Week #6 - MKTG 4396 - Fun with GitHub Copilot

This week, I wanted to get back into exploring more generative AI tools, and therefore, I have decided to look at GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot is a very interesting tool that I learned about through a YouTube video. Basically, GitHub Copilot can be added as an extension to IDEs (integrated development environments) like Visual Studio Code and can act as a developer and/or a teacher for you. In theory, this has the potential to save hobbyists and developers alike a lot of time writing tedious lines of code by having Copilot write it for you. However, you should always review the work done by generative AI as it still can be incorrect. 

The first thing I asked Copilot to do was to write lines of code for a simple tic-tac-toe game. Copilot immediately got to work and within seconds had the code completed for my review. Pictured below is a snippet of the code generated by Copilot as well as the tic-tac-toe game running in the terminal window.

As you can see the code that Copilot generated worked perfectly. However, as impressed as I was, I wondered if I could push it even further. So, I decided to see if Copilot could still do a tic-tac-toe game but also add a working GUI with Tkinter. And again, Copilot flawlessly executed my command. Below is a picture of the output.

Although what I asked of Copilot was relatively simple, it was able to write a fully functioning program in a matter of seconds which is incredible. I have so many other ideas that I would like to test with Copilot. If Copilot can also write code with complex math involved then its possibilities are near limitless. I do not suspect that it can flawlessly write thousands of lines of code, but I really do not know, and even if it cannot I do wonder how much longer it would take to be able to do something like that. I plan on making Copilot a part of my daily life when coding as it is much too powerful of a tool not to use.