I started my journey into GitHub Co-Pilot this week. I was once interested in trying it but scrapped the idea due to the price and the inability to find the 90-day free offer anymore. However, now I have finally begun my journey. I started by installing the GitHub Co-Pilot plugin for Visual Studio Code.
ℹ️ This post is not a comprehensive story or tutorial. It’s more a documentation of thoughts and findings on my journey using GitHub Co-Pilot.
Installation
My account was assigned a license, so I went ahead and installed the plugin.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/github-copilot
I signed in with GitHub, and after a moment, my Co-Pilot switched to active.
Usage
The best tool is worth nothing if you don’t know how to use it. So it’s time to understand the basic principles of using it.
Shortcuts
I familiarized myself with the available shortcuts. Most posts on the internet focus on the US-ENG keyboard, so I had to look up the configuration for my DE-CH variant.
Copilot for Infrastructure as Code
News from Microsoft: Unleashing GitHub Copilot for Infrastructure as Code
On April 25th, 2024 an announcement was posted on Microsoft’s website stating that Infrastructure as Code (IaC), including Bicep, is now improved in GitHub Co-Pilot. My experiences with GitHub Copilot up to this point have been rather unsatisfactory compared to those with OpenAI Chat GPT-3.5-turbo-1106 or GPT-4-1106. However, I will give it a try to see if generating Bicep has improved.
Secrets in code
One concern crossed my mind as I regularly work with scripts on my computer: I need to be even more careful when it comes to handling secrets.
Secrets
I will also further explore tools to support the secure handling of secrets in code. One tool I stumbled across is https://infisical.com/, but I didn’t test or look further into it. The first page looked promising.
