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.”

  • Rikj000
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    3 months ago

    uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot + AI feed 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##li.ActionList-sectionDivider:has-text(Copilot)
    github.com##li.TimelineItem:has-text(Copilot)
    github.com##div.pb-4:has-text(Copilot)
    github.com###copilot_free_global
    github.com###copilot-button-container
    github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon
    github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"]
    github.com##a[href*="/settings/copilot"]
    github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
    github.blog##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
    github.blog##a[href*="/ai-and-ml"]
    github.blog##article.changelog-label-copilot
    github.blog##article.changelog-label-models
    
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(LLM)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(OpenAI)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(ChatGPT)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(GPT)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Llama)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Gemini)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Grok)
    github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(DeepSeek)
    

    Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot

    • RiQuY
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      75 months ago

      Time to start using VSCodium then, I want no cloud AI in my development setup.

      • Rikj000
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        25 months ago

        Been using VSCodium for a few years now, for loose file editing,
        no complaints about it, imo it’s what VSCode should be.

  • plz1
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    215 months 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.

  • db0
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    125 months ago

    There’s absolutely no way this is sustainable

    • @mac@lemm.ee
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      45 months ago

      I mean chatgpt isn’t sustainable right now, and is losing money.

      Large corpos/VC funded startups will happily burn money to capture a critical mass of users. They’re frontloading cost to capture market share. Similar to Alexa’s, they’re dirt cheap to get you into their ecosystem. Rappi has done this in Latin America, uber did it for a time, etc.

    • @theherk@lemmy.world
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      115 months ago

      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.

        • Eager Eagle
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          25 months ago

          They aren’t. Copilot is not a built-in extension. Can’t say much about future plans though.

      • @residentmarchant@lemmy.world
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        45 months 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

  • @geography082@lemm.ee
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    75 months ago

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

    • @Moc@lemmy.world
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      55 months ago

      Both. And there is no guarantee they are not selling your data even if you pay.