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.”
‘free’
So is that ‘sell my data’ free? Or ‘get you hooked on the product and then add a subscription a year later’ free?
Bastards.
Both. And there is no guarantee they are not selling your data even if you pay.
If would be amazing to stop using the word free when we are talking about companies like Microsoft and Google
honestly copilot is great just to autocomplete repetitive lines of code but not enough to pay. i find the emmet snippets much better.
I’ve had much joy from using ‘windsurf’, the VSCode clone with the stupidest name.
Same here. I’m a Cursor subscriber but I loked Windsurf better after using its free trial.
I don’t need help to do copyright infringement Microsoft.
Better tl:dr;
GitHub announced a free version of its Copilot code completion tool, previously only available to students and open-source maintainers. The free plan, limited to 2,000 code completions per month, aims to expand Copilot’s reach and enable more developers worldwide. GitHub also announced reaching 150 million developers on its platform.
Can i point it at a local endpoint or do they wanna force me to send all my code to thwir servers
Run copilot’s proprietary model locally? You’re dreaming. But you can do this with ollama, and they aren’t forcing you. There are many local models that works pretty well.
I used Ollama locally and it worked decently well. Code suggestions were fast and relatively accurate (as far as an LLM goes). The real issue was the battery hit. Oh man, it HALVED my battery life, which is already short enough when running a server locally
No i mean i assume they are shipping a vscode extension as default. I was wondering if said extension allows me to point at said locally run model.
They aren’t. Copilot is not a built-in extension. Can’t say much about future plans though.
The fact that it even exists still shows how bad the state of programming is nowadays.
