Get started with the basics and unlock the full potential of your GitHub Copilot subscription.

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant that helps you write code faster and with less effort, allowing you to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration. Before you start working with Copilot, it's important to understand when you should and shouldn't use it.

To generate a code suggestion, the GitHub Copilot extension begins by examining the code in your editor—focusing on the lines just before and after your cursor, but also information including other files open in your editor and the URLs of repositories or file paths to identify relevant context.

GitHub Copilot Chat is available on the GitHub website, in GitHub Mobile, in supported IDEs (Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Eclipse IDE, and Xcode), and in Windows Terminal. Users can also use skills with Copilot Chat.

You can use Copilot to get answers to coding-related questions, such as how best to code something, how to fix a bug, or how someone else's code works. For full details of what Copilot can do, see What is GitHub Copilot?.

GitHub Copilot can suggest comments for your code, by analyzing the code you write and generating comments that describe what the code does. For Copilot Free users, comment suggestions count towards your monthly Copilot Chat usage, not your code suggestions usage.

Asking GitHub Copilot questions in your IDE. Use Copilot Chat in your editor to give you code suggestions, explain code, generate unit tests, and suggest code fixes.

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant that helps you write code faster and with less effort, allowing you to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration. GitHub Copilot has been proven to increase developer productivity and accelerate the pace of software development.

This article gives you some ideas for using Copilot to refactor code in your IDE.

You can use Copilot to get answers to coding-related questions, such as how best to code something, how to fix a bug, or how someone else's code works. For full details of what Copilot can do, see What is GitHub Copilot?.