AI helps write code 67 yuan / month! GitHub Copilot engages in charging “double standard” to persuade a large number of programmers

Sorting | Peng Huizhong Editor-in-Chief | Tu Min

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

Today, artificial intelligence has gradually become accustomed to playing the role of “co-pilot” in human life. It helps us clean up, write papers, reply to messages, navigate routes… But before that, AI has stopped improving code, so many people are still “bald” trying to write code?

Now, hand it over to this AI!

GitHub announced today that Copilot, an AI automatic programming tool jointly built with OpenAI, is officially released. day free trial period.

However, it is worth noting that there are also restrictions on the charging group, among which authenticated students and maintainers of popular open source projects can use it for free.

Image source GitHub official website

A whole year of brewing and waiting

With the arrival of GitHub Copilot, Microsoft has worked hard behind the scenes. It once invested $1 billion in research company OpenAI, and also promoted the cooperation between GitHub and OpenAI, and finally after years of research and development, GitHub Copilot successfully landed.

Copilot is built on OpenAI Codex, the descendant of OpenAI’s flagship GPT-3 language generation algorithm. It created the first time in history that artificial intelligence can be fully exploited by developers to complete code.

Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, said: “Like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change software development, giving developers a new tool that enables They code easier and faster, making their lives happier.”

In the developer circle, many people are no strangers to GitHub Copilot.

Back in June 2021, GitHub debuted Copilot in beta , describing the tool as an “AI paired programmer.” Copilot can advise developers on the next line of code when programming in an integrated development environment (IDE) such as JetBrains IDE, Neovim or Microsoft Visual Studio Code. In addition to providing code suggestions, it can also come up with complete methods and more complex algorithms when needed.

Image source GitHub official website

As we all know, the hourly salary of programmers is very high, generally between $10 and $150. As long as you can save a few hours of programming time or slightly increase the speed of development, you can have a lot of benefits. Especially for some experienced programmers, Copilot means easier crossover. With its blessing, developers are often not discouraged from learning Rust, and using C++ will not be so frustrating. People love and hate.

How powerful is Copilot?

So, what are the nirvanas of Copilot officially provided to developers?

GitHub officially released the following three introductions:

• You get AI-based coding advice. This includes getting code suggestions that fit the project context and stylistic conventions, and going through different options to decide what to accept, reject, or edit.

• Use your preferred environment. Integrate GitHub Copilot with popular editors, including Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, as an unobtrusive extension.

• Code with confidence in unfamiliar territory. When you’re coding in a new language or planning to try something new, GitHub Copilot provides syntax and code suggestions in dozens of languages ​​so you can spend more time learning by doing.

Official code example:

Image source GitHub official website

According to official GitHub statistics, in the past 12 months, more than 1.2 million developers have signed up to use the GitHub Copilot preview. In GitHub Copilot-enabled files, GitHub says that nearly 40% of the code is now written in Copilot.

Is partial payment Copilot worth it?

After announcing the payment, Copilot’s latest statement also attracted hot comments from more than 600 developers on HN (https://ift.tt/xtQJjFH), targeting the functions that the official said is hysterical. , From the developer’s point of view, is it really easy to use?

According to one developer: “ Copilot is very valuable for scripting quickly, especially in languages ​​you don’t know very well, to cobble together something that works faster. But when writing more complex code, If you’re not careful, it’s prone to small bugs that can be very frustrating. Just in terms of time savings, I think the $10/month is well worth it to my employer (just a few savings per day). Minutes are worth it). I’m excited to see Copilot improve in the future.”

Another developer who has been using Copilot for a few months also said that although Copilot makes a lot of mistakes, overall it has been great! Definitely worth the $10 per month (especially compared to the developer salary).

“Without it, I definitely wouldn’t want to go back and code. Copilot handles most of the boring, mundane, repetitive code for you, so you have more time for the fun parts. It’s like you hired A ‘nerd intern’ as an assistant. He’ll even give you unexpectedly good advice sometimes.”

Copilot is also very valuable for a generalist developer who works in 4-5 different languages ​​every 3-6 months.

“I tend to forget a lot of things, even simple stupid things like type conversions or specific keyword spellings,” says the developer. ” Copilot solves 99% of the problems so I can focus on my advanced specs. .”

However, some netizens said that they spent as much time debugging the error code written by Copilot as the time saved by using it.

Overall, Copilot is a redemption for bald programmers! But it is worth noting that new programming tools will inevitably bring new programming risks. Previously, GitHub Copilot has been controversial. Just days after its preview release, there were questions about the legality of Copilot’s training on public code released on GitHub. In addition to copyright issues, one study found that about 40% of Copilot’s output contained security holes. I don’t know whether the release of the commercial version can circumvent the problems.

But now, we are still fortunate to have such a technological innovation.

GitHub says Copilot is GitHub’s first step in bringing artificial intelligence to developers. It’s available to all developers starting today, and Copilot will be available to businesses later this year.

Have you used this

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN