Understanding GitHub Copilot(AI Pair Programmer)

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer which suggests line completions and entire function bodies as you type.

"Hmm that's Cool right!! But i think there is lot of kerfuffle around it."

GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex AI system.

"You might me now thinking what is this OPenAI Codex AI system."

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company.The investors include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, and Khosla Ventures.Goal of the company is promoting and developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole.

Recently OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to for-profit.
They have developed so many products.They have papers submitted on topic generative pre-training of a language model.This Generative pre-training commonly known by its abbreviated form GPT.

So now coming back to our GitHub Copilot, it is built on a new algorithm called OpenAI Codex, which OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman describes as a descendant of GPT-3.While GPT-3 generates English, OpenAI Codex generates code.

It works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go, according to a blog post from GitHub.

Since now GitHub is with Microsoft , Microsoft can easly push the OpenAI elements to GitHub.For now, Microsoft is only offering the service that knows about code stored in public repositories.Future we can expect that for enterprise customers too.

GitHub have a nice documentation written for the Copilot.Have a look.

"Now the question will be how to use it"

It is available today as a Visual Studio Code extension.

But currently we need to signup and access is limited to a small group of testers during the technical preview.