GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is the AI coding assistant from Microsoft and OpenAI that pioneered the category and remains the most widely deployed tool in professional engineering environments. It integrates natively into VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, and Visual Studio, providing real-time line and block completions as you type without interrupting your flow.

Copilot has evolved well beyond autocomplete. Copilot Chat lets you have a natural language conversation about your code — asking it to explain a function, suggest a fix for a bug, generate tests, or rewrite a section in a cleaner way — all within the IDE sidebar. Copilot Edits can make changes across multiple files in a single instruction, while Copilot Workspace lets you plan and execute larger tasks from an issue or prompt.

In 2024, Copilot became model-agnostic: you can switch between OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini depending on the task, giving developers access to the best model for each situation. GitHub Copilot for Pull Requests generates PR descriptions automatically, while the CLI extension brings AI assistance to the terminal.

Copilot Individual costs $10/month or $100/year, with a 30-day free trial. Copilot Business ($19/user/month) adds organization-wide policy controls, audit logs, and IP indemnity. Copilot Enterprise includes fine-tuned models on your private codebase.