GitHub’s New AI Assistant Writes Code As You Type
GitHub has opened a limited technical preview of GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered tool that functions as a pair programmer. Rather than searching the web for snippets or API documentation, developers can get suggestions for whole lines or entire functions directly in their editor. Copilot adapts to your coding style in real time, offering completions that help you finish tasks faster and explore alternative approaches, write tests, or work with unfamiliar APIs.
The system is the product of a collaboration with OpenAI and runs on the latter’s Codex model. Codex is a new AI system with broad knowledge of how developers use code, and it outperforms GPT-3 in code generation because it was trained on a dataset with a far higher concentration of public source code. Copilot supports a wide range of frameworks and languages, with especially strong performance in this preview for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.
Interested developers can sign up at the GitHub Copilot page, though the number of available spots is limited.
