GitHub CopilotTranslation site

GitHub What's Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is a collaboration between GitHub and theOpenAIA jointly developedAI Programming Aids. Trained on a large library of open source code, it understands both programming and human language and provides developers with real-time code completion, suggestions, and optimizations.Initially released in preview in 2021, and going live in 2022, Copilot aims to improve developers' programming efficiency and code quality, and has become one of the most popular developer tools.

GitHub Copilot Core Features

1. Code Completion
   • GitHub Copilot is able to provide real-time code-completion suggestions based on the context of the code a developer is writing. This not only completes simple lines of code, but also generates complete functions, classes, and even more complex code snippets.
2. Multi-language support
   • Copilot supports a wide range of programming languages, including but not limited to Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C++, Java, C#, and more. This allows developers to use the same tool for different projects and improve coding efficiency.
3. natural language-generated code (NLG)
   • Copilot understands natural language descriptions and generates code based on them. Developers can describe a function or algorithm in natural language in comments and Copilot will automatically generate code based on the description.
4. Learning from Context
   • Copilot is able to analyze the code a developer is currently writing, understand the variables, functions, classes, modules, etc. defined in the code, and then generate code suggestions that are highly relevant to the current context. This enables Copilot to provide not only simple code completion, but also to generate more complex code logic.
5. Cross-document reasoning
   • Within a project, Copilot can analyze the relationships between multiple files, identify dependencies, referenced external libraries and modules in the project, and generate appropriate code based on this information. This ability to reason across files allows Copilot to handle complex projects.

GitHub Copilot Technology Implementation

1. core model
   • The core model of GitHub Copilot is Codex, a variant of the large-scale language model GPT-3 based on the Transformer architecture.Codex is trained with a large publicly available codebase drawn primarily from the GitHub Public Project, programming tutorials, documentation, and other public resources.
2. Training data
   • Codex's training data includes not only code from a variety of programming languages, but also program documentation, function comments, and code style guides. This wide range of data sources gives the model the ability to understand different programming patterns and styles.
3. Self-attention mechanism
   • The self-attention mechanism in Transformer allows the model to focus on relevant parts of the code as it generates it, understanding information such as variable declarations, function calls, and code structure. This allows Copilot to generate contextualized code.

GitHub Copilot Fee Policy

GitHub Copilot has a flexible charging policy. It offers a free version with a limit of only 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. For those who need more features, there is Copilot Pro, which is available for a monthly or yearly fee. There is also a Business version for teams and organizations, as well as a more advanced Enterprise version, with pricing based on the number of users and subscription period. Unlimited Copilot Pro accounts are available free of charge for students, teachers and open source maintainers.

How to use GitHub Copilot

1. Installation of plug-ins
   • GitHub Copilot integrates as a plugin into common IDEs such as Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and the JetBrains family of editors. Developers need to install the Copilot plugin in their IDE and log in to their GitHub account to use its features.
2. Configuration options
   • In VS Code's settings, developers can find Copilot's configuration options to adjust its behavior. For example, there is an option to enable or disable code suggestions for certain languages.
3. Code suggestions and applications
   • When a developer writes code in the IDE, Copilot automatically pops up code suggestions. The developer can select and apply the suggestions by clicking on the code suggestion or using a shortcut key.