GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot↗ was launched in 2021 by GitHub and Microsoft, trained on public code repositories. It is built into VS Code and available as an extension for JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Xcode, and others. It is the most widely used AI coding assistant today.

# Features

Copilot offers autocomplete suggestions as you type, a chat panel for asking questions and making inline edits, and an agent mode capable of autonomously performing multi-step tasks across files, reading your entire workspace, and running terminal commands to iterate on solutions with minimal manual intervention.

The experience is most polished inside VS Code, where Copilot has deep integration with the editor's diff view, context picker, and terminal.

# Model selection

Copilot supports multiple underlying models, including OpenAI's GPT-4o and o3 plus Anthropic's Claude, allowing you to select which model powers your session directly in the chat interface based on your preferences and coding needs; model availability varies by subscription tier.

# Pricing

Copilot operates on a freemium model with a free tier offering limited monthly completions and chat interactions, plus paid individual, team, and enterprise subscription plans that provide increased usage limits, management controls, and audit logging; it is also included in GitHub Education for students and educators.

# Privacy

Code context is sent to GitHub's servers for processing, though GitHub states that it does not use Copilot Business or Enterprise user inputs to train its models, and individual account users can review data handling settings in GitHub account preferences to understand how their code is processed and can enable blocking of suggestions matching public code.