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Current section: Real World Examples 15 exercises
lesson

Install GitHub Copilot

The value of having an AI assistant incorporated into your coding editor cannot be overstated.

I've been using GitHub Copilot, but other options like Tabnine and Sourcegraph's Cody are also available.

Regardless of the AI assistant you choose, the core principles remain the same.

Using GitHub

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Transcript

00:00 Getting an AI assistant integrated into your editor is just like, you cannot put a value on that. Like, you absolutely want to have an AI assistant integrated into your editor. And there are a lot of really good options. Tab9 has been around for the longest as far as I'm aware.

00:16 The longest that I've been aware that we've had AI assistants, Tab9 has been around. And also Kodi from Sourcegraph, also another option that I've heard really good things about. I personally use GitHub Copilot because that's just the one that I first started using, and it's been really, really awesome for me.

00:34 But you might get some good mileage out of those other alternatives as well. In particular, some companies have issues with, like, lawyers not liking GitHub Copilot, but you could try some of the other ones as well. So we're going to be using Copilot in these videos, but the basic premise of using an

00:51 AI assistant really doesn't change with the different options that you have. So GitHub Copilot, amazing tool. And to get it installed, you first have to purchase a license. So you choose whatever license works for you and your organization.

01:08 And then once you have that, you can go to your GitHub settings page, the Copilot settings here, and you can customize a couple of things in here and then click on your editor right here. If you're using Visual Studio Code, that'll pull up the prerequisites and everything for getting that installed.

01:25 There's this link for the GitHub Copilot extension on the VS Code Marketplace, and we can install and open our editor. And you can install it here. I have it installed already and all configured, but it will require you to sign in and a couple other things here as well. So you'll want to make sure that you're doing that.

01:42 And with that installed, then you should be able to even just open up a new thing. And right here, GitHub Copilot is saying, "Hey, you can just press Command-I to ask GitHub Copilot chat to do something." So let's say, "Make me a ice cream sundae." Is that how you spell sundae? I don't know.

02:02 Let's see what it does with this. I'm sorry, I can't do that. So AI isn't going to make your ice cream sundaes, but make me a program that writes out ice cream sundae to the console in TypeScript. Let's see if it can do that. All right. Now we're talking. Accept that. Boom.

02:22 We've got VS Code integrated with our Copilot, so we're ready to rock and roll.