Microsoft’s AI Copilot is starting to automate the coding industry
When software developer Nikolai Avteniev go this hands onversion of Microsoft Corp.’ s Co pilot coding assistant in 2021, he quickly saw the potential.
Developed by Microsoft’s GitHub coding platform and based on a version of OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence, the assistant wasn’t perfect and sometimes got things wrong. But Avteniev, who works for ticket seller StubHub, was surprised by how ably it finished lines of code with just a few prompts. All he had to do was press the tab key, and Copilot filled in the rest.
“Instead of using 15 keystrokes, it took three,” he recalled recently. “It was nice a little speed boost.”
Three years later, and now infused with the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology, GitHub’s Copilot can do a lot more, including answering engineers’ questions and converting code from one programming language to another. As a result, the assistant is responsible for an increasingly significant percentage of the software being written and is even being used to program corporations’ critical systems.
Along the way, Copilot is gradually revolutionizing the working lives of software engineers—the first professional cohort to use generative AI en masse. Microsoft says Copilot has attracted 1.3 million customers so far, including 50,000 businesses ranging from small startups to corporations like Goldman Sachs, Ford and Ernst & Young. Engineers say Copilot saves them hundreds of hours a month by handling tedious and repetitive tasks, affording them time to focus on knottier challenges.
Acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub dominates its market and is betting Copilot has the AI horsepower to fight off rival services including Tabnine,
Amazon’s CodeWhisperer and Google-backed Replit Ghostwriter. GitHub’s AI assistant is also a kind of beta test for a host of other Copilots that Microsoft is baking into Office, Windows, Bing and other business lines.
As is true with AI generally, GitHub Copilot has limitations. Developers say it sometimes pulls up outdated code, provides unhelpful answers to questions and generates suggestions that are buggy or could infringe copyright. Because the tool is trained on public and open repositories of code, engineers run the risk of replicating security issues or injecting new ones into their work, particularly if they blindly accept Copilot’s recommendations.
GitHub emphasizes that the tool is an assistant, not a substitute for human programmers, and has put the onus on customers to use it wisely. Robust guidelines are required to prevent lazy programmers from simply accepting what Copilot suggests, said GitHub chief executive officer Thomas Dohmke. He expressed confidence that engineers would keep one another honest.
“The social dynamic of the team will make sure that those
GitHub emphasizes that the tool is an assistant, not a substitute for human programmers
that are cheating by accepting code too fast and that don’t actually go through the process defined by the team, that code will not make it into production,” he said in an interview.
Generative AI is the latest in a long line of innovations that have transformed computer coding over the years. Last century, program compilers accelerated software development by rapidly translating commands into ones and zeros that computers can understand. More recently, Linux popularized open-source coding, letting programmers leverage one another’s work rather than writing everything from scratch.
Coding assistants like GitHub’s Copilot could be even more revolutionary because generative AI holds the potential power to automate large swathes of what software engineers currently do.
For now, it mostly makes them more efficient. StubHub’s Avteniev, who also teaches software engineering at City College of New York, says Copilot’s predictive ability helps programmers stay in “the flow” because they no longer have to stop to look things up. Avteniev has been coding for more than 20 years, but even he sometimes forgets programming languages—forcing him to waste time Googling them. “Copilot stops you from having to exit your current coding process,” he said. “Even when it produces gibberish, it’s still easier to just accept what it does and then correct it myself.”
Aaron Hedges, a developer for more than 15 years, was getting burned out before Copilot arrived. Hedges works for ReadMe, a startup that helps companies create technical descriptions of their application programming interfaces, or APIs. Like Avteniev, he makes good use of Copilot’s auto-complete function. “Because I’m a fairly senior engineer, I can look at that and go, ‘Oh yeah, that looks right.’” He also likes that he can ask questions without leaving his programming window. “I don’t have to shift away and open a browser, which can be really disruptive,” he said.
At $10 a month, a Copilot subscription is a bargain that Hedges willingly pays himself. After work, he builds websites for Dungeons & Dragons fans. With a toddler and another baby on the way, leisure time is precious. “Those two hours I get to myself to code in the evening are super important to me,” he said. “The more efficient I can be, the better.”