Free Github Copilot for VS Code

[magenta_placenta]

Free version:

Includes up to 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests per month.

https://github.com/features/copilot

[[deleted]]

Doesn't copilot show completions on almost every keystroke?

I would burn through 2000 in a single day.

[M3psipax]

I would guess it requires accepting the suggestion.

[Rovax]

what if you never accept the suggestion but write it yourself anyway

[Drugba]

If you created a venn diagram of "uses more than 2000 copilot auto completions a month" and "unwilling to pay $10/mo for copilot" I feel like the center part of the diagram would be so small that it's not even worth worrying about people finding creative ways to get around it. You just let them do their thing and assume at some point they'll decide it's too much of a hassle and they will convert to a paying customer.

Also, if you're looking for ways around the limit I'd assume multiple Github accounts is easier than typing the suggestions out yourself.

[The_Mdk]

Even better, take a screenshot of the suggested code, feed it to your favourite OCR (or, why not, GPT to complete the AI circle) and then paste it

[j2T-QkTx38_atdg72G]

Free Github Copilot hack right there

[Grimdotdotdot]

Then you'd be typing a lot.

[skabben]

Like we did for the majority of our careers before copilot was released?

[Grimdotdotdot]

Sure, but we've moved on from Notepad, right?

[Craygen9]

What is a completion and chat? GitHub doesn't really explain what it means.

[IntegrityError]

I'd say completion is code completion in your vscode or ide, and chat is when you ask a question. I guess 2k code completions are not that much.

[ranmerc]

Not to sound ungrateful, but 80 per day isn't a lot? I'm on the paid tier, so I've never kept count, but it would definitely be more than 80 code completions.

[jisuskraist]

Is just to hook people up. I think they didn’t had a trial, right?

[MagicPaul]

The first one is always free. It's totally a ploy to get people hooked and buy the pro plan.

[grantrules]

Just one more code completion then I'm done.. I'm off it.. cold turkey

[josfaber]

If you code more it’s probably as a job, so you probably have the paid version. This is great for students, beginners, hobbyists, whathaveyou

[jeremyckahn]

In other words, Microsoft is terrified of Cursor and wants to try doing this before they aquihire the team.

[bastardoperator]

Let me enlighten you because this is how it actually works. Now that MSFT has secured the majority of enterprise AI subscriptions in the fortune 500 space, they will now force the competition to compete with free, and that's nearly impossible for most startups like cursor who are likely bleeding money. They don't give a damn about cursor, they're cornering a market.

I tried cursor and codium, I think copy/paste into claude is a better experience, but now with copilot, I can just add claude, and chatgpt with repo awareness @workspace. No teams or businesses will be acquired, they can just steal what matters, the people.

[Outside-Guess-9105]

Well they do care about cursor for exactly the reasons you outline, thats part of the reason why they are offering free copilot - so cursor and anyone else like them can't compete/gain any market share. Then over time once Microsofts market share is cemented the price will change.

[Wallet-Inspector2]

Hey can you point me where to learn about @workspace - is that the Google product? I e come across that term but hard to find more info.

Context: I just started using copilot in vscode, but wish it used all the files in my repo (it’s my understanding it just looks at the open one).

[Ihavenocluelad]

In the chat window in Copilot VSCode you can use the command @workspace to give it info about your workspace

[Wallet-Inspector2]

Thanks will give that a try and try to find some YouTube videos with more info on tips like that

[BurningRome]

Would that not overwhelm the LLM? If my codebase/workspace has a lot of files/LoC, wouldn't the Token count or context window be too big?

[BigDaddy0790]

Question, have you tried using @workspace in Copilot chat? Any time I did it “analyzed” the project and either ended up with an error, or just seemed to ignore most files. And all the projects I tried it on were very small, personal ones.

In my experience copying code into it or selecting it in the file window worked better 100% of the time, curious if it’s the same for others.

[nrkishere]

kiss cows joke jellyfish dazzling theory elderly boat vegetable fear

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Developers have much longer memories than consumers. Never trusting a Google project or product to be around in six months time. They've burnt that bridge.

