GitHub Copilot has pushed AI-assisted programming well beyond code generation and code chat, with new capabilities continuing to arrive at a rapid pace.
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In 2014, Microsoft Research released an experimental Bing Code Search add-on for Visual Studio and the web. It was a code snippet search tool for C# with a natural language interface, using an index of code from Stack Overflow, MSDN, Dotnetperls, and CSharp411, powered by Bing, running on Azure. The tool included a facility for changing the variable names from those in the snippet to those in your own code, but it didn’t work all that well. The accuracy was 70% to 80% for a single variable substitution, and fell rapidly as more variables needed to be renamed.
The experimental Microsoft Bing Code Search add-on from 2014 eventually evolved into GitHub Copilot. When I reviewed the preview version of GitHub Copilotin 2021, I found that it didn’t always generate good, correct, …