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Almost a third of the new code on GitHub is written using a neural network.

The vice president of GitHub Next, a team that implements AI tools to help programmers on the largest service for hosting IT projects, in an interview with Axios, said that almost 30% of new code on the site was written using the Copilot neural network. Oege de Moor noted that half of the developers who tried it at work continued to use the neural network.

Copilot analyzes the code written by the programmer and suggests further lines or alternative code, eliminating possible repetitions. The neural network is based on the OpenAI Codex system and trained on several terabytes of publicly available source code. In simple terms, it can translate a human language into a programming language. Copilot works on the autocomplete principle, learning in the process. The developers claim that over time, the neural network begins to work more accurately.

Copilot currently supports all popular programming languages, including Java, as well as Neovim, IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm development environments, and in the near future, Visual Studio. This will allow this technology to be introduced to a wider audience and will make programming accessible to 200 million novice developers.

I don’t want to say anything but that’s not the right license Mr Copilot. pic.twitter.com/hs8JRVQ7xJ

— Armin “vax ffs” Ronacher (@mitsuhiko) July 2, 2021

Any algorithm depends on the quality of the data on which it is trained, so Copilot is also flawed. A recent study found that 40% of the code generated by the neural network contains vulnerabilities. On the other hand, people are also far from perfect. Reportedly, programmers create an average of 70 errors per 1000 lines of code. Be that as it may, people will not be left without work. The demand for software developers grew by 25% in 2020.

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