Microsoft Integrates a Free Version of Its 'Copilot' Coding AI Into GitHub, VS Code

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: 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...

There are some limitations to the free version, which is geared toward occasional users, not major work on a big project. Developers on the free plan will get access to 2,000 code completions per month, for example, and as a GitHub spokesperson told me, each Copilot code suggestion will count against this limit — not just accepted suggestions. And while GitHub recently added the ability to switch between different foundation models, users on the free plan are limited to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. (The paid plans also include Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini.) For Copilot Chat, the number of chat messages is limited to 50, but otherwise, there aren't any major limitations to the free service. Developers still get access to all Copilot Extensions and skills.

The free Copilot SKU will work in a number of editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains, as well as on GitHub.com.
GitHub's announcement ends with the words "Happy coding!" and calls the service "GitHub Copilot Free." But TechCrunch points out there's already competition from services like Amazon Q Developer, as well as from companies like Tabnine and Qodo (previously known as Codium) — and they typically offer a free tier. But in addition, "With Copilot Free, we are returning to our freemium roots," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told TechCrunch, as well as "laying the groundwork for something far greater: AI represents our best path to enabling a GitHub with one billion developers.

"There should be no barrier to entry for experiencing the joy of creating software. Now six years after being acquired by Microsoft, it indeed appears GitHub is still GitHub — and we are doing our thing."

Or, as GitHub CEO Satya Nadella said in a video posted on LinkedIn, "The joy of coding is back! And we are looking forward to bringing the same experience to so many more people around the world."

Monopolistic behavior

[Njovich]

Microsoft promised when they purchased github (like a pair of shoes) that it would stay independent. They seem to completely have forgotten about this term in the requirements for being allowed to acquire GitHub. I hope authorities are watching closely and are going to sweep in. You cannot just get some government approval and just ignore it the moment it comes in.

We are a couple years later now and they take github copilot, force them to give it away for dumping prices and at a loss, to push Visual Studio Code as the new 'golden standard' for coding. So they are using 1 monopoly to create another one, a clear abuse of market power. Visual Studio code is not all that great compared to things like Jetbrains IntelliJ, but they use this kind of unfair monopolistic practices to push out them. Any new competitors like cursor are made impossible as microsoft will just keep the prices artificially low until all competition is gone and then they can ask whatever price they want.

Just like they did with Windows, Office 365, Exchange Online, Azure, Entra, etc etc etc.

Re:Monopolistic behavior

[ZipNada]

As the article clearly explained, there already are other code-completion alternatives out there with a free tier. As for Jetbrains, the article also clearly stated "The free Copilot SKU will work in a number of editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains"

Re:

[Samare]

Jetbrains IDEs are great, but apart from PyCharm which has a Community edition (aka free for open source), it's not free.
VS Code is. And with clangd, it's very close to Jetbrains' CLion.
Cursor is mostly VS Code with AI, which you can get with many VS Code extensions.

Re:

[Njovich]

What matters to microsoft is that they control the ecosystem. They will happily sell you stuff at a loss (ie. free) to establish dominance at first. And spend millions on it to establish it. After all when the competition is gone they can do whatever they want.

That's fine, but in the case of GitHub IP such as GitHub Copilot it seems in breach of the deal to acquire GitHub in the first place. Especially with regards to the deal with EU authorities.

What we are seeing here is microsoft killing off a market to

Re:

[qzzpjs]

Actually, JetBrains Rider now has a free version for non-commercial use as well.

Intellij?

[Viol8]

Fuck that. I'm not using any editor that requires java. I had to use that dog slow mess Eclipse in a former job, never again. If it's not a native binary I'm not interested.

Re:

[Njovich]

So what do you use then? I guess Visual Studio Code would be out as well as an electron app?

I guess you will always have Emacs or Vim.

Re:

[theurge14]

Sublime Text.

Re:

[Viol8]

Got it in one - vim.

Re: Intellij?

[commodore73]

What was Java? That's a joke.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

Satya: "Hey Donald, some kid here is complaining I'm not taking care of the shoes I bought a few years back"
Donald: "I'm the greatest! Elon, take care of i!"
Elon: "Pedo kid!"

Re:

[Patrick May]

Visual Studio code is not all that great compared to things like Jetbrains IntelliJ....

And it doesn't even come close to Emacs.

This is what is known in the industry

[quonset]

As a sneaky.

Free Spyware!

[BrendaEM]

That's strange, I saw a product that looked exactly like what I was working on.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

What other kind of software is there?

Well trodden path

[CommunityMember]

"The first hit is free!"

Caveat Coder

[Deep Esophagus]

My company blocked access to all AI chatbots through our firewall - except Copilot. We're encouraged to use Copilot to solve our coding and engineering problems.

