From the course: Software Testing Assistance with GitHub Copilot AI

What is GitHub Copilot? - Github Copilot Tutorial

From the course: Software Testing Assistance with GitHub Copilot AI

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What is GitHub Copilot?

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- [Narrator] GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant. By limiting scope to code, this AI is most useful for code completion, identifying bugs, and understanding code. This is the github.com Copilot features page. There's some interesting screenshots, tons of stats, and examples of how amazing Copilot is. More valuable, are the GitHub Copilot docs. You'll probably find that you interface with Copilot in your IDE, but it's also available via command line and in GitHub mobile. Broadly, Copilot does two things, code completion and chat. While there are different paid plans for Copilot, I'll be talking only about the individual plan in this course. Once you've signed up for Copilot, you need to enable it in your IDE. This course is using code spaces and enabling Copilot only requires adding the Copilot extension. The same holds true for the desktop version of VS code. A Copilot extension can also be installed in JetBrains IDEs. Once installed, the only setup Copilot needs is to connect to your GitHub account. I'm not going to walk through this, because every IDE I've used, drops you right into the wizard for setup after installing the Copilot extension. Your first interaction with Copilot will probably be code completion. When you start to type a function or leave a comment about the next line of code, Copilot will suggest a solution in ghost text. If you like what you see, tap tab and that code is now in place. This is how I work with Copilot most of the time. Sometimes the suggestion is exactly what I need, but it is AI, and there will be mistakes. Another way to interact with Copilot is via chat. In your IDE, you can ask Copilot to do things like explain this code, or change the snippet to another language, even things like create a data transfer object class from this JSON. One bonus that I really enjoy, GitHub CLI has a Copilot extension available. This allows you to create complex shell commands with the help of Copilot. Copilot is an AI coding assistant. It's a very robust tool that continues to improve. Understanding how to leverage it is a superpower.

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