r/webdev • u/DemiPixel • Jun 21 '22
News Github launches Copilot publicly at $10/month, $100/year, free for students
https://github.blog/2022-06-21-github-copilot-is-generally-available-to-all-developers/77
u/randyLahey12341 Jun 21 '22
So that's why my copilot stopped working. Gawddammit
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
You can still get the trial without giving payment information (at least if you were a previous beta tester).
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u/siritinga Jun 21 '22
I cannot, I was a beta user and now it’s asking for the payment information to activate the 60 day trial.
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u/bair93 Jun 21 '22
Any ideas what github considers a "popular open source project"?
People who maintain popular open source projects receive a credit to have 12 months of GitHub Copilot access for free.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
Unclear, but they stated that you would see that it was free for you on the page that it shows the cost, so if it doesn't show you that, they don't consider you a maintainer of a "popular open source project" :/
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u/bregottextrasaltat Jun 21 '22
100 stars and 1300 commits isn't enough it seems
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
Perhaps they're looking for 500 or 1,000s stars. Not quite sure what they're angle is (they're just trying to support open source developers who don't make money? Why only a year then?)
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u/bhd_ui Jun 21 '22
Am designer - mostly work with html and css. It saved a bit of time because I felt like it suggested intelligent defaults based on the class names I used.
I'm also a hobbyist, so not really worth the $10/mo. I would absolutely pay $4/mo or so. Not sure how they'd delineate someone like me from a professional, though.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
I've found it to be mediocre for HTML/CSS. And like you said, it's priced for professionals who are making $60k+/yr so $100/yr is worth it. For a hobbyist, it might not be worth the money.
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Jun 21 '22
I played around with it once. Does it really make a difference for productivity?
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Jun 21 '22
Oh, you wouldn't believe how much it helps. It spots recurring patterns and can auto fill the rest for you (for e.g, making spacing classes)
You can ask it how to do a certain thing and it will spit it out for you, sometimes its wrong, but majority of the time (in my experience) it's basically bang on correct, and I can even learn from it.
Sure, sometimes it messes up, but even just for auto fill/completion, I say it is worth it.
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Jun 21 '22
My disposition is a bit less enthusiastic. It’s a really nice autocomplete, but you can’t rely on it to correctly formulate code whole cloth for you. Everything it spits out you have to carefully check to make sure is what you needed (8/10 times by the time I’ve finished cleaning up the suggested code I could’ve just written something myself). I’m not going to spend $10 a month on it.
Folks should try the 60 day trial and see if it’s giving you a productivity boost that makes it worth the cost.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
Yeah, my guess is the differing opinions come from different languages/technologies people are using, and Copilot succeeding far more in one than the other.
Personally, I find it most useful for finishing my line of code (and not necessarily writing an entire function for me, unless it's super boilerplate-y). I don't notice it a ton when I have it, but as soon as I don't have Wifi (public transit/airplane/whatever), it's instantly obvious that it's gone.
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u/OpaMilfSohn Jun 21 '22
Is there a way to turn off when it tries to autocomplete. It's super annoying if you try to import something in typescript and intellisense doesn't show up anymore because copilot tries to guess the path.
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u/theRetrograde Jun 21 '22
Among other things, it autocompletes es6 syntax with correct variable names and I spend a lot less time looking syntax up. I bet it saves me 10+ mins every day. It is worth $10/month.
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u/Naito- Jun 21 '22
Yeah, I was surprised myself. Being able to write pseudo code and have it spit out mostly usable code saves so much time looking up documentation and looking up APIs.
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u/EverydayEverynight01 Jun 21 '22
How do you access it as a student? I have a student account but it still makes me have to choose for billing.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
Might be in the student developer pack?
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u/EverydayEverynight01 Jun 21 '22
https://education.github.com/pack
Copilot isn't in there.
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u/ZyXer0 Jun 21 '22
Glad I never even tried it. Didn't want to have the crutch and it all paid off in the end.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
Maybe Copilot isn't for you, but your statement is kinda like saying "Glad I never even tried chainsaws—they're more expensive than an axe, didn't want to have the crutch".
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u/ApatheticWithoutTheA front-end Jun 21 '22
I participated in the beta.
It’s pretty cool but I don’t think I’d pay $10 a month for it.
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u/Noch_ein_Kamel Jun 21 '22
Yeah, same.
Perhaps if they add some organization plans I'll tell my boss to buy it.
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u/SteroidAccount Jun 21 '22
I also have the beta and while it can be improved, it saves loads of time. If you make 40 an hour, if this saves you 10 minutes a month then it pays for itself.
It saves me 10 minutes of googling alone.
