GitHub Copilot - Your AI Pair To Write Code Faster and Efficiently

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 its solutions to enhance user experience.

Likewise, AI can be implemented in IT to automate repetitive tasks, resolve support issues, reply to IT requests, provide 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 in.

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 the 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.

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, 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 for 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.

To get started with Blazor Web Application, check out this article.

We will navigate to a class (.cs) file, as shown below.

We will write a descriptive comment to get code suggestions from GitHub Copilot.

With a simple comment, it provides the entire method with code. Awesome!!!

We can click the Tab button, and the whole function is ready just by clicking. So we can use Tab to accept the suggestion. However, we can request 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 the 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 implement the code suggested. Cool!

This is how we can integrate our AI copilot while writing code and doing 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 proven efficient in automating several tasks and bringing innovation. We can use AI to ease our tasks 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 more 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 more 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 into Visual Studio for writing code.

References:

https://rijsat.com/2023/05/19/github-copilot-your-ai-pair-to-write-code-faster-and-efficiently/

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot