GitHub Copilot Review: Still the best autocomplete in your IDE

GitHub Copilot has quietly become the default AI developer tool, and the default is not wrong. Two years in, its autocomplete remains the most frictionless AI assistance in software: no context switching, no prompting discipline, just suggestions appearing as you type that are right often enough to matter.

Our testing focused on where Copilot stands now that chat and agent features have arrived. The answer: still excellent inside the editor, especially for the flow state. Inline suggestions handled our routine work — boilerplate, tests, data transformations — with roughly one-in-three acceptance on a typical day, which translates to real time saved without any behavior change on our part. The chat is solid for "explain this function" questions, and agent mode in VS Code can execute multi-file changes, though Cursor's implementation feels a generation ahead there.

Where Copilot disappoints is large, unusual codebases. In our biggest monorepo, suggestions got noisier and occasionally contradicted internal conventions. Every suggestion still needs review — it is autocomplete, not a colleague — and teams should set expectations accordingly.

The price is the strategic argument: about $10 a month, half of most competitors, and it is included free for students and maintainers of popular open-source projects. For organizations already paying for GitHub, the enterprise tier integrates with existing governance, which made adoption trivial for the teams we observed.

If you want AI help without changing how you work, this remains the calmest, cheapest entry point.