Not so long ago, artificial intelligence was the main antagonist of Sci-Fi movies. And today, it is all around us. Almost every product that comes out of the technology world seems to have some element of artificial intelligence. AI has a significant impact on our daily life, but have you ever wondered what AI is really capable of? A great example of a futuristic vision becoming reality is the GitHub Copilot.
GitHub Copilot is super cool, but what is it?
Copilot is a tool built into the code editor that is capable of writing code itself based on the code you’ve already written in your project. The only thing you need to do is type a function name or some comments and Copilot will automatically fill in the implementation. The tool processes the user’s input in the cloud and comes back with a snippet that you just accept, decline, or ask for further solution suggestions.
But, What's the Price?
GitHub Copilot licenses, which are currently only available to individual users, cost $10 per month or $100 per year. However, students enrolled in GitHub's Global Campus Program and maintainers of popular open source GitHub projects -- identified when a user navigates to the GitHub Copilot subscription page -- will still be able to use the tool for free.
Can GitHub Copilot be any threat to developers?
After hitting the programmer’s market, it has been widely discussed whether it is a big step toward the death of computer programming or just another autocomplete tool on steroids. Well, it still requires some serious knowledge to build software. Even with Copilot’s help, you need to know what you are doing, verify and understand generated code. It’s not possible (yet) for non-programmers to jump on Copilot and build whatever they want.
The tool is not perfect. It doesn’t always generate the correct code. There are a lot of bad practices and deprecated code out there. Even worse, Copilot can write security vulnerabilities, especially in memory unsafe languages. It isn’t 100% reliable yet. You absolutely need to review Copilot’s code. This is AI. AI needs to learn. It will get better with time, but we need to wait.
Conclusion
Copilot is just one of many tools that improve and will keep improving our work. In fact, relying too much on tools like that might lead to unnecessary work or even serious problems.
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