How Good is Github Copilot: Is GitHub Copilot Safe to Use at Work?

Ever wondered how good the Github Copilot is? We will explain what GitHub Copilot is and how it works, an artificial intelligence system that is revolutionizing programmers. It is an AI  closely related to ChatGPT, although it is focused on making programming suggestions.

We will start by explaining exactly what Copilot is because it doesn't generate code from your requests but from what you've written. And then, we'll explain how it works, all in an easy-to-understand way so that even if you're not a developer, you can understand how it works in a basic way.

What is GitHub Copilot?

Copilot is a help system created by GitHub, which is one of the largest portals in the world for hosting open-source applications. It is a portal that was bought by Microsoft in June 2018, where hundreds of thousands of developers upload their code, their applications, and their tools so that it is open to anyone who wants to review it or collaborate on its development.

Copilot, on the other hand, is an AI-based assistant that helps you write code in real time. GitHub started showing this system in mid-2021 and has gradually developed and improved it.

What this assistant does is suggest code to continue completing a program you are developing. To do this, Copilot is based on what you have written so far to "guess" what you are going to do next. Developers who have tried it since its beginnings have already described it as spectacular and very interesting.

How Does it Feel to Use GitHub Copilot?

We’ve been using GitHub Copilot for programming for a few days now and this is our experience based on Codex, which is a new artificial intelligence system created by OpenAI. This is the same organization that created the GPT-3 engine that ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus or Bing Chat are based on.

So, we can say that it is a close relative of ChatGPT, but it focuses specifically on code creation since it has been trained for that. For its part, Codex works in a very similar way to GPT-3, being able to understand the meaning of the context that we provide through our code, and then synthesize new code from it.

In the short time it has been up and running, Copilot has been used by 1.2 million developers and has achieved very good numbers, with 40% of its suggestions in languages ​​like Python being accepted by developers. Copilot generates completely new code from scratch and does not copy what is already on GitHub, although some free code was used to train it.

Github Copilot is a paid tool, costing $10 per month or $100 per year for independent developers, or $19 per month per user for enterprises, both with a free trial. It also integrates directly into several top-tier code editors, including Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.

Finally, it must be said that Copilot is an AI that is still almost new, so it still has a lot of room for improvement. It is true that in Python its success rates are very high, but its generated or auto-completed codes still have errors, and GitHub will continue to improve it. But even with these errors, it still offers very good code structures that can be useful to you.

How GitHub Copilot Works - Is It Safe to Use at Work?

GitHub Copilot is safe to work at work and it works in a relatively simple way. You are a developer, and you open your compatible coding tool and start writing code for your program. Copilot will understand everything you write, and it will use the code you create.

It works similarly to understand the context of what you're doing, to be able to understand the type of program you're creating, and what you want to achieve with it. Then, when we can, the AI ​​will suggest code suggestions based on everything you've written and how these codes are typically completed with the public text hosted on GitHub.

Copilot is a Revolution for Programmers

It is an AI that knows how to program thanks to knowing how code is developed and written on GitHub. And then, taking into account what you've written, it will be able to generate completely new suggestions from scratch for you to complete your code.

When it makes suggestions, you can either accept the code to have it auto-completed in the editor or say no to have it make different suggestions based on your response. In doing so, Copilot can save you hours of work by generating code that is often tedious and repetitive to write by hand.