At GitHub, it’s part of our mission to build technology that makes developers happy. Since the launch of GitHub Copilot technical preview last year, it’s become very clear that AI is one of the best tools to empower the next generation of developers. AI is already acting as a copilot in our lives. It’s helping us write emails and essays, automatically generating photo albums of our loved ones, and even acting as a digital assistant to help us order groceries.
But until now, AI has stopped short of improving code, leaving the process of developing software almost completely manual. Today, I am thrilled to announce that we are making GitHub Copilot generally available to individual developers. Your AI pair programmer is here.
What is the market offering of GitHub Copilot?
With GitHub Copilot, for the first time in the history of software, AI can be broadly harnessed by developers to write and complete code. Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding will greatly change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool to write code easier and faster so they can be happier in their lives.
We specifically designed GitHub Copilot as an editor extension to make sure nothing gets in the way of what you’re doing. GitHub Copilot distills the collective knowledge of the world’s developers into an editor extension that suggests code in real time, to help you stay focused on what matters most: building great software. When you type code or comments, GitHub Copilot suggests the next line of code. But it’s not only a single word or line of code.
GitHub Copilot can suggest complete methods, boilerplate code, whole unit tests, and even complex algorithms. GitHub Copilot software today enables developers to:
- Get AI-based coding suggestions: Get code suggestions that match a project’s context and style conventions, and cycle through options to decide what to accept, reject, or edit.
- Use your preferred environment: Integrate GitHub Copilot with popular editors, like Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code as an unobtrusive extension.
- Code confidently in unfamiliar territory: Code in new languages and let GitHub Copilot suggest syntax and code in languages—so you can spend more time learning by doing.
With more than 1.2 million developers in our technical preview over the last 12 months, people who started using GitHub Copilot quickly told us it became an indispensable part of their daily workflows. In files where it’s enabled, nearly 40% of code is being written by GitHub Copilot in popular coding languages, like Python—and we expect that to increase.
That is creating more time and space for developers today to focus on solving bigger problems and building even better software. And now, you can put the power of GitHub Copilot to work for yourself in your preferred environment with a free 60-day trial.
How can developers access GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot wouldn’t be possible without GitHub’s vibrant community of students and creators. To support and give back to those communities, we’re making GitHub Copilot available for free to verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects.
We have students and maintainers using GitHubCopilot free of charge. If you’re a student and want to participate in the program, apply for the GitHub Student Pack. And if you’re a maintainer, check out our FAQs to see if you qualify to start using GitHub Copilot at no cost.
GitHub Copilot is our first step toward empowering developers across the globe with artificial intelligence. Starting today, it’s now available to all developers, and we’ll begin offering it to companies later this year. Get started with a 60-day free trial, and check out our pricing plans. It’s free to use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source software.
