GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
from Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 00:34
https://lemmy.world/post/23294521

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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db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Dec 01:04 next collapse

There’s absolutely no way this is sustainable

TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org on 19 Dec 01:48 next collapse

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

anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Dec 01:58 collapse

Why is it never drugs??

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 19 Dec 15:37 collapse

It’s basically digital drugs.

mac@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 03:53 collapse

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.

Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me on 19 Dec 01:10 next collapse

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

dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win on 19 Dec 01:12 next collapse

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.

unmagical@lemmy.ml on 19 Dec 01:30 next collapse

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@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 02:03 collapse

And you can’t opt out…

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

Railcar8095@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 05:13 collapse

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

cley_faye@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 08:57 collapse

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.

Railcar8095@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 10:01 collapse

So you can opt out

cley_faye@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 15:37 collapse

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.

Railcar8095@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 16:32 collapse

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@lemmy.world on 20 Dec 03:45 collapse

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.

Railcar8095@lemm.ee on 20 Dec 04:29 collapse

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.

FaceDeer@fedia.io on 19 Dec 04:31 next collapse

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.

[deleted] on 19 Dec 15:28 collapse

.

Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org on 19 Dec 01:47 next collapse

Does the EFF call it Free?

FaceDeer@fedia.io on 19 Dec 04:28 collapse

It's free as in beer.

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 04:55 next collapse

Beer is expensive, and gives you colon cancer.

loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Dec 09:20 collapse

That’s why I take heroin

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 19 Dec 15:35 collapse

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

Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org on 19 Dec 06:24 next collapse

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

FaceDeer@fedia.io on 19 Dec 08:23 next collapse

Well, there's free Copilot now.

ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net on 19 Dec 17:47 collapse

no more than there’s a free lunch.

<img alt="" src="https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/66fa0fa1-b5fc-468c-ac32-cf6eb04a6f13.jpeg">

BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 15:48 collapse

Free as in herpes.

semperverus@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 20:30 collapse

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

Solumbran@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 01:59 next collapse

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

muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 02:51 next collapse

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

theherk@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 06:39 collapse

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.

muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 07:02 next collapse

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@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 17:39 collapse

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

residentmarchant@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 11:19 collapse

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

plz1@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 05:09 next collapse

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.

konomikitten@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Dec 09:38 next collapse

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

Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de on 19 Dec 12:28 next collapse

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
github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon

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

RiQuY@lemm.ee on 19 Dec 13:38 collapse

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

greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml on 19 Dec 13:47 next collapse

better use Zed, it is hot cake

sfxrlz@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 18:10 next collapse

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

greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml on 20 Dec 09:36 collapse

there are ways to disable that, check r/zed

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Dec 20:57 collapse

just waiting on the windows version :(

greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml on 20 Dec 09:35 collapse

i hope it never comes, use gnu/linux

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 20 Dec 10:19 collapse

as soon as i can afford a new laptop but until then i have what i have

mac@lemm.ee on 22 Dec 04:39 collapse

Linux excels over windows on older laptops

Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de on 19 Dec 13:54 next collapse

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

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Dec 20:58 collapse

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.

AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org on 19 Dec 14:28 next collapse

Oh good, FREE SLOP FOR ALL!

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Dec 20:56 next collapse

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

PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world on 19 Dec 21:07 collapse

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

mfat@lemmy.ml on 20 Dec 03:07 collapse

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

geography082@lemm.ee on 20 Dec 08:08 next collapse

If would be amazing to stop using the word free when we are talking about companies like Microsoft and Google

dsilverz@thelemmy.club on 20 Dec 09:08 next collapse

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”?

JustAnIdiotPlsIgnore@lemmy.world on 20 Dec 11:35 collapse

‘free’

So is that ‘sell my data’ free? Or ‘get you hooked on the product and then add a subscription a year later’ free?

Bastards.

Moc@lemmy.world on 20 Dec 21:54 collapse

Both. And there is no guarantee they are not selling your data even if you pay.

Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 21 Dec 11:51 collapse

Enterprise versions of Copilot do guarantee in the contract that they are not selling your data or using it to train their LLM.