GitHub Copilot extends Support for JetBrains IDE

Despite the controversy surrounding the AI-driven programming assistant, Copilot, GitHub has gone ahead to add support for more editors like JetBrains IDE and Neovim, along with multiline code completions in languages such as C, C++, C# and Java.

While the early preview was launched with Visual Studio Code extension only, with very few languages supported, Copilot now support programming languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, and Go.

Copilot remains in preview stage, with the support for editors like Neovim and JetBrains IDEs, still expected to be launched in thenext updates with focus on JetBrains’ IntelliJ and PyCharm.

What is GitHub Copilot?

Copilot is an AI system trained on a selection of English language, powered by OpenAI Codex, and source code derived from publicly available repositories on GitHub.

It draws on the context of class names, function and method names, with comments to generate and synthesize the code offering developers with suggestions for new lines of code or functions in the editor. Copilot provides synthesized code suggestions, not just verbatim comments, and safeguards are being implemented to ensure that verbatim comments don't make it into code suggestions.

GitHub also discovered that code snippet suggestions verbatim were about 0.1% of the time. It also suggested that a fair amount of human intervention will be required when working with Copilot.

How to Get Started with Copilot?

Developers are enjoined to sign up to the waitlist to try out Copilot via the GitHub Copilot portal.

The company is keen to engage in a discussion with developers on topics and lead in setting up appropriate standards for training AI models.