Playing Around with GitHub Copilot

I have been spending some quality time with GitHub Copilot and so far it has made me fall out of my chair a couple of times. It truly is amazing. Thought of writing this post to share some experience, so whoever hasn't tried it so far, can get amazed like me.

GitHub Copilot is a Pair Programmer, which does way more than auto-completion and it's completely powered with AI (Artificial Intelligence). I have been using Visual Studio for a long time, and probably since the day I started, we had IntelliSense which does the basic auto-completion. Then a couple of years back, Microsoft announced IntelliCode which is an AI-Assisted tool to suggest the next piece of code based on where we are, and it was great.

Now GitHub Copilot places things on a whole different level. It basically can write code based on the comments in Natural Language, can you believe that? So whether it's a comment, docstring, function name, or the code itself, GitHub Copilot uses those to synthesize code. Currently, it's still in its Technical Preview stage, and has first-class support for the following programming languages.

• Python
• JavaScript
• TypeScript
• Ruby
• Java
• Go

Same time it understands dozens of other languages and can help you find your way around almost anything. I have tried with C#, T-SQL and it's working super nicely.

As of today, GitHub Copilot  is available as an extension for 

• Visual Studio Code
• Visual Studio
• JetBrains
• Neovim

This is a simple express app, I have created using Visual Studio Code, I only wrote the comments, and the code was completely written by GitHub Copilot.

// Create an Express application
var express = require('express');
 
// Expose an endpoint
var app = express();
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
    res.send('Hello World!');
});
 
// Expose another endpoint
app.get('/api', function (req, res) {
    // Send a response of current time
    res.send(new Date());
});
 
// Run express application
app.listen(3000, function () {
    console.log('Listening on port ' + 3000);
});

I have also created a simple ASP.NET Core Minimal API with CRUD operations, again I only wrote the comments on natural language, and GitHub Copilot wrote all the new code for creating a class, the DbContext, and exposing CRUD endpoints and that's with the functionality.

So how does this work?

First, let's start with a bit of history. It all started with an AI Research Startup called OpenAI founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. In July 2019, Microsoft partnered up with OpenAI. In June 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on trillions of words from the Internet. In June 2021, OpenAI Codex was introduced, a model based on GPT-3 to translate natural language to code (and vice-versa).

GitHub Copilot is powered with OpenAI Codex models. 

How GitHub Copilot Works

OpenAI Codex was trained on publicly available source code (including code in public repositories on GitHub) and natural language, so it understands both programming and human languages. The GitHub Copilot editor extension sends our comments and code to the GitHub Copilot service, which then uses OpenAI Codex to synthesize and suggest individual lines and/or whole functions.

The whole GitHub Copilot experience is beyond words, you have to try it for yourself. Sign up with the Technical Program now, you will have to be on the waitlist for some time, but I would definitely say it's worth the wait, because once you have access, it's going to blow your minds off.

Hope this helps.

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya