How to Use GitHub Copilot: Use Cases and Best Practices

GitHub Copilot: Your AI-Powered Coding Partner

Boost your coding efficiency with GitHub Copilot, the AI-powered assistant that streamlines complex and mundane tasks. This tutorial explores Copilot's functionality, key features, and its impact on productivity. For those unfamiliar with GitHub, the Understanding GitHub blog post is a recommended starting point.

Launched in 2021, GitHub Copilot leverages OpenAI's Codex model—a GPT descendant trained extensively on various programming languages and contexts. This makes it arguably superior to ChatGPT for code generation. Its seamless integration into popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code is a standout feature, acting as a real-time coding partner offering suggestions and completions.

Key Copilot Features:

• In-Editor Chat: A ChatGPT-like interface within your IDE eliminates the need to switch between applications for code correction or assistance. (See example image below)

GitHub Copilot sidebar in VS Code IDE

• CLI Support: A similar chat interface is available within the command line for terminal-based workflows. (See example image below)

GitHub Copilot inside the command line interface

• Documentation Access: Copilot directly sources information from documentation, saving time and effort. (See example image below)

GitHub Copilot for Docs

• AI-Powered Pull Requests: Streamline GitHub workflows by generating descriptions and reviews for pull requests. (See example image below)

GIF based on video taken from GitHub Next

Getting Started:

1. Install Visual Studio Code: Download and install VS Code from the official website. (See example image below)

Downloading Visual Studio Code

2. GitHub Account & Copilot Installation: Create a GitHub account (consider the free trial). Install the GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat extensions within VS Code. (See example image below)

Signing Up for GitHub

3. VS Code Setup: Install the extensions and sign in to your GitHub account. (See example image below)

Setting up GitHub Copilot

Copilot in Action (Seoul Bike Sharing Dataset Example):

The tutorial demonstrates Copilot's capabilities through a data science project using the Seoul Bike Sharing dataset. Copilot assists with data import, visualization (creating a correlation matrix heatmap), data preprocessing (one-hot encoding), model training (linear regression and random forest), and model evaluation. (See example images below)

Importing data into Github Copilot Writing code for a plot in Github Copilot Displaying a plot in Github Copilot Preparing data in Github Copilot Creating a train / test split in Github Copilot Training our model in Github Copilot Evaluating our model in Github Copilot Viewing model statistics in Github Copilot

Pricing and Alternatives:

GitHub Copilot offers Individual, Business, and Enterprise plans. Alternatives include DataCamp's DataLab, TabNine, and SonarQube. (See example image below)

Github Copilot pricing structure The DataLab IDE

Conclusion:

GitHub Copilot significantly accelerates the data science workflow, proving invaluable for various tasks. DataCamp's "Pair Programming with GitHub Copilot" video and "GitHub concepts" course are recommended for further learning.

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