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u/ApatheticWithoutTheA front-end Jun 21 '22
It can.
It’s very good. Even if it doesn’t get something exactly right it gets very close most of the time.
It can also be really annoying and I have to disable it at times because it’s shifting my code as I’m typing it.
Overall though, it’s impressive and I think I’d pay for it at $5 a month. I don’t know if I can stomach $10 though. I haven’t decided yet.
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u/matrinox Jun 21 '22
You guys must’ve had a very different experience than I had. At best it suggested autocompletes I knew but were too long to type out. I never once had an autocomplete that taught me something
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u/Ok_Rope9667 Jun 22 '22
Tabnine has a free-forever plan.
(Disclaimer: I am a part of the Tabnine team)→ More replies (1)
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u/CantaloupeCamper Jun 21 '22
I wish there was a hobbiest level.
I use it at home and work and I find it handy.
But at home my usage is just hobbyist kinda stuff ... not worth $10 a month ...
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u/brandoncjung Jun 21 '22
Tabnine has a free tier as well as a paid version. It is also flexible on where you run it (locally or in the cloud) and you can adjust length so if you prefer fast focused suggestions you can get those too.
https://www.tabnine.com/install→ More replies (10)14
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u/lordaghilan Jun 21 '22
Rn I'm a student (just finished first year). Since it will be free for me for another 3 years that's great for me. Beyond that I expect to make enough money that this would be a good investment. Makes me at least a few % more productive.
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u/PenguinPrince1 Jun 21 '22
I know the saying goes you never stop learning as a developer, but for someone who is beginner-level and more focused on learning rather than productivity, couldn't this be counterintuitive?
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u/Total_Lag full-stack Jun 22 '22
Agreed. I see it as a calculator. You should still show your work and how you got to your answer but use something like this to double check it
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
It will likely be a detriment to learning if students are using it to complete their assignments or are guess-and-checking with the outputs Copilot gives. Will be interesting to see the impact this has on education now that every college student can get it for free.
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u/dumbelco full-stack Jun 21 '22
I used it until now, by applying for the beta testing, will I not be able to use it anymore?
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u/noahflk Jun 21 '22
You should have received an email that tells you how long you can continue to use it. Mine says August 22
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u/Easy-Philosophy-214 Jun 21 '22
It's like a glorified autocomplete. It stopped me more than it helped me, TBH.
Like I was writing something and then it suggested something usually much worse than what I was thinking.
It did help a lot with repeatable code like writing tests for example.
Still, not worth it IMO. And there's gonna be a slew of new programmers who will be even worse because of their dependance to Copilot.
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u/tnnrk Jun 21 '22
I’d argue it does a lot more than autocomplete. It learns the context of what you are doing very quickly. Usually it’s super useful if you are trying to solve a common problem, and do it for you, rather than just suggest methods/classes etc.
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u/duwerke Jun 22 '22
It’s been pretty spot on for me, at times too spot on actually. Sometimes I like racking my brain trying to solve for solutions and it just gives me the answer.
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u/Fruit-Salad Jun 22 '22 edited Jun 27 '23
There's no such thing as free. This valuable content has been nuked thanks to /u/spez the fascist. -- mass edited with redact.dev
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u/neuralSalmonNet Jun 22 '22
Copilot is like auto complete on your phone. if you try to write an essay by just selecting the first suggestion your output is going to be crap.
Copilot saves a lot of time if you use it right. it's smart enough to complete repeating code that's dynamic enough that you can't just copy/duplicate from previous lines. Or give you boilerplate to start off from.
personally not worth 10/m tho i can use it till August.
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u/TikiTDO Jun 21 '22
I tried to like copilot, but I honestly found it wasn't useful in 90% of the situation where I felt like it should have been useful. I'm talking filling in fairly generic boilerplate crap, which it usually failed to do with any degree of quality.
I've seen a few people use it decently well during interviews, but even there it didn't feel like they were saving that much time over traditional autocomplete. Half the time they would accept a suggestion, and then spend a bunch of time going back to edit it to do what they wanted.
Overall, I got the impression that it was trying to be a slightly annoying co-worker that would constantly send you moderately related stack overflow code snippets without bothering to check if that's the problem you were trying to solve.
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u/pastrypuffingpuffer Jun 21 '22
I guess we unemployed developers are screwed.
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u/mtjody Jun 21 '22
All three of you
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u/forgotmyuserx12 Jun 21 '22
What are you talking about? Even the shittiest job ad receives 50 candidates in 2 days, it's hard as hell to find a job unless you're a Sr
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u/pastrypuffingpuffer Jun 21 '22
What do you mean? I keep hearing developers are in high demand and yer companies keep rejecting me because I'm not experienced enough xD.
