Software developer platform GitHub now has over 150 million developers, the Microsoft-backed company said on Thursday, December 19. It has also launched a new free tier of GitHub Copilot in VS code. “With GitHub Copilot Free in VS Code, India can accelerate the timeline forward to becoming the largest developer community in the world. But only if we make it happen,” CEO Thomas Dohmke said in a statement. “Let us now empower every person in India to build and create code in natural language—and to code with Copilot,” he added. By integrating Microsoft’s flagship AI offering Copilot into VS Code, all users with a personal GitHub account will be able to access over 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. This means that developers can prompt the AI model to answer a coding-related question or find a bug in their code. Users can also execute edits across multiple files, and access Copilot’s third-party agents or build their own extension. They can pick between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. Starting today, all GitHub developers can directly use Copilot Chat from their dashboard. Students, educators, and open-source project leaders will continue to enjoy unlimited access to their Copilot Pro accounts for free, the company said.
