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

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.”

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    78·
    4 days ago

    And you can’t opt out…

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

    • Railcar8095@lemm.eeEnglish
      131·
      4 days ago

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

      • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
        53·
        4 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.

          • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
            33·
            4 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.eeEnglish
              23·
              4 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.worldEnglish
                11·
                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.eeEnglish
                  31·
                  3 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.