Last June, Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI launched Copilot, a service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Available as a downloadable extension, Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex that’s trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. Copilot can also surface an approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g. “Say hello world”), drawing on its knowledge base and current context.

Copilot was previously only available in technical preview. But after signaling that the tool would reach generally availability this summer, GitHub today announced that Copilot is now available to all developers. As previously detailed, it'll be free for students as well as "verified" open source contributors -- starting with roughly 60,000 developers selected from the community and students in the GitHub Education program.

GitHub says that 1.2 million people signed up during the preview period. Copilot is now suggesting 40% of newly-written code, according to the company -- up from 35% earlier this year.

"Over the past year, we’ve continued to iterate and test workflows to help drive the 'magic' of Copilot," Ryan J. Salva, VP of product at GitHub, told TechCrunch via email. "We not only used the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot, but also to scale the service safely."

With Copilot, developers can cycle through suggestions for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of other programming languages and accept, reject, or manually edit them. Copilot adapts to the edits developers make, matching particular coding styles to autofill boilerplate or repetitive code patterns and recommend unit tests that match implementation code.

Copilot extensions are available for Noevim and JetBrains in addition to Visual Studio Code, or in the cloud on GitHub Codespaces.