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

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.”

  • mesamuneEnglish
    -1•31 minutes ago

    And you can’t opt out…

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

      • @cley_fayeEnglish
        2•7 hours ago

        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.

          • @cley_fayeEnglish
            1•8 minutes ago

            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.