this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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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.

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 4 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

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

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

[–] 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 6 days ago

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

[–] 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 6 days ago

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

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 58 points 1 week ago

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

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

Does the EFF call it Free?

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 19 points 1 week ago (7 children)
[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] 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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[–] plz1@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week 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 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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 36 points 1 week ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 21 points 1 week 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.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There's absolutely no way this is sustainable

[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's basically digital drugs.

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[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week 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 1 week ago (3 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.

[–] 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

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[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

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

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