GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant made by GitHub. It runs on large language models (neural networks trained on large amounts of text and code that generate text), and the user chooses among models from several providers, such as Anthropic's Haiku and OpenAI's GPT models.
In a code editor such as Visual Studio Code, Copilot suggests the next lines of code as the developer types, explains code, and proposes edits; in agent mode it works through several steps itself. A developer can also describe a goal, and a Copilot agent researches the repository, plans, edits files, runs tools and returns the work as a pull request for review. Copilot also reviews pull requests and works in the terminal through the Copilot CLI. Because it is built into GitHub, it uses the code, its history, the issues and the pull requests. Teams can add custom instructions, MCP servers (Model Context Protocol, a standard way to connect AI tools) and third-party agents such as Claude and OpenAI Codex.
Copilot is a hosted subscription service, priced per user per month. A free plan has a monthly limit on code completions.