Security News > 2021 > June > GitHub Launches 'Copilot' — AI-Powered Code Completion Tool
GitHub on Tuesday launched a technical preview of a new AI-powered pair programming tool that aims to help software developers write better code across a variety of programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go. Copilot, as the code synthesizer is called, has been developed in collaboration with OpenAI, and leverages Codex, a new AI system that's trained on publicly available source code and natural language with the goal of translating comments and code written by a user into auto-generated code snippets.
"GitHub Copilot draws context from the code you're working on, suggesting whole lines or entire functions," GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said in a blog post.
Despite its function as an AI-based autocomplete for writing boilerplate code, the Microsoft-owned software repository hosting and version control platform reiterated that Copilot is not designed to write code on behalf of the developer, while noting that users can cycle through alternative suggestions and manually edit suggested code.
In other words, the code suggested by GitHub Copilot "Should be carefully tested, reviewed, and vetted, like any other code."
If it's any consolation, the code autofilled by Copilot is largely unique, with a test performed by GitHub finding that only 0.1% of generated code could be found verbatim in the training set.
GitHub Copilot is currently available as an extension for Microsoft's cross-platform code editor Visual Studio Code, both locally on the machine or in the cloud on GitHub Codespaces.