Copilot
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
GitHub Copilot is the AI coding assistant that lives inside your editor and autocompletes your code. You start typing and it suggests the next line, function, or entire block. It's powered by OpenAI Codex (and now GPT-4). It's like pair programming with a very fast robot who's read all of GitHub. It changed how developers write code.
Real Talk
GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered code completion tool integrated into IDEs (VS Code, JetBrains, etc.), built on OpenAI Codex/GPT-4. It provides inline suggestions, whole-function completions, docstring generation, and test writing. It now includes Copilot Chat for conversational coding. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 and launched Copilot in 2021.
When You'll Hear This
"Copilot wrote the entire CRUD endpoint from the function name." / "We have Copilot Enterprise for the whole team."
Related Terms
AI Pair Programming
AI pair programming is pair programming where your partner is an AI.
Autocomplete
AI autocomplete is like your phone's predictive text, but for code, and actually intelligent.
Code Generation
Code Generation is AI writing code for you based on a description.
Cursor
Cursor is a code editor (forked from VS Code) with AI built into every interaction.
LLM (Large Language Model)
An LLM is a humongous AI that read basically the entire internet and learned to predict what words come next, really really well.