Research: How GitHub Copilot helps improve developer productivity

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Software developers know that around 90% of all computer code has already been written for an application somewhere in the world, so having to manually type it into a job again is counterproductive. Plus, the artificial intelligence (AI) tools we now have in 2022 already know where all that code is in the libraries and can retrieve virtually anything in microseconds.

Companies such as start-up Tabnine and open-source tools store GitHub are jumping right into this trend of development tools that stay one or more steps ahead of the code being written. They read the beginning of the line of code, then make smart guesses — and then offer suggestions — in real time on how to complete it.

GitHub's co-pilot goes into general availability

A year ago, GitHub released a technical preview of Copilot, a new AI pair programmer that plugs into any source editor and offers coding suggestions. Despite the limited number of tester spots, those who started using GitHub Copilot told GitHub that the tool immediately became an indispensable part of their daily workflows.

And why not? As soon as someone starts typing a particular line, the app recognizes it and offers suggestions on how to finish; it even closes the parentheses correctly, and in order, every time.

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As of June 21, GitHub Copilot has become available to all developers.

"The feedback we've heard and continue to hear supports our main thesis: AI can help make developers more productive and happier when coding," said GitHub Principal Researcher Eddie Aftandilian, in a media advisory. "Even still, we wanted to test our theory and see if GitHub Copilot itself actually leads to higher productivity rates among developers."

Productivity Survey: Are Copilot's Suggestions Helpful?

To find out, GitHub's research and engineering teams have teamed up to combine qualitative survey data from over 2,000 US-based developers with anonymized data to determine whether developers think that GitHub Copilot makes them more productive, and whether the data proves that they really are, in fact, more productive when using GitHub Copilot.

The idea behind GitHub Copilot is to help make developers happier and more productive by keeping them focused on what matters most: building great software, Aftandilian said.

But "productivity" is a word that contains a wide range of possible practical meanings. Ideally, do developers want to save keystrokes, or do they really want to avoid Google and StackOverflow searches? Should GitHub Copilot help them stay in the flow...