177

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.”

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de 45 points 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days 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
github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon

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

[-] RiQuY@lemm.ee 9 points 5 days ago

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

[-] cupcakezealot 2 points 4 days ago

i like vscodium but is sublime text still worth it. i use it for some things but the packages are harder to find/manage, i feel.

[-] Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 5 days ago

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

load more comments (7 replies)
[-] JustAnIdiotPlsIgnore@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago

'free'

So is that 'sell my data' free? Or 'get you hooked on the product and then add a subscription a year later' free?

Bastards.

[-] Moc@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

Both. And there is no guarantee they are not selling your data even if you pay.

[-] Kit 1 points 3 days ago

Enterprise versions of Copilot do guarantee in the contract that they are not selling your data or using it to train their LLM.

[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 61 points 5 days ago

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

[-] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 49 points 5 days ago

Does the EFF call it Free?

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 17 points 5 days ago
[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago
[-] semperverus@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

This needs to get added to the common nomenclature as the third option 😂

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

Beer is expensive, and gives you colon cancer.

[-] loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 5 days ago

I'm not the one who's so far away
When I feel the snake bite enter my veins

No such thing as a free beer, no more than there's a free lunch.

[-] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 12 points 4 days ago

no more than there's a free lunch.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 7 points 5 days ago

Well, there's free Copilot now.

[-] geography082@lemm.ee 9 points 4 days ago

If would be amazing to stop using the word free when we are talking about companies like Microsoft and Google

[-] konomikitten 26 points 5 days ago

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

[-] plz1@lemmy.world 29 points 5 days 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.

[-] dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win 30 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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.

[-] unmagical@lemmy.ml 35 points 5 days 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.

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

And you can't opt out..

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

[-] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 12 points 5 days ago

What do you mean? You have to create an account and log in. Am I missing something?

[-] cley_faye@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days 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.

[-] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)
[-] cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days 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.

[-] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 2 points 5 days ago

You're the one making the false claim it cannot me opted out right now. If you want you prove that claim go ahead.

As you want you also prove the future, please prove it won't be possible to opt out in the future.

I know you will come empty handed, so won't bother waiting

[-] cley_faye@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

I have a hard time parsing your sentences, but it seems you don't understand. You can't opt out of those "free" credits. It's a simple matter of not having the option given to us.

[-] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago

You have to manually enable copilot free even if you install copilot extension and you log in. How do I know? I tried instead of making things up in my head like you are.

You don't have hard time parsing my sentences. You have hard time admitting you have no idea what you're saying.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 20 points 5 days 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.

[-] AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 5 days ago

Oh good, FREE SLOP FOR ALL!

[-] Solumbran@lemmy.world 21 points 5 days ago

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

[-] dsilverz@thelemmy.club 5 points 4 days ago

As I like to test things before saying something critical about them, I rushed to my GH account in order to test this "Copilot" from GitHub (it's a weird name considering that Copilot is also a Bing AI; both Bing and Copilot are Microsoft products, so unsurprisingly there's zero creativity coming from them).

So far:

  • It's nothing new: it's just OpenAI ChatGPT 4o under the hood (something I already use through OpenAI's website, thanks for the nothing burger, Github)
  • It's GPT 4o with supposedly some integration with GH APIs...
  • ... except that it has no Github Gists integration (I use Gists more than I use repos)
  • ... and it fails to retrieve the list of all my repos so far (something I managed to manually do through my browser, accessing some endpoint from Github's API (it requires no token) and using Devtools to map and format the JSON array into a string list)
  • The paid version seems to offer the possibility to pick another LLM model: Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT o1 (also known as "strawberry", who can't count "how many R's" are there within its own name) and... that's it. Also nothing new, even if you ever dare to pay for it.

Summary: a "nothing burger". It perfectly describes this... "tool"?

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 5 days ago

There's absolutely no way this is sustainable

[-] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 20 points 5 days ago

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

[-] anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 5 days ago

It's basically digital drugs.

[-] mac@lemm.ee 4 points 5 days 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.

[-] cupcakezealot 7 points 4 days ago

honestly copilot is great just to autocomplete repetitive lines of code but not enough to pay. i find the emmet snippets much better.

[-] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

I've had much joy from using 'windsurf', the VSCode clone with the stupidest name.

[-] mfat@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

Same here. I'm a Cursor subscriber but I loked Windsurf better after using its free trial.

this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
177 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

60074 readers
3166 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS