GitHub has introduced a free tier for its AI coding assistant, with options for Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI GPT-4o as the model. The Microsoft subsidiary also declared that it now has more than 150M developers on GitHub.

The free tier offers up to 2000 code completions in IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Azure Data Studio (based on VS Code), Apple Xcode, and Vim or Neovim. Up to 50 messages in Copilot Chat are also included, though this only applies to VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, or the GitHub dashboard. Free tiers can be important for paid adoption as it makes it easy to experiment without the pressure of a limited trial period. 

Developers in search of an AI coding assistant face a myriad of choices, including free options with fewer limitations. Codeium, for example, has unlimited AI autocomplete and in-editor AI chats within its free plan. 

AWS Q Developer is another example, with unlimited code suggestions in the IDE, though chat is limited to 50 interactions per month. The free tier for Q Developer also includes up to 10 agent tasks, where the assistant responds to prompts with a proposed implementation that it can then carry out.

A recent survey listed 32 AI assistant tools with some level of usage, also showing Copilot as the second most popular after OpenAI ChatGPT. 

What matters most to developers though is the quality of the AI assistance, rather than the extent of the free tier, and the nebulous nature of vendor claims makes this hard to evaluate. “Hilarious. The code ‘fix’ Copilot suggests in their example is wrong on so many levels,” observed a developer looking at a JavaScript example shown off on the Copilot product page, adding that “this naive fix … leads to subtle bugs.”

Coders also worry about other aspects of the AI coding frenzy. “Working with people who use this stuff a lot has made my current job just so much harder in every way” said another developer on Hacker News. “Codebases quickly become these weird piles of different idioms, even without considering the hallucinations.” “Hallucinations” are when AI delivers an invented answer with no basis in reality.

Copilot seems here to stay though, not least because of GitHub’s marketing advantage, with not only a claimed 150M developers on its books, but also a tight integration with Microsoft-owned VS Code, the most popular programmer’s editor.