Technology

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"?

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.

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

Oh good, FREE SLOP FOR ALL!

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.

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

Does the EFF call it Free?

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.

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

There's absolutely no way this is sustainable

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