A typical use case:
Me: I'm writing a powershell script to solve such-and-so need in our on-prem Azure Devops Server instance. What is the right API endpoint to get this information?
Co: Sure, just use {nonexistent powershell function} to go to your.base.url/_apis/non-existent-endpoint
Me: Wait, {nonexistent powershell function}? That's not documented anywhere, and powershell crashes when it hits that command.
Co: Oopsies! I meant {other nonexistent function}
Me: That didn't work either. I googled it and found {correct function}
Co: Goodness gracious me, that's right.
Me: I tried that endpoint and nonexistent-endpoint isn't real
Co: Gosh, I don't know what happened! I do apologize. Try {other nonexistent-endpoint} instead

Yesterday was classic Copilot
Me: I'm running this pipeline in our on-prem Visual Studio Server instance (no matter how many times I say that, as often as not it gives me answers that only apply to the cloud Services). There are two pipeline agents installed on server {blurp}. When the pipeline uses agent A, it works correctly. But when it uses agent B, it throws this error saying it can't find the right version of Visual Studio. As I mentioned, they are both on the same server. They also both use the same service account, so they both have the same environment settings, the same versions of VStudio installed, identical agent versions, identical .NET assemblies, etc. If I open the agent configuration screen in the Azure agent pool setup screen, both of them have identical capabilities. How is it that agent A runs it correctly but B fails?
Co: Compare the versions of Visual Studio and make sure it is correct for both of them.
Me: Are you unable to read? I just told you, they are both on the same machine with the same VS available.
Co: Righto, try looking at the agent's capabilities and make sure they are the same.
Me: What part of "capabilities are identical" do you not understand?
Co: Look in the agents' config folder.
Me: In C:\agents\A and C:\agents\B, there is no folder called config
Co: My mistake, I meant to look at config.json.
Me: There is no file called config.json.
Co: Compare the versions of Visual Studio and make sure it is correct for both of them.

I lose more time trying to get a straight answer out of Copilot than if I had just googled instead. And considering my low opinion of the quality of google search results, that's a pretty low bar.

So, my fellow coders, beware: don't fall into the trap of letting Copilot do your thinking for you. That way lies madness (and really crappy unusable code)

Postscript for those wondering how I resolved the problem: I had to uninstall the "bad" agent and reinstall it to get the pipeline working correctly.

Post-postscript: Yes, the above dialogue is paraphrased. Copilot does apologise profusely every time I call out its mistakes, but it doesn't use so much colloquialism. However, my angry sarcastic responses are verbatim.

Re:

[narcc]

I lose more time trying to get a straight answer out of Copilot than if I had just googled instead [...] don't fall into the trap of letting Copilot do your thinking for you. That way lies madness (and really crappy unusable code)

As the novelty wears off, more and more people are realizing just how much time they're wasting with AI. I suspected that a lot of the early self-reported productivity gains were just people focusing more on work because they were having fun playing with the new toy, being that the gains disappeared along with the novelty.

Re:

[phantomfive]

A lot of people are using it as a replacement for a search engine (or wikipedia) and I don't see that usage going away. The people who do it seem really satisfied with it.

Re: Caveat Coder

[St.Creed]

If you find the cases where AI is really good, it's worth every penny you paid.

I have several of these cases. In fact, my wife and son use paid gpt too, and I can tell they have very different things they use it for. But all valid.

Are there things it doesn't really do well? Yes, much more than the things it is good at. Butif that's not your use case, why care?

I don't hire a pole vaulter to win a horse race either.

Things AI is good at:
- science questions for exact sciences
- language manipulation, including

Re:

[vyvepe]

Be careful. I'm sure LLMs provided slightly wrong answers to me. My test questions were about:
1) science questions about how spacetime is bent around black holes and questions about electromagnetism (stuff related to Maxwell equations)
2) code sketches related to field oriented motor control

I tried the free models available on ducduckgo. Things went awry especially when I started to ask for more details and reasoning why stuff works this way and that way ...
Maybe bigger models do better.

Re:

[narcc]

I've found that people who use it that way don't have any idea how often it provides them with nonsense answers. A little fact-checking is all takes to realize the absurdity of using an LLM as a replacement for search.

Re: Caveat Coder

[zawarski]

MS called. You have convinced them. Your anecdotal stories did the trick. No more AI coding assist. Happy now?

The return of ClippyAI

[Mirnotoriety]

Is it possible to remove ClippyAI from VS Code editor?

Re:

[martin-boundary]

I don't know! Let's ask Clippy?

Re:

[Mirnotoriety]

$ Uninstall the GitHub Copilot Extension

a. Open VS Code: Launch your Visual Studio Code editor.

b. Go to Extensions: Click on the Extensions icon in the Activity Bar on the side of the editor or press Ctrl+Shift+X (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+X (Mac).

c. Find GitHub Copilot: Search for "GitHub Copilot" in the search bar.

d. Uninstall: Click the gear icon next to the GitHub Copilot extension and select "Uninstall."

You get what you pay for

[commodore73]

Now you get to train their LLMs for free, even if you don't GitHub or SO. And that setting to opt out...we know how that works on the mothership already.

Need more data to train your AI?

[chas.williams]

Introduce a free version that reports back to the mothership.