• Public source does not equal free to use. And even if it is "proper" open source as defined by the Open Source Directive [1], it's often published under an MIT [2] or GNU GPL [3] license which require copyright or source attribution.
• This Codepilot has been copying code ad verbum (comments and all..) into some of its users' projects, and even did so without any form of attribution. Although I'm sure this will improve over time as they steal more public code.
• Their plan is to eventually start charging for usage, so don't count on yourself getting dirty rich on being able to lean back and have the code write itself just yet.
• Oh, and as the cherry on the cake, it also sends home any code you have written that is an adjustment of the snippet it spit out. Meaning it's possibly illegal to use if you're handling code or data that's covered by an NDA or protected by privacy law.

At least they're up-front about it as most of the above is mentioned as a possibility in their FAQ [4].

Microsoft is a 1.7 trillion dollar enterprise, by the way. They should be alright without you jumping into the breach for them.

1 opensource.org/docs/osd
2 choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
3 choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-3.0/
4 copilot.github.com/#faqs

Edit: Added the distinction between "public source" and "open source" with links and fixed some grammar.

Addition: Look, I understand this is the future. What bothers me is that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that they left hanging when it comes to ethics.

I guess the paradigm that applies to Facebook and Google now also applies to GitHub: "when something is free, you're the product". Except in this case GitHub might have violated the license of public code (AKA stole it) and there's no way to tell if you're a victim.

Looks very similar to TabNine which I've been using for ages - although Copilot seems to be totally OTT in comparison. TabNine's suggestions are fairly conservative, but incredibly helpful - it really does feel like it's reading your mind sometimes.

This level of completion though - especially the very large ones, is an absolute disaster for the levels of competency in the industry, and very bad for people who are learning. It's almost an automated StackOverflow copy-pasta machine.

Possibly useful in the right hands, but - as they say - with great power, comes great responsibility

So, GitHub/Micro$oft is now injecting source code derived from copyrighted sources into the software of their customers without informing them of the license of the original source code.

I'm sure lawyers will be very interested

I definitely don't think orgs should be hiring people who just rely on the AI to code for them; what if Copilot breaks and manual coding is necessary?

An auto coding tool is not a substitute for a sufficiently wholesome CV.

For me at the moment it's more a competitor for Google + Stackoverflow copy and paste :)

I don't think it's based on GPT-3 though it is made by the same company OpenAI