About coding co-pilots

GitHub has launched a new AI tool named Copilot, which is a decision support tool helping build lines of code to developers. This was a pilot collaboration with OpenAI last year. Today it's publicly available to all developers. For $100 a year, Copilot suggests the next line of code to developers as they code in almost any IDE. Copilot offers complete methods and complex algorithms along with boilerplate code and helps with unit testing.

Over 1.2 million developers have signed up for the GitHub Copilot preview in the past 12 months, and it will remain a free tool for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. In the files where it is included, GitHub says that almost 40 percent of the code is now written by Copilot.

Microsoft's $1 billion investment in OpenAI, a research firm now led by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, led to the creation of GitHub Copilot. It is built on OpenAI Codex, a product of the GPT-3 language generation algorithm.

On another note, GitHub Copilot is controversial. The questions arose soon after the launch include a potential issue with the legality of Copilot working with the public code. Moreover, a study revealed that 40 percent of the output has security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft is not the only company working on automated AI tools to help you code. Last year, DeepMind, owned by Google, introduced an AI tool called AlphaCode, designed to write computer programs "at a competitive level." AlphaCode has been tested and received an "evaluative rating", demonstrating how AI coding systems can help programmers in the future.

The future is faster, than you think!