We are in the era of Artificial Intelligence, and it is taking over numerous manual and repetitive tasks. We have AI in almost every system, tool, or device regardless of any domain. Likewise, we are surrounded by AI and its applications. AI is reducing our workloads, recommending the best options, doing things faster, and many more. Now we have ample use cases of AI in every product and service. Importantly, every tech company is exploring AI and implementing its application in their solutions to enhance user experience.
Likewise, AI can be implemented in IT to automate repetitive tasks, resolve the support issues, reply to the IT requests, IT support and assistance, etc. Most importantly, AI can play a vital role in designing solutions, writing code, finding issues in code, fixing bugs, QA, optimizing code and performance, and can be our copilot in development.
Yes, AI can be our copilot in software development. In fact, AI can be our copilot in every phase of development starting from building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating. This is where GitHub Copilot comes.
GitHub Copilot is a new AI tool that helps developers to write code faster and better. Indeed, it is an AI coding partner that provides suggestions to your code and can write code based on description in natural language. This AI copilot model is built on a heavy GitHub code base and OpenAI collaboration, which is further backed by Microsoft.
In this article, we will explore GitHub Copilot and how to get started with it.
GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to assist developers in suggesting and writing code based on the context. It is developed with the collaboration of OpenAI and Microsoft. It uses OpenAI’s Codex language model, which has been trained on a massive dataset of public code repositories. GitHub Copilot can suggest code completions, functions, and even entire programs, based on the context of the code that you are currently writing. Furthermore, it can provide suggestions to optimize the code performance, identify bugs and provide fixes of it, and generate documentation of the code.
Additionally, GitHub Copilot can also be used with several programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, and Go. It can also be helpful to generate code for a variety of tasks, such as web development, data science, and machine learning.
Moreover, it can be directly integrated well with a variety of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs.
As per research, it has improved the developer productivity significantly as portrayed.
GitHub Copilot Pricing
This GitHub Copilot comes with two pricing models: Individual and Business.
Getting Started with GitHub Copilot
In this section, we will learn how to get started with GitHub Copilot and use this awesome tool for writing code and do development.
Prerequisites
- You need to have a valid license to use this tool. If you don’t have a valid license, you can start with a one-time 30-day trial.
- Visual Studio 2022 version 17.4.4 or later.
In this article, I will be using Visual Studio.
First, we will install an extension in Visual Studio named GitHub Copilot.
Now we will search for GitHub Copilot as shown below.
We will download the extension, GitHub Copilot.
We should close Visual Studio to install the GitHub Copilot extension.
Now, we will verify the installation of the extension.
The GitHub Copilot extension has been successfully installed in my visual studio.
Let’s create a new project and use this AI copilot for code suggestions. I will create a simple asp.net core project with Blazor Server App Template.
For getting started with Blazor Web Application, check out this article.
We will navigate to a class (.cs) file as shown below.
We will write a description comment to get code suggestions from GitHub Copilot.
With a simple comment, it provides the entire method with code. Awesome!!!
We can click Tab button and the whole function is ready just by clicking. So we can use Tab to accept the suggestion, however, we can request for another sample or code with Alt+ as shown below.
Once I press Alt+, we will get another sample for the same function as portrayed.
And press tab to get the function ready. Consequently, the Encrypt method is ready with just a short comment. Great!
Based on this function, it automatically suggests decrypting one with the comment.
Likewise, we can use GitHub Copilot in our project and write code much faster with just comments. The best thing about it is that it does not show any error when we implemented the code suggested. Cool!
This is how we can integrate our AI copilot while writing code and do development efficiently.
Conclusion
Today, Artificial Intelligence is becoming one of the vital parts of each solution and its applications are almost everywhere. AI tools have been proven to be efficient in automating several tasks and bringing innovation. We can use AI to ease our task and do those efficiently. AI is being adopted globally, and the response is much better. GitHub Copilot is another implementation of AI in writing code faster and efficiently. This copilot is trained on billions of lines of code, which can suggest and improve code based on natural language. Moreover, this AI copilot can help developers to write code faster and accurately. Furthermore, it comes with a variety of IDEs and is applied to most of the popular programming languages. In this article, I have explored GitHub Copilot and shown how to integrate it in Visual Studio for writing code.