GitHub Copilot, your AI pair programmer

  • 2 minutes

The logo icon for GitHub Copilot that shows the Copilot icon in the middle with a blue and green swirl around the logo.

It's no secret that AI is disrupting the technology industry. AI is shaping how development teams work and build software. These advancements in AI can enhance the productivity of developers around the world.

The addition of AI features to the developer tools that you use and love helps you collaborate, develop, test, and ship your products faster and more efficiently than ever before. GitHub Copilot is a service that provides you with an AI pair programmer that works with all of the popular programming languages.

In recent research, GitHub and Microsoft found that developers experience a significant productivity boost when they use GitHub Copilot to work on real-world projects and tasks. In fact, in the three years since its launch, developers have experienced the following benefits while using GitHub Copilot:

  • 46% of new code now written by AI
  • 55% faster overall developer productivity
  • 74% of developers feeling more focused on satisfying work

Microsoft developed GitHub Copilot in collaboration with OpenAI. GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex system. OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code and is more capable than GPT-3 in code generation. OpenAI Codex is more capable, in part, because it was trained on a dataset that included a larger concentration of public source code.

GitHub Copilot is available as an extension for VS Code, Visual Studio, Vim/Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of IDEs.

GitHub Copilot features

GitHub Copilot started an AI pair programmer that keeps developers in the flow by autocompleting comments and code. But AI-powered autocompletion was just the starting point.

Here are some features of GitHub Copilot that truly make it a modern developer tool. With these features, GitHub Copilot is more than just an editor. It's becoming a readily accessible AI assistant throughout the entire development life cycle.

Copilot for chat

GitHub Copilot brings a ChatGPT-like chat interface to the editor. The chat interface focuses on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio. It's deeply embedded in the IDE, and it recognizes what code a developer has typed and what error messages appear. A developer can get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs.

Copilot for pull requests

OpenAI's GPT-4 model adds support in GitHub Copilot for AI-powered tags in pull-request descriptions through a GitHub app that organization admins and individual repository owners can install. GitHub Copilot automatically fills out these tags based on the changed code. Developers can then review or modify the suggested descriptions.

Copilot for the CLI

Next to the editor and pull requests, the terminal is the place where developers spend the most time. However, even the most proficient developers need to scroll through many pages to remember the precise syntax of many commands. The GitHub Copilot command-line interface (CLI) can compose commands and loops, and it can throw obscure find flags to satisfy your query.

Subscription plans

GitHub Copilot is available in several plans, each offering different capabilities for individuals, teams, and organizations.

GitHub Copilot Free

GitHub Copilot Free allows individual developers to use GitHub Copilot at no cost. To get started, open Visual Studio Code, click on the GitHub Copilot icon, and then click "Sign in to Use GitHub Copilot for Free". Log in to your GitHub account in the window that will open in the browser.

The GitHub Copilot Free tier includes 2000 code completions per month, 50 chat requests per month, and access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models. Learn more.

Key features:

  • Code completions in supported editors
  • Limited monthly completions and chat requests
  • Access to advanced AI models

GitHub Copilot Pro

GitHub Copilot Pro is designed for individual developers who want enhanced capabilities beyond the Free plan.

Key features:

  • Unlimited code completions and chat requests
  • Priority access to the latest AI models
  • Advanced code suggestions and explanations
  • Integration with supported IDEs (VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Neovim)
  • Automated test generation and code explanation features

GitHub Copilot Pro+

Copilot Pro+ includes all the features of Copilot Pro with additional access to premium model usage and priority performance on high-demand resources. It's suited for individuals with higher usage needs.

Key features:

  • All Pro features
  • Additional premium request capacity
  • Priority infrastructure access

GitHub Copilot Business

GitHub Copilot Business is for organizations that want to manage Copilot access and benefit from additional security and compliance features.

Key features:

  • All Pro and Pro+ features for organization members
  • Centralized management and policy controls
  • Security vulnerability filtering
  • Code referencing and public code filtering
  • IP indemnity and enterprise-grade security, safety, and privacy
  • Chat in IDE and mobile
  • Filter for public code

GitHub Copilot Enterprise

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is designed for large organizations and enterprises that require advanced capabilities, deeper integration, and enhanced personalization.

Key features:

  • All Business features
  • Personalized code suggestions based on internal/private code
  • Integration with GitHub Enterprise Cloud
  • AI-powered search and documentation generation across your codebase
  • Enhanced pull request support with AI-powered tags and summaries
  • Organization-wide customization and fine-tuning of Copilot models
  • Deep integration with GitHub for chat and codebase exploration.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business, plus a layer of personalization for organizations. It provides integration into GitHub as a chat interface, so developers can converse about their codebase. It also provides action buttons throughout the platform.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization's codebase for a deeper understanding and for suggestions that are more tailored. It offers access to GitHub Copilot customization to fine-tune private models for code completion.

In the next unit, you'll learn about how to get started with GitHub Copilot and some common configurations.