this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024

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GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

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[–] Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de 45 points 6 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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 6 days ago (3 children)

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

[–] Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 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.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 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.

[–] greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml -1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

better use Zed, it is hot cake

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

just waiting on the windows version :(

[–] greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

i hope it never comes, use gnu/linux

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

as soon as i can afford a new laptop but until then i have what i have

[–] mac@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago

Linux excels over windows on older laptops

[–] sfxrlz@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But it has ai chats baked in as well, or is there a way to disable it? Haven’t looked properly yet.

[–] greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago

there are ways to disable that, check r/zed

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 49 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Does the EFF call it Free?

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 19 points 6 days ago (7 children)

It's free as in beer.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Free as in herpes.

[–] semperverus@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago

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

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[–] konomikitten@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 6 days ago

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

[–] plz1@lemmy.world 30 points 6 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.

[–] JustAnIdiotPlsIgnore@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

'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 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 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.

[–] AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 6 days ago

Oh good, FREE SLOP FOR ALL!

[–] geography082@lemm.ee 8 points 5 days ago

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

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Can i point it at a local endpoint or do they wanna force me to send all my code to thwir servers

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

No i mean i assume they are shipping a vscode extension as default. I was wondering if said extension allows me to point at said locally run model.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

They aren't. Copilot is not a built-in extension. Can't say much about future plans though.

[–] residentmarchant@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days 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

[–] dsilverz@thelemmy.club 5 points 5 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"?

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] mfat@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 days ago

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

[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago

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

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