GitHub Copilot Will Change the Way You Code — or Will It Get You Into Hot Water?

We were recently conducting a technical interview for a React.js role with one of our candidates. We have a special question for folks interviewing for this role that starts with a template project and gives them some tasks to complete the work. While we were watching this candidate work, we were really surprised when their IDE suggested a complete line of code to loop through properties and render them. This was not your simple autocomplete; this was reading the developer’s mind, looking at the context, and suggesting the perfect line of code to add there.

Our jaws dropped. We had seen some examples of GitHub’s Copilot from one of our team members who did a presentation when it was in beta about six months ago, but this was the first time it crept up in an interview. We were so stunned we didn’t even say anything and just kept going with the interview.

A couple weeks later one of my most senior developers asked me if they could expense the cost of Copilot because it was helping him be so much more productive. My first reaction was sure, but as I was looking into corporate pricing options I found some interesting articles about privacy and licensing that concerned me a bit.

Before we get into that, if you are not familiar with Copilot, it is a developer productivity tool brought to you by the good folks at GitHub and OpenAI and it plugs into most of the popular editor/IDEs and programming languages. Copilot is powered by…