By simply pressing the tab key, a developer using Copilot can finish a line, generate blocks of code, or even write entire programs. According to GitHub, over 10,000 organizations, ranging from Coca-Cola to Airbnb, have signed up for Copilot’s enterprise version, and more than 30,000 employees at Microsoft itself now regularly code with assistance from Copilot.
“Sooner than later, 80% of the code is going to be written by Copilot. And that doesn’t mean the developer is going to be replaced.”
Recently, Freethink spoke with Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s CEO, to learn more about how Copilot promises to refashion programming as a profession, and the questions AI-powered development raises about the future of innovation itself. We also talked about why coding with Copilot is so much fun, how AI is going to change the way we learn, and whether Copilot can fix banks that are still running COBOL on mainframes.