHub, we theorize that the variable security quality stems from the nature of the community-provided code. That is, where certain bugs are more visible in open-source repositories, those bugs will be more often reproduced by Copilot."

10. Will GitHub Copilot replace developers 👨🏻‍💻

Bringing in more intelligent systems has the potential to bring enormous change to the developer experience. We do not expect GitHub Copilot to replace developers. Rather, we expect GitHub Copilot to partner with developers, augment their capabilities, and enable them to be more productive, reduce manual tasks, and help them focus on interesting work. We also believe that GitHub Copilot has the potential to lower barriers to entry, enabling more people to explore software development, and join the next generation of developers. We are working to test these hypotheses with both internal and external research.

• Thats it for this blog. I hope you will try it out and learn something new. Also incase i have missed something feel free to share your thoughts and feedback. Thanks for reading.

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