GitHub Copilot internals
published on 2022/12/19
Github Copilot has been incredibly useful to me. It can often magically read my mind and make useful suggestions. The thing that surprised me the most was its ability to correctly “guess” functions/variables from surrounding code – including from other files. This can only happen, if the copilot extension sends valuable information from surrounding code to the Codex model. I was curious about how it worked, so I decided to take a look at the source code.
In this post, I try to answer specific questions about the internals of Copilot, while also describing some interesting observations I made as I combed through the code. I will provide pointers to the relevant code for almost everything I talk about, so that interested folks can take a look at the code themselves.
Fascinating