GitHub AI and the Future of Development

Since launched in March 2023, GitHub’s AI powered Copilot has transformed the life of numerous programmers and development focused agencies, offering innovative solutions that have redefined the way developers approach and execute new projects.

With GitHub’s most recent conference, the UNIVERSE 23, Copilot has gained an entire day of the event, featuring several upgrades and refinements. These enhancements mark a significant new era for the platform as a whole, introducing cutting-edge AI-powered tools and optimisations that promise to elevate the coding experience for developers worldwide.

 

1. What is Github Copilot?
2. What Makes Copilot Special?
3. Copilot Within GitHub
4. Copilot Pricing
5. BFJ Web Development

 

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot serves as an AI pair programmer for developers driven by Codex, an AI framework created by OpenAI and Microsoft that is being trained in both natural language and billions of lines of code.

During the last couple of years, Copilot has been continually enhanced to work seamlessly on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code IDE, and can either receive prompts for specific tasks or generate precise code suggestions on the go, leveraging the developers experience, productivity and has proven to accelerate the pace of software development teams in up to incredibly 55%.

 

A common misconception about Copilot it that it reads code on the web and copy into your apps. However, as an AI Generative Code tool, Copilot is capable of generating completely novel code by looking at the code you’ve already written in your project as context and attempts to produce new code to match it perfectly. By doing so, it not only suggests individual lines of code but can generate entire functions, significantly accelerating the development process.

 

What Makes Copilot Special?

What sets GitHub AI apart is its comprehensive training on a diverse range of data sources. Beyond conventional datasets, it has been enriched with knowledge from natural language text and source code found in publicly available repositories, specially those on GitHub. This extensive training equips Copilot with a profound understanding of coding patterns, enabling it to provide relevant suggestions to developers.

A great example of how Copilot is trained in a variety of external datasets happens when it’s needed to create widely used functions like fetching data or creating unit tests for components. By simply typing the name of the function, Copilot is capable of generating the entire function in seconds.

Another powerful tool Copilot brings to the table is the Copilot Chat, which had several enhancements announced on GitHub’s latest UNIVERSE 23 event, such as:

• GPT-4 powered Chat;
• Code-aware guidance and code generation;
• Inline AI-powered Copilot Chat;
• Slash commands to shortcut big tasks;
• JetBrains IDE integration.

Copilot Within GitHub

GitHub serves as the platform where projects initiate, developers collaborate, and the open source community constructs and expands the global codebase. Not surprisingly, the GitHub team is now bringing the power of Copilot and AI directly into the biggest developer platform in the world: github.com.

This integration will empower developers to dive into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding inquiries, with Copilot Chat offering valuable suggestions, summaries, analyses, and answers.

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Leveraging the power of natural language, Copilot is also exploring Voice Coding, a new feature that will enable write code without the keyboard, which comes in handy as an assistance feature as well. In addition, on iPhone and Android devices, developers can get answers to any programming question and about the repositories, files, or documentation they’re viewing in the GitHub app, making it easy to continue using Code tools anywhere.

With Copilot in the code editor, typed or spoken , in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in the mobile app, GitHub is making Copilot widespread throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of the platform’s surface areas.

 

Copilot Pricing

GitHub Copilot offers all those features above bundled in a single subscription plan with a fair pricing attending to diverse coding needs. For solo coders and freelancers, the individual plan comes at a reasonable $10 per month, providing access to Copilot’s chat and code completions.

Teams can opt for the business plan at $19 per user monthly, enhancing collaborative coding experiences. This plan comes with Copilot’s assistance in the command terminal (CLI) as well as enterprise-grade security, safety and privacy such as IP indemnity, public code filtering and security vulnerability alerts.

Looking ahead, the enterprise plan, set to launch in February 2024 at $39 per user monthly, promises advanced features for larger-scale projects such as:

• Chat personalised to your codebase;
• Documentation search and summaries;
• Pull request summaries;
• Code review skills;
• and more…

These pricing options ensure that whether you’re coding solo or leading a robust team, GitHub Copilot remains an accessible and valuable tool to enhance your code performance and reduce development time.

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Choose BFJ Web Development

At BFJ, we’re always on the cutting edge when it comes to employing the latest and most powerful digital AI tools. With a strong commitment to staying ahead of the curve, BFJ analysed the industry and develops custom strategies based on your business needs. Contact our team at BFJ Digital and get a personalised solution.