Microsoft has announced some important updates for its AI-powered programming assistant, GitHub Copilot. The AI-powered programming tool, which has been available in preview since June, has added support for new code editors and additional languages (via Axios)
GitHub Copilot is currently available as a plugin to Visual Studio Code and it helps users to automatically generate code based on the contents of the current file. GitHub has now introduced support for some popular programming languages such as C, C++, C#, and Java, with additional languages to follow in the coming months. This update also brings integration with new editors, including Neovim and JetBrains IDEs.
According to GitHub, Copilot has received a lot of positive feedback so far and around 30 percent of all code on the platform is written with this tool. “We hear a lot from our users that their coding practices have changed using Copilot,” said Oege de Moor, VP of GitHub Next. “Overall, they’re able to become much more productive in their coding.” However, the company acknowledges its accuracy is highly dependent on its training data and that 40 percent of the code generated by Copilot contains security issues, according to a research study.
As of this writing, GitHub Copilot access is only limited to a small group of testers, and the company is inviting more developers to try out the tool. If you’re interested, you can sign up today for the Copilot technical preview on the GitHub page.
