GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is a development tool that writes code for you. It launched in 2021: developers write a comment or a function name, and it fills in the rest. Today it also lets you give instructions in a chat, or even hand off a task entirely and let it fix things on its own.

The most common misunderstanding is thinking Copilot is a model name. Copilot is actually a product and an interface — the model that actually generates the answers is whichever one the user picks. It could be OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude, or Google's Gemini. You can select and switch between them right in the interface.

There's also confusion from the shared name. Microsoft Copilot, built into Word or Windows, is a different product from GitHub Copilot, which developers use. Articles need to clearly distinguish between the two.

In 2026, the doors opened even wider. GitHub released an SDK that lets other programs use Copilot's features, including for languages like Java, breaking its own mold as a "tool only usable inside GitHub." It also added Spec Kit, which has you draw up a design spec before writing any code. But in August, a report surfaced that another AI managed to exploit a vulnerability planted by Copilot's auto-fix feature within just five days — raising bigger questions about who checks the code AI writes.

"Copilot answered like this" — it's not the Copilot model that answered; it's whichever model, GPT or Claude, was selected inside it.