Developers are turning to GitHub Copilot, a ChatGPT-like tool that helps them wr...

• GitHub Copilot, launched in 2021, uses generative AI to help programmers write code.

• The technology was created by OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed creator of ChatGPT.

• Programmers say it's led to big productivity gains, but domain knowledge is still necessary.

While ChatGPT has spurred a lot of excitement around artificial intelligence, the conversational chatbot is not the only technology to come from OpenAI.

The Microsoft-backed company has developed a slew of generative-AI products, including one called Codex that's already helping engineers become more productive.

Codex is the basis for GitHub Copilot, a tool that functions as a sort of autocomplete for software engineers. Copilot looks at the code an engineer is writing and suggests the next few lines they might want to write to solve their problem. Users can also write a comment in human language describing the program they want to build, and Copilot will provide a suggested solution.

Software engineers often have to put together scaffolding, or boilerplate code software needs. Because the code is so common, Copilot can easily reproduce it. GitHub has said that in files where it's enabled, Copilot is responsible for upward of 40% of the written code. Engineers who spoke with Insider said it had already proved a major boon for productivity.

Copilot can help developers become more productive

Cyrus Ghazanfar, the chief technology officer at the 401(k)-management startup Beagle, said his company began experimenting with Copilot in recent months. He now requires his team of three engineers to use the tool because he quickly found it saved him plenty of time by eliminating rote work. Already, Copilot has proved useful for creating databases, he said.

"In these frameworks, there's a specific way of creating databases," Ghazanfar said. "I find Copilot super useful because there's a lot of repetition when you do these kinds of things."

For example, many databases have the same properties, like a timestamp that says when the data was created. Ghazanfar said he could now use Copilot to build a database with these properties.