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.”
They’re gonna have to pay me to waste my time with this trash
Does the EFF call it Free?
uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot 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##a[href*="/settings/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"]
github.com###copilot_free_global
github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon
Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot
Time to start using VSCodium then, I want no cloud AI in my development setup.
But it has ai chats baked in as well, or is there a way to disable it? Haven’t looked properly yet.
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.
My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I’m not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft’s market share in the AI developer space?
My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you’ll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.
To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?
Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn’t mean to link them but I’ll leave it here, don’t give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.
To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?
That’s exactly it.
From their email:
What you get:
2,000 code suggestions a month: Get context-aware suggestions tailored to your VS Code workspace and GitHub projects.
50 Copilot Chat messages a month: Use Copilot Chat in VS Code and on GitHub to ask questions and refactor, debug, document, and explain code.
Choose your AI model: You can select between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 4o.
Render edits across multiple files: Use Copilot Edits to make changes to multiple files you’re working with.
Access the Copilot Extensions ecosystem: Use third-party agents to conduct web searches via Perplexity, access information from Stack Overflow, and more.
So it’s just a rate limited thing meant to get you signed up and then cut you off right when you get used to it. I get access through work and well, it just sucks.
And you can’t opt out…
If you have a GitHub account you are auto added in.
What do you mean? You have to create an account and log in. Am I missing something?
