How to use GitHub Copilot tutorial
Imagine having a coding partner at your side who knows more languages than you, fully comprehends all the technical documentation, completely understands your codebase and is willing to do all the low-level grunt work like configuring dependencies and writing unit tests.
That's what coding with GitHub Copilot feels like.
What is GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant that can bootstrap new projects, generate code based on plain-text prompts, fix bugs and write unit tests. In short, it does lots of tasks that can help multiply the productivity of the software developers on your team.
Through plugins and extensions, GitHub Copilot functionality can be integrated into several different IDEs, including the following:
- Visual Studio Code.
- All JetBrains IDEs.
- Azure Data Studio.
- Neovim.
- Eclipse.
How does GitHub Copilot work?
Anyone who has asked ChatGPT to write some code or fix a bug will pick up GitHub Copilot quickly. In fact, GPT-4o is one of the default large-language models (LLM) from which a user can choose to generate code, along with the following other options:
- Claude Sonnet.
- Gemini Flash.
- 03-mini.
However, GitHub Copilot isn't simply a built-in chat window to talk to an LLM. When queried in an extension such as GitHub Chat or GitHub Edits, the tool takes the insights provided by the backing LLM and can either create new source files or update existing ones.
GitHub Copilot Chat
Furthermore, GitHub Chat commands enable the tool to perform the following functions:
- Configure project-wide unit testing.
- Explain highlighted code snippets.
- Fix bugs in code that's misbehaving.
- Suggest needed terminal and BASH commands.
Working with GitHub Copilot really does feel like you're peer programming with a much smarter developer who's willing to let you take credit for all the great code that's being produced.
If you haven't used it before, this GitHub Copilot tutorial will help you get started. In just a few minutes, you'll learn how to set up GitHub Copilot in your IDE, garner insights through GitHub Copilot Chat and bootstrap entire projects with Copilot Edits.
If you quickly want to become adept with GitHub Copilot, this video tutorial will help get you on your way.
Cameron McKenzie has been a Java EE software engineer for 20 years. His current specialties include Agile development; DevOps; Spring; and container-based technologies such as Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes.