Copilot is an artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft to assist users of various integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code. There are different versions of Copilot available, including GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based AI pair programmer that helps users write code faster and with less work. It draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions instantly. It is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of IDEs. On the other hand, Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. It transforms work in three ways: helping users be more creative, analytical, expressive, productive, and collaborative.
Copilot can help users with various tasks such as creating documents, reading and summarizing emails, crafting presentations, analyzing data, and more. It can also suggest code solutions when provided with a programming problem in natural language. Copilot shares recommendations based on the projects context and style conventions and can quickly cycle through lines of code, complete function suggestions, and autocomplete chunks of code, repetitive sections of code, and entire methods and/or functions.
However, there have been concerns with Copilots security and educational impact, as well as licensing controversy surrounding the code it produces. Copilots autocomplete feature is accurate roughly half of the time. It is designed to generate the best code possible given the context it has access to, but it doesn’t test the code it suggests, so the code may not always work or even make sense. Copilot can only hold a very limited context, so it may not make use of helpful functions defined elsewhere in the project or even in the same file. And it may suggest old or deprecated uses of libraries and languages.
