Technology

60013 readers

2618 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

165

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

submitted 2 days ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.

GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023.

“My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open source maintainers.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] dsilverz@thelemmy.club 5 points 17 hours ago

As I like to test things before saying something critical about them, I rushed to my GH account in order to test this "Copilot" from GitHub (it's a weird name considering that Copilot is also a Bing AI; both Bing and Copilot are Microsoft products, so unsurprisingly there's zero creativity coming from them).

So far:

It's nothing new: it's just OpenAI ChatGPT 4o under the hood (something I already use through OpenAI's website, thanks for the nothing burger, Github)
It's GPT 4o with supposedly some integration with GH APIs...
... except that it has no Github Gists integration (I use Gists more than I use repos)
... and it fails to retrieve the list of all my repos so far (something I managed to manually do through my browser, accessing some endpoint from Github's API (it requires no token) and using Devtools to map and format the JSON array into a string list)
The paid version seems to offer the possibility to pick another LLM model: Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT o1 (also known as "strawberry", who can't count "how many R's" are there within its own name) and... that's it. Also nothing new, even if you ever dare to pay for it.

Summary: a "nothing burger". It perfectly describes this... "tool"?