Microsoft has launched Copilot, an AI programming tool

Most developers, at one point or another, have written repetitive code with the thought "if only the software could write the code automatically".

Now, Microsoft has made that idea a reality.

Last year, Microsoft GitHub partnered with OpenAI to create an early preview of Copilot, an AI programming tool, and today, Microsoft announced that Copilot will go live with a subscription cost of $10 a month or $100 a year.

Copilot can suggest complete methods or algorithms and provide boilerboard Code for unit testing when developers are programming in integrated development environments (ides) such as Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDE.

Copilot can even write an entire usable block of code automatically for simple, intuitive loop sections or other repetitive code.

Copilot's excellent AI performance helped it win over 1.2 million developers in early testing, and accounts for nearly 40 percent of the code in the files that enabled it.

Copilot, however, is controversial.

For one thing, Copilot's AI training is based on GitHub's massive open source code, which is questionable for a commercial application.

Copilot, on the other hand, outputs code that is less secure, with about 40% security vulnerabilities, making it difficult to perform as well as it should in large commercial projects.