You wanna bug fix and chill?
Microsoft’s GitHub on Tuesday released its Copilot AI programming assistance tool into the wild after a year-long free technical trial. And now that GitHub Copilot is generally available, developers will have to start paying for it. Or most of them will. Verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects may continue using Copilot at no charge. Those who have been testing the AI assistance extension, however, will find that it no longer works and instead presents a prompt to activate a 60-day free trial. That’s the onboarding option available to newcomers as well. Upon completion of the trial, the fee will be $10 per month or $100 per year to continue using the software. Enterprise-managed user accounts aren’t yet supported. This is a bit less than the $12 per month Pro plan for a similar tool, Tabnine.
„With GitHub Copilot, for the first time in the history of software, AI can be broadly harnessed by developers to write and complete code“, said Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, in a blog post. „Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding will fundamentally 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.“
Copilot takes the form of an extension for text editors and IDEs that are used for software development. The tool, powered by OpenAI’s text-generating technology, can thus be plugged into applications like Microsoft Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and various JetBrains IDEs.