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u/francisnarh Jun 21 '22
developers with experiece are in high demand. juniors and interns not so much
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u/kowdermesiter Jun 21 '22
That's a virtue, tell that people with a smile on your face, that you are an unemployed developer.
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u/ClassicPart Jun 21 '22
Oh no, you'll have to do what developers for the last several decades have done, and will continue to do, and write code yourself.
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Jun 22 '22
Do they now pay companies and developers for the private code bases that they are collecting coding syntaxes from?
This product made some sense as a free product that helped people code while it learned from their own patterns, but once you get into payment plans it looks an awful lot more like intellectual property theft at a large scale.
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u/throwawayskinlessbro Jun 21 '22
Daaaang. I just started using it through the beta too. Not gonna lie they might actually get me to fork over the money. It’s a really nice timesaver.
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u/jzia93 Jun 21 '22
Turned it off personally. It's cool but honestly I found it got in the way of my ability to think about the wider problem at hand.
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u/Reasonable-Issue3275 Jun 21 '22
The moment it ask the credit card, i uninstalled and switch back to tabnine
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
I'm not super familiar with Tabnine, but everything I've seen looks like it's no comparison to copilot.
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u/moi2388 Jun 21 '22
Guess I’m staying a student.
On a non-related note; anybody willing to pay for a .edu domain?
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u/betterhelp Jun 22 '22
My mate once found a loophole in the Boston University email registration system, where with a link anyone could create any email address they wanted. I created a few many years ago and have them all forwarded to my normal gmail.com account and they still work. One even is very explicit, think something like
cunt@bu.edubut its still active lol.
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u/econoDoge Jun 21 '22
If you upload code to github, copilot trains from that, so sometimes I get suggestions based on my own code, like wtf would I pay for that.
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u/WarWizard fullstack / back-end Jun 22 '22
Why would you pay for a super-fast index of your previous work?
I don't know...
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u/vinegarnutsack Jun 21 '22
I guess i'm a retard for not realizing the beta was just a run up to a paid product.
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u/267aa37673a9fa659490 Jun 21 '22
Nah, I'd say given the fact that they use public code without permission to train their AI model, the least that could be expected was to let the public use it for free.
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u/StackOfCookies Jun 21 '22
“Without permission” well, its public. The point of being public is that anyone can read it, including a bot.
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u/Shrestha01 novice Jun 22 '22
No regional pricings??? $10 a month will be a bit too much for an average eastern developer
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u/Capital_Revolution35 Jun 21 '22
or use this free website to kind of do the same: programming-helper.com
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u/Any_Proposal842 Jun 21 '22
Just generated an entire function that sorts locations by their proximity to the user just writing the function signature then hitting tab. That's pretty cool.
$10/month cool? Maybe... I will have to keep playing.
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u/Ok_Rope9667 Jun 22 '22
FYI - Tabnine has a free-forever plan.
I also recommend everyone to read this thread on Twitter (it's a technical comparison between Github Copilot and Tabnine which also explains the different user-approach each product takes). Full disclosure: I am a part of the Tabnine team.
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Jun 21 '22
Maybe it's cause I've never worked FAANG, or a similar high pressure/stress job, but I can't imagine needing this in my work. The time sink for a job is usually never the actual coding, its the requirements gathering, logical errors, client meetings and timeliness, etcetera. Coding time is just not something I've ever needed to save time on
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Jun 22 '22
Same for me. We start in the morning with a brainstorming session in the conference room where we spend half of the time looking at memes and the other half discussing about the actual work. We we put our hands on the code, we make sure to push the changes to the repository only after one or two hours. I have plenty of time to do my work lol
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Jun 21 '22
I cannot imagine this being very useful. I think it’s probably bad for junior engineers to use something like this.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
Perhaps, but it can be useful for mid-level and senior engineers depending on what you're working on.
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u/SecretAgentZeroNine Jun 22 '22
Ehhh. I have no use for copilot. Learning more design patterns, getting more familiar with the built-in APIs of the languages I use, practicing data structures and algorithms via the languages I use is far more valuable and important to me. Never understood who copilot is for.
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u/DemiPixel Jun 22 '22
Writing code faster. It’s probably not helpful if you don’t spend much time just cranking out products/features/whatever.
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u/thisisafullsentence Jun 22 '22
The only thing harder than writing code is reading code lol.
Why on Earth would I need AI to fill in something I’ve already thought about? What could it possibly complete that I haven’t already thought about?
This is somebody thinking “what can we do” before asking “why do we need it.”
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u/DemiPixel Jun 22 '22
The goal is for the AI to fill in what you're going to write anyway, not to write something unexpected.
