What is GitHub co-pilot?

In this article, we will see what is GitHub co-pilot and how it works inside VS code. As well as techniques on how to use it to improve your programming.

Github co-pilot is the Godzilla of autocomplete. It is state-of-the-art AI technology from open AI that provides suggestions when you write code. The advice can range from words to lines of code to even entire functions over multiple lines. For example, you might want to perform a sentiment check on some text rather than using stack overflow, searching for a good API, and writing out the function manually. You can add some comments on copilot what you follow and the artificially paired programmer will do the work for you writing out this clear function that looks way better than any code.

How does it work

Copilot has been trained on billions of lines of public code written by developers all over the world. This means that it might have some wacky outputs that are upside down but in most cases, you’ll get a wide context of autocompletes. Which pretty much covers every type of function, you might want to write. It is also not limited to a single language or framework, which means that it has a wider use case allowing you to work from python to javascript, typescript even ruby.

Powerful things:

• It is the ability to take in context more than any other AI.
• Allows it to synthesize code in a way that we have never seen before.
• Copilot can extrapolate from code that’s already in a file and use correct variables, classes, structures, etc that are well-defined. For example, if wanted to write a function in goto check the average runtime in seconds. Copilot will use the variables, I have already written and filled out the rest of the function.

This is just the basics of copilot does, it can do a lot more grunt work that we haven’t even considered before. Things like having automatic, autofill, capabilities for manual labor tasks with patterns and repeating structures.

For example, If you’re writing out a large JSON and you need to fill out different types of languages. Copilot can literally understand the context of what you’re trying to do and finish the work for you. This means it grasps that you’re trying to iterate over different languages in a JSON format and trying to provide the start and stop syntax for adding comments. It can understand and populate all the information for you. So far we’ve looked at examples of writing code and extrapolating syntax but let’s what sort of things the copilot can do.

In terms of helping you learn new code and languages and form tasks, you might not have tried before. You can write out good ideas such as a book rating system or fetching tweets and see what that function would look like in different languages. This is very useful and you can infer a lot of learning that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to because of the consistent structure that most humans wouldn’t be able to do. So, you guys now have a good understanding of how the copilot works. In terms of using AI to help you autocomplete a lot of the code.