GitHub Copilot is now GA — should IT pros be worried or excited?

GitHub Copilot went GA on June 21st 2022. If you missed the announcement, you're probably not alone. It landed quietly during a week that already had a lot of noise from Microsoft Build fallout. But I think this is worth stopping and paying attention to.

What Copilot actually is

For the uninitiated: GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer built on OpenAI's Codex model, which is itself derived from GPT-3. It sits in your editor (primarily VS Code) and autocompletes code as you type. Not just boilerplate. Sometimes whole functions, with comments and error handling, based on context from the rest of your file.

I've been in the technical preview since late 2021. My honest take: it's impressive, imperfect, and genuinely changes the rhythm of writing code.

The "worried or excited" question

Every time a new AI tool shows up in the dev space, the same conversation happens: "Will this replace developers?" I've watched this cycle repeat for years. GitHub Copilot is the first time I've genuinely paused and thought about it differently.

Not because it will replace experienced engineers. It won't, not now, not soon. The output still needs to be read, understood, and often substantially corrected. Copilot doesn't understand your system; it pattern-matches against an enormous training corpus of public code. It can suggest a function that looks plausible but breaks in production because it doesn't know your data model.

The skill gap it closes is significant, and that's what I keep returning to. A junior dev using Copilot can now produce code that looks structurally like what a more experienced developer might write, faster than before. That's interesting, and slightly uncomfortable if you've built your value proposition on being fast at writing the standard stuff.

What this means for IT pros specifically

Most of the people reading this aren't professional software developers. But most of us write some code: PowerShell scripts, automation, a bit of Python, the odd bit of JSON wrestling. This is where Copilot is genuinely useful right now.

I've used it to generate PowerShell functions for Intune reporting. I used it this month to help me write a Graph API call I'd never done before. It got me 70% of the way there in about 30 seconds, and the remaining 30% was understandable because Copilot had scaffolded the structure for me.

That's not a replacement. That's a power tool.

The licensing angle

At £10/month individual or £19/user/month for business, this is the kind of SaaS spend that doesn't even get questioned in most organisations. If you're writing any kind of code regularly and you're not at least trying this, you're making a decision without information.

The technical preview required a waitlist and a GitHub account. The GA version is open to anyone. No excuses now.

Where I've landed

GitHub Copilot is the first AI tool I've used that has genuinely changed how I work, rather than just promised to. It's not magic, and it makes mistakes that would embarrass a mid-level developer. But it's also genuinely useful, today, for people who write code as part of a broader technical job rather than as their primary profession.

If you're an IT professional who scripts anything (deployments, automation, reporting), give it a proper trial before forming an opinion. The cost of being wrong about this one is low. The cost of ignoring it might not be.