GitHub Copilot vs. ChatGPT: Which Is Better for Software Development?
Over the past year, generative AI technologies have brought exciting new solutions to software developers. Software engineers can now take advantage of a variety of tools to help generate code automatically. Some, like GitHub Copilot, are AI tools designed specifically and solely for helping to write code. Others, such as ChatGPT, are general-purpose AI solutions that can churn out code, but can do many other things as well.
Copilot: Advantages and Drawbacks
Copilot is an AI-assisted coding tool introduced in late 2021. It's built into GitHub (which is owned by Microsoft) and is powered by OpenAI's GPT language model. Once integrated into an IDE, Copilot can automatically make completion suggestions for code that developers begin writing. You can also insert comments describing what you want your code to do, and Copilot will generate code to implement them.
The main advantages of Copilot include:
- Direct integration with IDEs, which means there is no need to toggle between different tools when using Copilot to help write code.
- The ability to adapt to individual programmers' coding styles.
- Copilot generally does a better job than ChatGPT of producing code that runs with few, if any, manual modifications.
Copilot also has some disadvantages:
- It only supports certain IDEs, which might be a limitation for users of more obscure IDEs.
- Copilot doesn't do much to help you design application architectures; it mostly just helps to auto-generate relatively short sections of code once you've already decided how you'll implement your application.
ChatGPT: Advantages and Drawbacks
ChatGPT, released by OpenAI in November 2022, is designed to respond to natural language queries of any type and to generate any kind of text — not just computer code.
Advantages of ChatGPT for software developers include:
- The ability to ask open-ended questions and obtain suggestions about how to structure applications.
- Deeper explanations of how the generated code works, providing high-level guidance for implementation and deployment.
The main disadvantage of ChatGPT is its likelihood to produce functioning code compared to Copilot. Developers find that code written by Copilot is more likely to compile and run properly than code written by ChatGPT.
Choosing Between Copilot and ChatGPT
Copilot is ideal for developers who need a tool to help generate high-quality code to complete ongoing projects. On the other hand, ChatGPT is suited for those starting projects and requiring high-level guidance and sample code.
One approach is to use both tools in conjunction. Begin with ChatGPT for project initiation and then switch to Copilot for more intensive coding tasks.
