Hello everyone, today I'm going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of GitHub Copilot, a tool I've been using for over 6 months. Let's dive right in.
What is GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered code completion tool developed by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI. It's built on OpenAI’s Codex technology, trained on a vast amount of publicly available code.
Copilot seamlessly integrates with your IDEs like VSCode, PyCharm, IntelliJ, etc., assisting developers by suggesting code completions, generating whole lines or blocks of code, and providing contextual documentation.
What are the advantages of GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot suggests code snippets as you write your code.
It automates repetitive tasks, making it a great time saver.
You can use it for code commenting; it reads your code and adds comments about what each section does.
It even suggests entire code blocks for the file that fits the context of what the programmer is working on.
What are the disadvantages of GitHub Copilot?
The major disadvantage of GitHub Copilot is for beginner developers or those starting with a new language. Because Copilot suggests code snippets as you code, you may not develop as strong a grasp of syntax as you would without it.
Code suggestions from GitHub Copilot can be distracting when trying to build logic.
It can provide unoptimized, inefficient, or even insecure code. Therefore, you always need to double-check before finalizing the code.