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.”

  • Rikj000English
    13•3 hours ago

    uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot bloat on Github
    uBlock Origin => Open the Dashboard => My Filters => Add:

    github.com##.copilotPreview__container
github.com##.AppHeader-CopilotChat
github.com##li.ActionListItem:has-text(Copilot)
github.com##a[href*="/settings/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"]
github.com###copilot_free_global

    Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot

    • RiQuYEnglish
      2•2 hours ago

      Time to start using VSCodium then, I want no cloud AI in my development setup.

      • Rikj000English
        2•2 hours ago

        Been using VSCodium for a few years now, for loose file editing,
        no complaints about it, imo it’s what VSCode should be.

  • KonomiEnglish
    15•6 hours ago

    I don’t need help to do copyright infringement Microsoft.

  • plz1English
    24•11 hours ago

    Better tl:dr;

    GitHub announced a free version of its Copilot code completion tool, previously only available to students and open-source maintainers. The free plan, limited to 2,000 code completions per month, aims to expand Copilot’s reach and enable more developers worldwide. GitHub also announced reaching 150 million developers on its platform.

  • Max-PEnglish
    42•15 hours ago

    They’re gonna have to pay me to waste my time with this trash

  • dudeami0English
    27•15 hours ago

    My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I’m not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft’s market share in the AI developer space?

    My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you’ll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.

    To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?

    Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn’t mean to link them but I’ll leave it here, don’t give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.

    • FaceDeer
      13•11 hours ago

      It’s a free sample, which is a very common marketing technique. The free tier only gives you 2000 code completions a month so if you end up using it a lot you’ll need to switch to a paid tier. Nothing particularly nefarious there.

    • @[email protected]English
      28•14 hours ago

      To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?

      That’s exactly it.

      From their email:

      What you get:

      2,000 code suggestions a month: Get context-aware suggestions tailored to your VS Code workspace and GitHub projects.

      50 Copilot Chat messages a month: Use Copilot Chat in VS Code and on GitHub to ask questions and refactor, debug, document, and explain code.

      Choose your AI model: You can select between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 4o.

      Render edits across multiple files: Use Copilot Edits to make changes to multiple files you’re working with.

      Access the Copilot Extensions ecosystem: Use third-party agents to conduct web searches via Perplexity, access information from Stack Overflow, and more.

      So it’s just a rate limited thing meant to get you signed up and then cut you off right when you get used to it. I get access through work and well, it just sucks.

      • mesamuneEnglish
        -1•41 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•18 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.

    • @theherkEnglish
      9•9 hours ago

      Run copilot’s proprietary model locally? You’re dreaming. But you can do this with ollama, and they aren’t forcing you. There are many local models that works pretty well.

      • @residentmarchantEnglish
        2•5 hours ago

        I used Ollama locally and it worked decently well. Code suggestions were fast and relatively accurate (as far as an LLM goes). The real issue was the battery hit. Oh man, it HALVED my battery life, which is already short enough when running a server locally

  • @SolumbranEnglish
    11•14 hours ago

    The fact that it even exists still shows how bad the state of programming is nowadays.

  • db0English
    13•15 hours ago

    There’s absolutely no way this is sustainable

    • TimeSquirrel
      16•14 hours ago

      It’s limited. They give you a free dose at first and expect you to come back for more later.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•12 hours ago

      I mean chatgpt isn’t sustainable right now, and is losing money.

      Large corpos/VC funded startups will happily burn money to capture a critical mass of users. They’re frontloading cost to capture market share. Similar to Alexa’s, they’re dirt cheap to get you into their ecosystem. Rappi has done this in Latin America, uber did it for a time, etc.