GitHub launches free version of Copilot for VS Code

Thomas Dohmke, GitHub CEO, pictured above
| Photo Credit: KSL

GitHub has announced a free version of its AI coding assistant Copilot, that will be integrated directly into Microsoft’s Visual Studio (VS) Code editor. The monthly fee until now had been $10 a month for developers with just verified students and teachers receiving free access.

GitHub Copilot Free will offer users with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. 

The AI pair programmer is powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. But advanced models like Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o1-preview will be available to those who are paid subscribers. 

The platform used to offer free repositories, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) minutes and Codespaces to developers. With Copilot Free, another layer of offerings has been added like multi-file editing, terminal assistance which makes suggestions and corrects errors in code, listening to voice commands and project context awareness where Copilot understands the entire codebase and helps accordingly. 

GitHub is also working on Vision Copilot using which developers can generate user interfaces from screenshots and streamline the design-to-code workflow. 

The free tier is available in VS Code and GitHub once users log into their GitHub accounts.