this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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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.”

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

honestly copilot is great just to autocomplete repetitive lines of code but not enough to pay. i find the emmet snippets much better.

[–] PlutoniumAcid 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I've had much joy from using 'windsurf', the VSCode clone with the stupidest name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Same here. I'm a Cursor subscriber but I loked Windsurf better after using its free trial.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot bloat on Github
uBlock Origin => Open the Dashboard => My Filters => Add:

github.com##.copilotPreview__container
github.com##.AppHeader-CopilotChat
github.com##li.ActionListItem:has-text(Copilot)
github.com##a[href*="/settings/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"]
github.com###copilot_free_global

Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

Time to start using VSCodium then, I want no cloud AI in my development setup.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

i like vscodium but is sublime text still worth it. i use it for some things but the packages are harder to find/manage, i feel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago

Been using VSCodium for a few years now, for loose file editing,
no complaints about it, imo it's what VSCode should be.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

better use Zed, it is hot cake

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

just waiting on the windows version :(

[–] sfxrlz 2 points 11 hours ago

But it has ai chats baked in as well, or is there a way to disable it? Haven’t looked properly yet.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 15 hours ago

Oh good, FREE SLOP FOR ALL!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 20 hours ago

I don't need help to do copyright infringement Microsoft.

[–] plz1 26 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 day ago

They're gonna have to pay me to waste my time with this trash

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Does the EFF call it Free?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] semperverus 2 points 9 hours ago

This needs to get added to the common nomenclature as the third option 😂

[–] [email protected] -1 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

No such thing as a free beer, no more than there's a free lunch.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

no more than there's a free lunch.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago

Well, there's free Copilot now.

[–] Lost_My_Mind -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Beer is expensive, and gives you colon cancer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 20 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

I'm not the one who's so far away
When I feel the snake bite enter my veins

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I'm not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft's market share in the AI developer space?

My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you'll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.

To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I'm missing?

Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn't mean to link them but I'll leave it here, don't give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

It's a free sample, which is a very common marketing technique. The free tier only gives you 2000 code completions a month so if you end up using it a lot you'll need to switch to a paid tier. Nothing particularly nefarious there.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I'm missing?

That's exactly it.

From their email:

What you get:

2,000 code suggestions a month: Get context-aware suggestions tailored to your VS Code workspace and GitHub projects.

50 Copilot Chat messages a month: Use Copilot Chat in VS Code and on GitHub to ask questions and refactor, debug, document, and explain code.

Choose your AI model: You can select between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 4o.

Render edits across multiple files: Use Copilot Edits to make changes to multiple files you’re working with.

Access the Copilot Extensions ecosystem: Use third-party agents to conduct web searches via Perplexity, access information from Stack Overflow, and more.

So it's just a rate limited thing meant to get you signed up and then cut you off right when you get used to it. I get access through work and well, it just sucks.

[–] mesamunefire -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

And you can't opt out..

If you have a GitHub account you are auto added in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What do you mean? You have to create an account and log in. Am I missing something?

[–] cley_faye 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

If you have a github account, you have this. You can decide to not use it… unless it gets intertwined more and more in your tools and you have to actively make sure your IDE is not suddenly sending your whole private project to MS servers because it was enabled by default.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)
[–] cley_faye 0 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Please point me to anything, anywhere in your github profile, settings, or whatever, that allows you to make sure that this feature will not be enabled for you.

I'll wait.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

You're the one making the false claim it cannot me opted out right now. If you want you prove that claim go ahead.

As you want you also prove the future, please prove it won't be possible to opt out in the future.

I know you will come empty handed, so won't bother waiting

[–] cley_faye 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I have a hard time parsing your sentences, but it seems you don't understand. You can't opt out of those "free" credits. It's a simple matter of not having the option given to us.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

You have to manually enable copilot free even if you install copilot extension and you log in. How do I know? I tried instead of making things up in my head like you are.

You don't have hard time parsing my sentences. You have hard time admitting you have no idea what you're saying.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can i point it at a local endpoint or do they wanna force me to send all my code to thwir servers

[–] theherk 11 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] residentmarchant 5 points 18 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] eager_eagle 2 points 12 hours ago

They aren't. Copilot is not a built-in extension. Can't say much about future plans though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There's absolutely no way this is sustainable

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's limited. They give you a free dose at first and expect you to come back for more later.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

It's basically digital drugs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I mean chatgpt isn't sustainable right now, and is losing money.

Large corpos/VC funded startups will happily burn money to capture a critical mass of users. They're frontloading cost to capture market share. Similar to Alexa's, they're dirt cheap to get you into their ecosystem. Rappi has done this in Latin America, uber did it for a time, etc.

[–] Solumbran 10 points 1 day ago

The fact that it even exists still shows how bad the state of programming is nowadays.