One Year On, GitHub Copilot Adoption Soars

A year into its launch, GitHub’s code-generation tool Copilot has been used by a million developers, according to the Microsoft-owned code repository.

Copilot also has been adopted by more than 20,000 organizations, generating more than three billion lines of code, GitHub said in a blog post.

Copilot is “the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool,” wrote GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. “We have witnessed a sea change in software development.”

An analysis of Copilot users revealed that they accepted nearly 30% of code suggestions and also reported higher productivity.

The benefits are greatest for less experienced users who become more adept in using prompts and interacting with the AI in software development.

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Assuming a 30% increase in productivity for 45 million developers by 2030, the impact is an additional $1.5 trillion in global GDP, the company estimated.

As for GitHub Copilot for Business, three months after its February launch 10,000 companies were using it and that number has risen to 20,000 today.

GitHub also has seen an “explosion” of open source activity on generative AI, based on an analysis of its repositories and commitments.

Dohmke said that “generative AI is turbocharging developer productivity with gains that will ultimately drive a boom in GDP for the global economy and, in turn, a surge in demand for software developers.”

“We’ve seen this throughout the history of developer tool innovations,” he said. “We’ve realized this collision of AI and the software developer will not lead to a decrease in developer jobs — it will lead to AI augmenting developer potential and accelerating human progress."