In this video i'm going to be discussing Github and the new product that they have launched. So
Github has launched a new product called Copilot. Copilot is an AI powered assistant to help you
write code faster. That's what we're talking about today. Before we jump into this, make sure and
like this video if you enjoy this kind of content and don't forget to subscribe to the channel and
turn on notifications. So today we're talking about Github Copilot. It's just been released very
recently so let's talk about what it is and how it can assist us. Should we be worried about it
is it going to take over our jobs? Is it going to replace developers? There are a lot of concerns
around this technology at the moment and since it is newly released I figured it's a good time
to have a quick look at it and discuss how we can use it. Copilot will allow you to write code much
faster, so it acts as an autocomplete for your coding. You can use copilot directly within visual
studio code, and the idea is that you can simply write a comment and it will auto complete a full
working piece of code that will do what you want. So you're basically describing what piece of code
that you want to write and copilot will go and fetch different code examples that are
similar to what you're trying to achieve, and it will write the code automatically for you.
A really nice feature as part of Copilot is the ability to choose different types of code. So you
don't have to take the first suggestion, you can cycle between different samples of code. Maybe one
of the code types is more reflective of your own personal style of development. If the code doesn't
look familiar to you or it looks too confusing or too verbose, you can select a different
alternative and use that one. When we actually think about Copilot, it almost sounds too good to
be true. We've got AI that is writing code for us. There are certain limitations however. An example
of this is that you you actually need to write the comments really well from what i understand.
You need to be very descriptive of what it is you want to achieve within that block of code. Perhaps
you want to write a function that returns a decimal value, then you need to describe what type
of value that you're returning and also the data you're inputting into that method or that function
in order to perform the calculations. You actually have to be quite descriptive about what it is
you're trying to achieve and in that way it does work like someone who's pair programming with you.
You're working together to write the piece of code. So it's not really possible for the
AI to go off and write a full app for you at this point. At this point there's no real concern about
co-pilot or AI taking actual developer jobs. So at the moment you need to be able to describe
what it is you're trying to achieve and it will work with you. It works as your co-pilot,
it works and builds the code with you. But it very much relies on the developer telling it
exactly what has to be achieved. Copilot has really caught my attention because
it is a tool that can work alongside you and it will allow you to write code faster.
And generally anything that allows you to create or write code faster is something that i think
should be worth checking out and worth taking time to explore a little bit further. Copilot
has only been launched quite recently so at this point we don't really know all of the limitations,
and in fact i've tried to sign up to use it myself but i'm on the waiting list currently. Once i get
access to that i will probably create some more content around using copilot. So far we haven't
really seen that much in the way of limitations. We can see on the website that they have some very
interesting examples of how you can use it. At the moment they are only allowing a certain number
of developers to try out copilot. Once it fully launches they will roll it out to more and more
developers so i think at that point we'll start to see what are the limitations of this software.
I have read a few concerns online about some of the code that it automatically creates, so
some of the code may or may not work and there is also the chance that they are not using the right
open source license for some of the code. Possibly some of the code may not fall under open source
license so there are some areas there that people are concerned about right now but
i think time will tell as to how well this works for us and what concerns we may have
that are valid and which concerns that maybe are not valid. At this point we were just trying to
understand how it works, how it can benefit us. So i'm quite excited to get trying this out.
Let me know in the comments below if you've had a chance to use it yet and what you think of
co-pilot. Does it make it easier for you to write code, does it save you time. Let me know in the
comments below. Thank you so much for watching this video and as always if you enjoy this kind
of video give it a like and subscribe to the channel and i will see you all in the next one.
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