GitHub Copilot AI Coding Assistant Launches with a $10/Month Subscription Fee

GitHub has announced that its Copilot AI coding assistance tool is now generally available for all developers. GitHub Copilot launched in technical preview in June 2021, and it’s designed to help software developers write code faster through autocompletion.

With GitHub Copilot, software developers can use inline comments within their editor to get code suggestions for programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, TypeScript, and Ruby. The tool helps developers to autocomplete lines of code or implement a complete function based on the current context. It lets users accept, reject as well as manually edit these code suggestions.

Thanks to OpenAI’s text-generating technology, the AI pair programmer tool is available as an extension for text editors and IDEs. It offers integration with popular applications such as Neovim, Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and various JetBrains IDEs.

“With more than 1.2 million developers in our technical preview over the last 12 months, people who started using GitHub Copilot quickly told us it became an indispensable part of their daily workflows. In files where it’s enabled, nearly 40% of code is being written by GitHub Copilot in popular coding languages, like Python—and we expect that to increase,” explained Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub.

GitHub Copilot is free for students & open-source contributors

It is important to note that Copilot is an automated tool, and its code suggestions may not always be accurate. GitHub advises developers to test their code as it may contain bugs, unsupported API references, and security vulnerabilities.

Software developers who have been testing the GitHub Copilot extension will now be prompted to activate a 60-day free trial. The AI-powered programming assistant is priced at $10 per month (or $100 per year), but it’s free for all verified students and open-source contributors.

GitHub plans to add support for enterprise-managed user accounts later this year. If you’re interested, you can learn more about the pricing details in the FAQ document.