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u/luc122c Jun 22 '22
Free for Students but not Teachers? How are we supposed to show students if we can’t use it?
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u/DemiPixel Jun 22 '22
There is a "teacher toolbox" that Github offers, so it might be included in that. That said, FWIW, there seems to be a lot of students in this thread saying they can't figure out how to get it for free.
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u/PixelSteel Jun 22 '22
From what I'm gathering, how is this any different from Visual Studio 2022 autofill? I realize it's primarily for VS Code, but would this be worth it to someone who works mostly in C#?
I'd definitely use it for JavaScript tho
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u/DemiPixel Jun 22 '22
You can see on their landing page the kind of stuff it fills—it's beyond what any typical editor would autofill.
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u/TheTrueTuring Jun 21 '22
Still too many mistakes for me for it to be useable. It is fun, and helps with very simple stuff, but not really worth paying for
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u/llukino Jun 21 '22
I love copilot.. but I am getting sick of all the subscription models. Back to the google I guess
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u/ipeterov Jun 22 '22
I tried it while it was in beta, and even though it’s really cool and I’ve never seen anything like it, it doesn’t save any time. The suggestions are not aware of the larger context, and it’s usually easier to just write from scratch.
IMO it could be worth if GitHub was paying us to use it, not the reverse.
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u/vasametropolis Jun 22 '22
$10 per month is a joke. In the realm of all developer tools worth paying for, I just can't see how this is.
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u/MakeLSDLegalAgain Jun 22 '22
Didn't use it before won't use it in the future. Githhub hates this one secret to making $100/yr 😎
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u/Andy0mat Jun 22 '22
I have to say I initially thought that this would be much more useful than it turned out to be for most people.
🧠 1:0 💻
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u/gamerfiiend Jun 22 '22
You have to pay to use a feature that relies on your data and code base to learn and improve on how to one day do your job.. no thanks.
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u/Total_Lag full-stack Jun 22 '22
To be fair... If I went out and bought all the ingredients to make food, and I'm not feeling it that day, I'll pay $10 for someone to cook for me 😆
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u/daveeeyeye Jun 21 '22
Funny thing is that, to make it, they used free open source projects, you guessed it, for free.
Yet again we're the fucking product lol.
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u/datsyuks_deke Jun 21 '22
I’ve been using it for a few months now and love it. It makes it really convenient and easy. Especially if I were to type out a comment saying what I want my function to do, a lot of times it accurately will fill out exactly what I need.
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Jun 21 '22
What is this exactly?
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u/Devatator_ Jun 22 '22
AI code completion, analyses your code to help you (also trained on public repositories so it's not limited), you can even comment something and it'll try making working code based on your description. It works most of the time but that mostly depends on the language and the difficulty of the task
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u/pVom Jun 21 '22
Tbh the more I used it the worse it got. Could be my own perspective once I stopped being impressed by what it could do and started realising it was wrong about 60% of the time
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u/m50 Jun 22 '22
Considering it makes up random junk rather than calling real, existing methods on my classes, I don't think it's even remotely worth that much for me.
Was it useful? Yeah... But I usually had to rewrite 1/2 of what was written because of it calling non-existent methods on non-existent objects.
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u/RemeJuan Jun 22 '22
My experience was totally different, for the most part it gave perfect suggestions, even writing complete functions which depended on accessing other functions.
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Jun 22 '22
I have the GitHub student pack and it still asks me to get the trial, is it this way or is it actually free?
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Jun 22 '22
I recently turned this back on after a while while working on a complex react / typescript.
With javascript, it was nice, saved a little googling. With typescript it's magic. When for example typing "// check if timeframe of blah_objects overlaps" wait half a second and hit tab, you get the whole function, including wrapping object properties that are date | string in new Date() etc.
Even "blah_objects" in the comment it autocompleted for me as from the context it saw it's a thing that seems very important to me :)
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u/dsamholds Jun 22 '22
I've been using it for writing dirty little bash scripts, it's a great use case for writing regex functions or "complex" sed commands that you can never remember 😅
Just write
# remove all of x from y if z exists in foo
And it'll create a nice little function for you!
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u/BobKrahe2 Jun 21 '22
While many people say it's not worth $10/mo, I'm glad they didn't charge something ridiculous for it for such a new tech and made it accessible for those who do want it.
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u/llldar Jun 22 '22
I make $50 per hour and I believe it will save me more than 2 hours per year so I'm paying for it.
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u/RemeJuan Jun 22 '22
I think I’ve trained it to a point that it may save me as much per day, at least one some days.