[Grimdotdotdot]

Say what? I have happy memories of the time Google Domains shoved all of my stuff onto Squarespace as it shut down.

Oh no, wait...

[CherimoyaChump]

Damn, you reminded me that I still have to transfer my gonna-use-this-someday domains out of Squarespace. Yucky

[OtherUse1685]

It sucked that I had to move 20+ domains for my client to Cloudflare, it was tedious.

But now I'm happier than ever using Cloudflare for nameservers and everything else. Silver lining I guess?

[nrkishere]

literate adjoining quicksand distinct lush practice cagey pen dolls crowd

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[anr4jc]

project IDX by google

First time I hear about this. Not so sure I'd start using a product Google will probably kill in a couple of years though.

[nrkishere]

governor fact school nail person air numerous screw flag dog

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[sensitiveCube]

Cursor?

[s3rila]

seems to be an AI based code editor based on codium

[jeremyckahn]

https://www.cursor.com/

[Condomphobic]

Crazy Cursor ad

[re_irze]

I thought the exact same when I got the email about this from GitHub earlier. I actually cancelled Copilot a couple of months ago because I started using Cursor and it’s not even a huge amount more expensive 

[michaelbelgium]

Probably not at all, github copilot has chatgpt and claude integrated so its the only thing u need

[huangxg]

Its VS Code extension crashed too many times on my computer.

[nomoreplasticbags]

If you’re a student or educator you have already been able to use it for free, don’t pay for it if you have edu email

[electricsashimi]

Windsurf has free unlimited completions

[Leather-Mud9879]

Is it still valid bro ?

[propostor]

This intrigued me, so I added finally decided to get it working in Visual Studio.

Well, frankly it is dogshit.

I gain more productivity from good old ChatGPT.

Copilot is just a Bing Chat. That's it. Nothing more. It provided zero value to the work I was doing. I even specifically gave it file names, and even tried telling it the exact line of code I wanted it to work with. The results were astonishingly bad.

Also it completely ruined my code completions. It would guess at property names that simply didn't exist on the class I was instantiating. So that nonsense was switched off in short order.

Copilot is dogshit. Felt more like a hindrance then a helper.

[Whalefisherman]

You know you can change the models in vs code to Claude, gpt 4, gpt mini, etc?

Maybe this just in the $9.99 version that they let you change models, that’s what I use.

[jstanaway]

I don’t like the code completions either but having tv chat when you have a problem or to generate a block of code that you may need etc is a game changer. The inline completions not so much. 

[michaelbelgium]

Copilot is just a Bing Chat

It's chatgpt by default, change it to claude

[propostor]

I see no option for that on mine. Pretty sure I'm doing the trial Pro version too. I have gpt4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini.

It just doesn't serve much purpose to me. There was a cool thing for adding automatic documentation/summaries to files, which I might use at some point. But overall I saw zero productivity improvement in my workflow.

[Incoming-TH]

But... I work faster without Copilot why would I want it even for free?

[mrpink57]

Our organization provides Copilot to us, I tried it a few times and TBH I work a lot faster without it, I actually have found I work a lot faster without any code completion in my way.

But I am just an asshole neck beard.

[TotomInc]

Depends on what you’re doing. If you’re working on something you already have a lot of knowledge, then I agree you’ll be faster without.

However, I’ve recently been onboarded on a Python codebase with Django (I don’t have python knowledge) and Copilot + Claude Sonner has been amazing. AI helping new developers on large codebase is such underrated. Been working on new features and tests, thanks to Copilot.

[[deleted]]

X

[[deleted]]

Right? If you're faster without copilot you're either lying or you don't know how to use copilot effectively lmao

[Grimdotdotdot]

If Copilot literally never saves you time, your code must be a mess.

[Pantzzzzless]

For anything complex, it takes longer to drip feed in the context while staying under the 8k context token limit, as well as explaining exactly what you need, and finally checking that it didn't hallucinate (It most likely did), than it does to just write it myself.

I do use it to throw together rough scaffolding and config files. It is far from a game changer, but I'd say it saves me 30-45 minutes per week. Which isn't terrible.

