The autocomplete for code that GitHub and OpenAI released as a preview in June 2021, a year and a half before ChatGPT, which makes it the first AI product most programmers paid for and the first to be sued over training data. The record notes the tab key did more for the hype era than any keynote, and that the name Copilot was later applied to almost everything Microsoft sells.
I let it write a unit test in the summer of 2021 and it wrote the test I would have written, including the typo. I felt seen and replaced in the same second.
Correction: GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are different products with a shared word. The coding tool came first, in 2021; Microsoft applied the name to Bing Chat and Office in 2023.
November 2022, a class action filed in California over Copilot's training on public repositories, the first of the era's copyright suits. The record notes it arrived the same month as ChatGPT and got a tenth of the attention.
The record notes that Copilot was built on the Codex model, that its early party trick was completing a function from its name alone, and that it once autocompleted a real person's API key from its training data.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