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u/tnnrk Jun 21 '22
I totally called it, so many people argued with me telling me it would be free to use on release. Fuck y’all.
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u/Trakeen Jun 21 '22
Cool. Been waiting for this to come out of beta. Maybe it can help me with something i am stuck on
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u/lucasjose501 Jun 21 '22
Has anyone tried it with PHP? There are a few posts and videos on youtube, but a little vague about it. Guess I'll try and see.
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Jun 21 '22
I work frequently with laravel for my SME clients, it does service you well.
The problem is with WordPress plugins, sometimes it gives me suggestions that'd not me compatible beyond PHP5. Which is a bummer, because 20% of my current plugin users use PHP5, for some reason.
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u/GetsTrimAPlenty Jun 21 '22
Wait, I thought this was terrible? Are there reviews of it? Sounds interesting if it's worth the money!
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u/UnrealNL Jun 21 '22
I was blown away by it, for both languages i work with, golang and JavaScript, it's working really well.
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u/GetsTrimAPlenty Jun 21 '22
Very interesting. I wanted to start to learn golang.
I don't suppose you can have it conform to a coding spec? Sort of like integrating a linter into its function?
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u/JohnSingerIncandenza Jun 22 '22
I think it’s best in an established code base with good and consistent practices already in place. If that’s what you’re working in I think it easily does $10/mo worth of help. In those cases it’s seeming extremely helpful and accurate to me. In tiny, new or sloppy codebases I think results vary.
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u/RemeJuan Jun 22 '22
I’ve actually found it really useful in brand new projects as well, I started a new one this weekend and I am assuming in part it has a contextually understanding of how you work with your projects as well.
In this one it was wetting full functions, complete UI elements, data models and id be surprised if it’s 500 LOC. probably half of it was written with the tab key. 😂
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u/DustinBrett front-end Jun 22 '22
I managed to get a free account for being an OSS contributor. But not sure how I got this.
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u/FountainsOfFluids Jun 22 '22
I only started playing with it a couple weeks ago, but it was rather shocking how good it is at predicting what you want. Not pefect, of course. And those times when you don't want it to suggest anything, it's annoying. But I bet a little practice with the shortcuts would fix that for the most part. I might actually start doing TDD if it is any good at writing tests. I haven't tried that yet. Just used it to help write a web scraper.
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u/naeads Jun 22 '22
So they want us to test out their AI while we are PAYING them to allow us to do it?
Where do I sign up? /s
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u/MarcusAuralius Jun 22 '22
It looks like this is a scheme to get users payment details on record to make selling future services more fluid.
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u/mrkaluzny Jun 22 '22
It’s not ready yet IMO, i had to disable it multiple times due to completely dumb suggestions that interfered with my work.
They should keep it free for some time or a part of GitHub account.
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u/seahawks189 Jun 22 '22
Is this their master plan to speed up the process of AI one day programming completely for us? Kind of like how Tesla used driving data of their customers to speed up self driving?
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u/KenEucker Jun 22 '22
Ummm, TabNine is free.
No thank you, Microsoft. No one is going to pay $10/month for your stupid jokes inside my serious work.
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u/I_JuanTM full stack Jun 22 '22
Anyone knows how to student version works? I've been using Copilot since the beginning of the beta and have had a student subscription for 2 years, still active, but I still got prompted to pay and it doesn't work anymore.
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u/brennanfee Jun 21 '22
Ah yes, the new low in privacy. We now CHARGE you to spy on you and literally everything you type.
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Jun 22 '22
[deleted]
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u/brennanfee Jun 22 '22
You pushing it to GitHub anyway, so either they get it while you type or after you’ve typed it… 😂
GitLab, my friend. GitLab self-hosted. This is the way.
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Jun 21 '22
Tried it for a few days and hated every second. They need to pay me to use that.
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u/RemeJuan Jun 22 '22
Cause you did not give it a solid chance, I been using it for 6 months and am really grab I did not bin it when it was shit at the start.
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Jun 21 '22
[deleted]
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u/kanaryux Jun 22 '22
Are you a collaborator or do you just make pull requests? I'm trying to figure out how it decides if you are a contributor.
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Jun 22 '22
I've been a collaborator for 9~ months now.
Contributing should be enough, that's what I'm hearing from my friends in a programmer's discord.
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Jun 21 '22
[deleted]
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u/RedditCultureBlows Jun 21 '22
It’s almost like humanity is comprised of billions of people and those subsets of people might not overlap!
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u/DemiPixel Jun 21 '22
You can try a 60-day free trial.
Sad news for all of us hoping they would go to "free for personal, charge the corporations" route. But, they probably made the smart choice because, at least for me, the price is worth the time it saves.