Codex

OpenAI Codex—based on GPT-3—is the model behind GitHub Copilot

All the big corporate companies are rushing to launch a growing number of similar (and not free, not open source) productivity products (e.g. tabnine, Microsoft Visual Studio IntelliCode, Amazon CodeWhisperer)

These products generate code in a narrow context (auto-completion or transformation of natural language to code or vise-versa)

AlphaCode 2

Google DeepMind AlphaCode 2—based on Gemini—stands out as a totally different (and for now totally unavailable) product generating code at the level of competitive programming (reaching the 85^th percentile)

Think of it as code evolution by “natural” selection:

• a very large number of code samples are generated (think “mutations”)
• a filtering and scoring system selects for the best candidates (that’s the selection part)

AlphaCode 2 is able to solve much more open-ended problems

What about FOSS?

Free

These models are large and most convenient to run on servers

 → Price of cloud service

Some self-hosted options exist. A very promising one is Tabby. Not practical for everyone

Open source

While these models feed from open source code, they are themselves not open source 🙁

The open source community is trying to provide open source alternatives (e.g. Tabby). Despite the much more limited resources, the performance of some of these alternatives is very good

What is GitHub Copilot?

Access

Individual or organization GitHub accounts

Requires subscription

Students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects can apply for free access

Safety

Filters are in place for offensive words, but…

Generated code comes with no guaranty of safety or quality

A lawsuit is open against GitHub Copilot for licenses violation

Supported languages

Any language used in public repos

Quality of suggestions is higher for languages with lots of data

How to use it?

Interface

Extensions to text editors:

  → Visual Studio Code/Visual Studio
  → Vim/Neovim/Emacs
  → JetBrains IDEs
  → Azure Data Studio

Get a subscription

Go to your GitHub account page
  → Settings
  → Copilot
  → Enable

Provide free access or payment method

Set settings

VS Code

Vim/Neovim

Install Node.js

Clone https://github.com/github/copilot.vim

Configure:

:Copilot setup

Enable:

:Copilot enable

Get help:

:help copilot

Emacs

Install Node.js

Assuming straight is installed:

(straight-use-package 'editorconfig)                   ; Copilot dependency

(use-package copilot
    :straight (:host github
                     :repo "copilot-emacs/copilot.el"
                     :files ("dist" "*.el"))
    :hook (prog-mode . copilot-mode)                   ; Settings up to you
    :bind (("C-8" . copilot-complete)
           :map copilot-completion-map
           ("C-j" . copilot-accept-completion)
           ("C-f" . copilot-accept-completion-by-word)
           ("C-t" . copilot-accept-completion-by-line)
           ("C-n" . copilot-next-completion)
           ("C-p" . copilot-previous-completion)))

Login to your GitHub account (only needs to be done once): M-x copilot-login

What is Copilot in the CLI?

In beta

An extension to GitHub CLI (GitHub operations from the CLI)

 → Generate commands from natural language
 → Generate natural language explanations from commands

Trained on data up to 2021

Lower performance for natural languages ≠ English

Be very careful: the command line is powerful and you can delete your data or mess up your system if you don’t know what you are doing. Check commands carefully!

Setup

gh auth login

gh extension install github/gh-copilot

Usage

Get code explanations:

gh copilot explain

Get code from natural language:

gh copilot suggest

Resources

GitHub support portal

GitHub Copilot documentation

Stack Overflow [github-copilot] tag

copilot.el (unofficial Emacs plug-in)