An AI pair programming tool developed by GitHub (a Microsoft subsidiary) and powered by OpenAI models, deeply integrated into Azure and the broader Microsoft developer ecosystem. Like having an expert collaborator who has read every public code repository, Copilot suggests whole lines, functions, and even entire files of code based on natural language prompts and surrounding context. It works across dozens of programming languages and integrates natively into VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and GitHub's web editor. GitHub Copilot also offers chat-based assistance for explaining code, generating tests, and fixing bugs.
A cloud engineer writing Terraform configurations for an Azure deployment types a comment describing a virtual network with three subnets and a network security group. GitHub Copilot generates the entire Terraform resource block with proper CIDR ranges, subnet configurations, and NSG rules — matching Azure best practices. The engineer reviews the suggestion, makes minor adjustments to the IP ranges, and deploys infrastructure that would have taken 30 minutes to write manually.