Midjourney image using the prompt: "a 1950s era robot holding a paint brush, standing in front of an unfinished abstract painting that shows a triangle, circle and square dancing, with a faded cityscape of Bauhaus buildings in the background, style of a vector illustration --ar 2:1".
In the past few years several tools have been developed to utilize the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to assist with writing code. Most of these are built on the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) models developed at OpenAI. As early as mid-2020 when GPT-3 first became available, people began probing its ability to generate useful code. Two prevalent tools that have emerged are GitHub Copilot , launched in mid-2021, and the general purpose ChatGPT , launched in late 2022.
GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s Codex model, which is built on the GPT-3 foundational model, with additional training on a large corpus of source code for further fine tuning. It is capable of generating code to complete a text prompt, as well as translating code into a natural language description, and translating code between programming languages. Copilot is available to use via IDE plugins (I’m using the Visual Studio Code plugin ), and requires a subscription of roughly $10 per month. It can offe