Learning GitHub Copilot

Chapter 8. Other Ways to Leverage Copilot

As we’ve seen, Copilot provides a lot of value for working with traditional coding flows as well as traditional tasks like testing and documentation. Copilot can also help in many less common use cases encountered by programmers.

We can’t cover all those use cases in this chapter or even in this book, but we can cover some representative examples. As a heads-up, the structure of this chapter is different from that of the other chapters. We’ll be covering multiple, diverse use cases rather than focusing on one overall feature or functional area. The examples we’ll look at are outlined in the next few paragraphs.

You may primarily think of using GitHub Copilot for coding in popular languages like JavaScript and Python. However, Copilot has access to all the languages that the model you’re using was trained on. So, you can also use it on ones that we don’t think of as traditional programming languages. An example is one we’ve touched on before—SQL—commonly used to work with relational databases. Copilot can simplify a surprising number of database-related tasks when you’re working with queries, schemas, and stored procedures.

Frameworks, such as Kubernetes, also make use of an ordered format (most commonly expressed in YAML). While these frameworks are declarative rather than imperative, their syntax and structure are understood by Copilot. It can provide completion suggestions and answers about how to work with them, just as for any programming ...