Ecosystem and generative AI fueled GitHub Copilot

In 2021 GitHub launched Copilot, a developer tool that writes and suggests code using artificial intelligence. Since its public debut, Copilot has been used by over a million developers. They have collectively generated more than three billion lines of code with the AI assistant.

Copilot is able to do a surprising number of tasks. Not only can it can generate new code based on code that developers have already written, it can also read comments in natural language and write code based on their instructions. Developers simply write in plain English a description of the code they want and Copilot translates it into any number of programming languages. Such intelligence has had an impact. According to GitHub's research, developers completed tasks 55% faster with Copilot than without.

Much of Copilot's success is a result of research by OpenAI, a Silicon Valley tech company that has raised upwards of $11 billion in venture funding to build and train AI models. Under the hood, Copilot runs on Codex, one of OpenAI's models fine-tuned for writing code and trained on gigabytes of publicly available code on GitHub. It's no surprise that Copilot has become centerpiece of recent marketing campaigns by Microsoft (it is both an investor in OpenAI and the parent company of GitHub).

Adoption of GitHub Copilot has been fast. But its sudden rise to fame has been about more than just advancements in generative AI. Copilot sits at the forefront of an entire ecosystem of developer tools built on Visual Studio Code, a code editor also built by Microsoft.

Nearly 74% of developers use Visual Studio Code, according to recent surveys from Stack Overflow. They have access to over 52,000 extensions in its digital marketplace to install and try out — many for free. These extensions range from simple color themes to sophisticated debugging tools, linters, and (now) AI-enhanced coding assistants. Most can be set up in just a few clicks.

Copilot, like so many other new developer tools, relies on Visual Studio Code and its marketplace to get into the hands of developers faster. While generative AI has engineers whispering about the dawn of a new era in software development, the seeds of change were planted nearly a decade ago, back in 2015, with the first release of Visual Studio Code.