Is GitHub Copilot the future of Coding?
First and foremost, what
is Github Copilot: Its is a new service from GitHub and OpenAI,
described as “Your AI pair programmer”. It is a plugin to Visual Studio Code
which auto-generates code for you based on the contents of the current file,
and your current cursor location.
Seems unbelievable and magical that the computers that are
made up of programs can now start making code for us. This feature is already
present in many other software’s like Gmail for text prediction but predicting
what code you will be typing in the future is magical. For example, if we type $
in this php code then based on the context of the current program it would
suggest some code:
The grey body of the
function has been entirely written by Copilot! You just have to hit Tab on your
keyboard, and the suggestion gets accepted and inserted into your code.
Where Copilot differs
from other such tools is that it can generate entire multi-line functions and
even documentation and tests, based on the full context of a file of code.
How does it work?
Copilot is powered by a
deep neural network language model called Codex, which was trained on public
code repositories on GitHub. The basic nature of programming is repetitive for
basic tasks. Such type of repetitive code can be learned and predicted based on
the context of the program written by the user.
Does that mean computers
will replace programmers?
NO. Not at all. The code
generated by Copilot is many of the times useless or too much extra code is
generated. As such copilot doesn’t compile the code before predicting so it has
no idea if the code will work or not. Also the code generated may not be
optimum or the best possible solution as copilot has learned the code from many
repositories which may be good or bad. Based on the search terms and context it
would spit out the best possible match but that doesn’t garuantee a better code
hence finally human programmer needs to go through the code and use the pieces
which will be applicable for the software. Hence copilot will probably never
replace a human programmer but it can definitely assist them during programming
with appropriate suggestions and corrections.
How to install CoPilot?
You must have Visual
Studio Code Installed on your PC. Go to extension manager and search for
CoPilot. You can click the install button on the first extension called the
Github Copilot. Once installed you will need to Signin to your Github Account
to start using it. Once logged in you may start programming as usual and can
start seeing auto suggestions which coding.
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