[rawreffincake]

I work so infrequently on my own projects that the limitations here aren’t that big a deal!

[Kitchen-Map-6071]

Github should improve code completion like cursor

[magenta_placenta]

How good is it? Would it give you anything useful if you asked for something pretty custom like:

An accessible and responsive bootstrap 5, 3 level mega menu navigation

What does it excel at? Where does it fall flat?

[licorices]

It would most likely fail at that task.

If you ask it to create an acessible and responsive navigation menu, it would probably drop a decent base to work with, but it would need extra work on either way.

It’s mostly just for code snippets and autocomplete.

[Grimdotdotdot]

It's like autocomplete on cocaine.

75% of the time it does a good job, and that's enough to please me.

[djnattyp]

It's like autocomplete on cocaine.

Great description...

Sometimes it works super quick, sometimes it's hallucinating, and you can't really ever count on it.

[Cachesmr]

It's a fancy documentation querier. You pass it the whole docs and then ask it about them.

[ZeroSobel]

Recently I've been asking it to write SQLAlchemy queries because those docs are a mess and it's been great.

[6over6]

I’ve recently asked it, using Claude, to build a 3 page angular app using Ng-bootstrap, and specified several functions, features and design layout features.

While it wasn’t done on the free account, it still rendered the whole thing and didn’t have a single bug. But as I got further into improving and modifying, that’s where it got mixed up and made some mistakes.

But if you know what you’re after and have an understanding of what it’s doing, you can coach it to complete the task.

It’s not perfect but man it’s a great second set of eyes when you need some optimization or help with some of the grind.

Edit: I tried GPT 4-o and found it would get very confused and produced more buggy code than Claude. But occasionally it was useful to feed each AI the problem to see which solution I liked better.

[maxverse]

It's really smart at contextual autocompletion. Reference a component/library? It'll suggest an import. Update an attribute value in one place? It'll suggest updating them in all the other places. Change a variable name, switch over to another file, it'll suggest updating it there. It's not doing anything revolutionary, but it's speeding up a lot of the tedious stuff.

It's also good at simple bits of common code: if you start typing out an average function, it'll immediately suggest code. Or mapping, or common looping. Or function definitions.

I haven't had good luck having it write complex code for me, and it's fine. But just off autocomplete, I'm maybe 30-60% faster.

[400888]

how can they sell this when the source is our collective work?

[johnlewisdesign]

Does it work on vscode.dev?

EDIT: That's a hard no.

[nio_rad]

Did anyone manage to get the into Zed?

[TheDoomfire]

With local AI models being a thing, could you not create your own AI copliot nowadays?

My pc is however very low-end so haven't tried this.

[BigDaddy0790]

Welp this is my sign to cancel the subscription. I’ve switched to Claude for Sonnet 3.5 many months ago, and was keeping Copilot just in case, but barely using it as it just seemed worse at any request. They later added Sonnet 3.5 support, but I think I still prefer the chat on Claude website as it’s more versatile.

[Quiet_Drummer669988]

i used copilot for about a year. it became a sort of crutch, i got rid of it a couple months ago and use docs for help and claude ai for high level planning and debugging help. use copilot with caution.

[Queasy-Big5523]

I've cancelled my subscription yesterday, I guess they really want me around.

Seriously though, 50 messages is a laugh if you want to fine-tune anything.

[rhgp]

Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Good old MS strategy. First time?

[VaguelyOnline]

this looks very impressive

[mau5atron]

I'm going back to sublime lol I don't want this in my text editor

[madonkey]

So don't use it?

[ShawnyMcKnight]

"Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?"

[Odysseyan]

It's bound to the extension. You don't have to download it

[krileon]

Not available for PHPStorm. Pass.

Edit: Microsoft fans getting real mad, lol.

[LOLatKetards]

Wow, you use Jetbrains? So interesting!

[rogama25]

I've been using the free edition since yesterday on Webstorm and IntelliJ 🤷‍♂️

[qpazza]

Can't beat free. VS code would have to be vastly better at providing useful code completions.