Microsoft has now paired up with Github and OpenAI to create an artificial intelligence system that can recommend code to software developers.
The system which has been named Github Copilot, will be able to draw upon source code from Github to assess and suggest code. Now this has been a concept that has been researched by Microsoft for decades and the reason why there hasn’t been much progress is because of the lack of two factors – versatile code and cloud computing power from Azure.
Currently the system works under the principle of a pair programmer – which is a scenario where two developers pair up to collaborate on the same code. It supports almost every programming language and works best with Python, Javascript and Typescript.
Words from the creators:
“The new software makes coding faster. Hundreds of developers at GitHub have been using the Copilot feature all day while coding, and the majority of them are accepting suggestions and not turning the feature off.”
Nat Friedman, CEO of Github
“You don’t want to go read Twilio’s API documentation. It knows all that stuff. It’s actually quite reliable at it,”
Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI and its chief technology officer.
“It can save me from having to dive through a whole bunch of documentation to get a tool to do a thing that I know it’s capable of doing, and that is so good for productivity. I can’t even tell you the number of hours I’ve wasted trying to figure out the right way to do a relatively prosaic thing, just navigating the complexity of these tools.”
Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer
The tool is said to make it’s first appearance on Visual Studio Code and then to be incorporated in commercial Visual Studio products in the future.
References:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/microsoft-github-copilot-ai-offers-coding-suggestions.html