Why did Microsoft give GitHub Copilot away for free?
AI-powered code completion tools like Github Copilot, Tabnine, Amazon Q, cursor and codeium have been all the rage over the past year or so. The promise of an all powerful AI that can augment or entirely replace a human software developer is partly behind this immense appeal and promise of these tools. On its most recent earnings call, Google, announced that 25% of its code was generated by AI tools like GitHub Copilot 🤔
“Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers." Sundar Pichai
Yet amidst all of this excitement and promise of an all-mighty AI that can write software products on its own, Microsoft dropped this bit of news:
Now automatically integrated into VS Code, all of you have access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, simply by signing in with your personal GitHub account. Or by creating a new one. And just last week, we passed the mark of 150M developers on GitHub. 🎉
Copilot Free gives you the choice between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. You can ask a coding question, explain existing code, or have it find a bug. You can execute edits across multiple files. And you can access Copilot’s third-party agents or build your own extension.
