Introduction

  • 1 minute

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding partner that provides autocomplete suggestions while you code. You get suggestions from Copilot by typing code or describing it in natural language.

Copilot analyses your file and related files, offering suggestions in your text editor. It uses OpenAI Codex, a new AI system developed by OpenAI, to help derive context from written code and comments, and then suggests new lines or entire functions.

GitHub Codespaces is a hosted developer environment operating in the cloud that can be run with Visual Studio Code. You can customize the development experience for any development project on GitHub, preinstalling dependencies, libraries, and even Visual Studio Code extensions and settings.

Scenario: Improving a project

As a developer, you want to be more productive when you're typing code for new projects and existing ones. For this task, you want to find out if an AI assistant is what you need to improve your developer workflows in code writing, documentation, testing, and more.

In this module, you learn how you can use GitHub Copilot to modify a project by using a prompt to customize a Python API. You also learn how to use live suggestions after typing initial code.

By the conclusion of this module, you have:

  • Configured a GitHub repository in Codespaces and installed the GitHub Copilot extension.
  • Crafted prompts to generate suggestions from GitHub Copilot.
  • Learned how to apply GitHub Copilot to improve your Python projects.

What is the main objective?

After successfully finishing this module, you're capable of using a prompt to customize a Python project with GitHub Copilot in GitHub Codespaces.

Prerequisites

Skills:

  • Basic understanding of Python and text editors.
  • Basic comprehension of Git and GitHub Fundamentals. Particularly, running basic git commands like git add and git push.

Accounts: