General

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot transforms the developer experience. Backed by the leaders in AI, GitHub Copilot provides contextualized assistance throughout the software development lifecycle, from code completions and chat assistance in the IDE to code explanations and answers to docs in GitHub and more. With GitHub Copilot elevating their workflow, developers can focus on: value, innovation, and happiness.

GitHub Copilot enables developers to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration and spend less effort on the mundane and boilerplate. That’s why developers who use GitHub Copilot report up to 75% higher satisfaction with their jobs than those who don’t and are up to 55% more productive at writing code without sacrifice to quality, which all adds up to engaged developers shipping great software faster.

GitHub Copilot integrates with leading editors, including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim, and, unlike other AI coding assistants, is natively built into GitHub. Growing to millions of individual users and tens of thousands of business customers, GitHub Copilot is the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool and the competitive advantage developers ask for by name.

Who is eligible to access GitHub Copilot for free?

GitHub Copilot Free is a new free pricing tier with limited functionality for individual developers. Users assigned a Copilot Business or Copilot Enterprise seat are not eligible for access. Users with access to Copilot Pro through a paid subscription, trial, or through an existing verified OSS, student, faculty, or MVP account may elect to use Free instead. 

What languages, IDEs, and platforms does GitHub Copilot support?

GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories. For each language, the quality of suggestions you receive may depend on the volume and diversity of training data for that language. For example, JavaScript is well-represented in public repositories and is one of GitHub Copilot’s best supported languages. Languages with less representation in public repositories may produce fewer or less robust suggestions.

GitHub Copilot is available as an extension in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Vim, Neovim, the JetBrains suite of IDEs, and Azure Data Studio. Although code completion functionality is available across all these extensions, chat functionality is currently available only in Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Visual Studio. GitHub Copilot is also supported in terminals through GitHub CLI and as a chat integration in Windows Terminal Canary. With the GitHub Copilot Enterprise plan, GitHub Copilot is natively integrated into GitHub.com. All plans are supported in GitHub Copilot in GitHub Mobile. GitHub Mobile for Copilot Pro and Copilot Business have access to Bing and public repository code search. Copilot Enterprise in GitHub Mobile gives you additional access to your organization's knowledge.

Does GitHub Copilot “copy/paste”?

No, GitHub Copilot generates suggestions using probabilistic determination.

• When thinking about intellectual property and open source issues, it is critical to understand how GitHub Copilot really works. The AI models that create GitHub Copilot’s suggestions may be trained on public code, but do not contain any code. When they generate a suggestion, they are not “copying and pasting” from any codebase.
• To generate a code suggestion, the GitHub Copilot extension begins by examining the code in your editor—focusing on the lines just before and after your cursor, but also information including other files open in your editor and the URLs of repositories or file paths to identify relevant context. That information is sent to GitHub Copilot’s model, to make a probabilistic determination of what is likely to come next and generate suggestions.
• To generate a suggestion for chat in the code editor, the GitHub Copilot extension creates a contextual prompt by combining your prompt with additional context including the code file open in your active document, your code selection, and general workspace information, such as frameworks, languages, and dependencies. That information is sent to GitHub Copilot’s model, to make a probabilistic determination of what is likely to come next and generate suggestions.
• To generate a suggestion for chat on GitHub.com, such as providing an answer to a question from your chat prompt, GitHub Copilot creates a contextual prompt by combining your prompt with additional context including previous prompts, the open pages on GitHub.com as well as retrieved context from your codebase or Bing search. That information is sent to GitHub Copilot’s model, to make a probabilistic determination of what is likely to come next and generate suggestions. 

What are the differences between the GitHub Copilot Business, GitHub Copilot Enterprise, and GitHub Copilot Individual plans?

GitHub Copilot has multiple offerings for organizations and an offering for individual developers. All the offerings include both code completion and chat assistance. The primary differences between the organization offerings and the individual offering are license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.

Organizations can choose between GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise. GitHub Copilot Business primarily features GitHub Copilot in the coding environment - that is the IDE, CLI and GitHub Mobile. GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business. It also  adds an additional layer of customization for organizations and integrates into GitHub.com as a chat interface to allow developers to converse with GitHub Copilot throughout the platform. GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization’s codebase for a deeper understanding of the customer’s knowledge for more tailored suggestions and will offer customers access to fine-tuned custom, private models for code completion.

GitHub Copilot Individual is designed for individual developers, freelancers, students, educators, and open source maintainers. The plan includes all the features of GitHub Copilot Business except organizational license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.

What data has GitHub Copilot been trained on?

GitHub Copilot is powered by generative AI models developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.

Which plan includes GitHub Copilot Autofix?

GitHub Copilot Autofix provides contextual explanations and code suggestions to help developers fix vulnerabilities in code, and is included in GitHub Advanced Security.

What if I do not want GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is entirely optional and requires you to opt in before gaining access. You can easily configure its usage directly in the editor, enabling or disabling it at any time. Additionally, you have control over which file types GitHub Copilot is active for.

How do I control access to GitHub Copilot in my company?

Access to Copilot Business and Enterprise is managed by your GitHub Administrator. They can control access to preview features, models, and set GitHub Copilot policies for your organization. Additionally, you can use your network firewall to explicitly allow access to Copilot Business and/or block access to Copilot Pro or Free. For more details, refer to the documentation.

Footnotes

1. Response times may vary during periods of high usage. Requests may be subject to rate limiting.
2. Option to purchase additional premium requests not available to users that subscribe or have subscribed to Pro or Pro+ through GitHub Mobile on iOS or Android.
3. Authentication with SAML single sign-on (SSO) available for organizations using GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

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