GitHub Copilot Review

What GitHub Copilot is and who makes it

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant built by GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. It started life in 2021 as a glorified autocomplete that guessed the next few lines of code. It is now something broader: a chat panel that knows your repository, a code reviewer that leaves comments on pull requests, and an agent mode that can make changes across several files and open a PR for you to inspect.

One detail people often miss is that Copilot is not a single model. On the paid plans you can switch between models from several labs, so the tool is better understood as a delivery layer that puts strong models exactly where a developer already works. That matters because Copilot runs inside Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, the JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Xcode and on github.com itself. If your team already keeps its issues and pull requests on GitHub, adopting Copilot needs no new vendor, no new login and no fresh procurement conversation. For plenty of Indian engineering teams, that is the whole argument.

Key features in depth

Inline completion. This is the original feature and still the one you use most. As you type, Copilot proposes the rest of the line or the rest of the function in grey text; Tab accepts it. It is at its best on the boring parts of a codebase - mapping an API response into a struct, writing a repetitive validation block, filling in a switch statement. It is at its worst when you are inventing something genuinely new, where its suggestions can be confidently wrong.

Copilot Chat. A sidebar conversation that can see your open file, your selection or, when you point it there, your whole workspace. Ask it why a test is failing, ask it to explain an unfamiliar module written by someone who left the company two years ago, ask it to convert a callback-heavy file to async or await. This is where Copilot earns its keep for people joining an existing codebase.

Agent mode and Copilot coding agent. Agent mode inside the editor takes an instruction such as add pagination to the orders endpoint, then plans the change, edits multiple files, runs commands and shows you a diff. The coding agent version lives on github.com: assign it an issue and it works in a background environment, then raises a pull request. Both need supervision. Treat the output as a junior developer's first draft, not as finished work.

Code review. Copilot can be added as a reviewer on a pull request and will leave line-level comments. It catches obvious things - an unhandled null, a missing await, a variable that shadows another. It does not catch design problems, and it should never replace a human reviewer on anything touching payments, authentication or personal data.

Next edit suggestions. A newer feature that predicts where you will want to change something next, based on the edit you just made. If you rename a field in one place, it offers to follow through the rest of the file. It is genuinely useful during refactors.

Repository knowledge. Point Chat at your repo and it indexes it, so questions like where do we validate GST numbers get answered with actual file references instead of a generic essay. Custom instruction files let you tell Copilot about your house style once, rather than repeating it in every prompt.

Pricing tiers explained for Indian users

Copilot has three consumer tiers plus business plans. All amounts below convert at roughly Rs 85 to the dollar and are indicative; the vendor bills in dollars, so your actual charge moves with the exchange rate, and most foreign software vendors now collect 18 per cent GST from Indian consumers on top.

The Free tier gives you a capped number of completions and chat messages each month. It is not a trial that expires; it simply runs out and refills. For a student working through a college project or someone learning in the evenings, it is often enough.

Pro at roughly Rs 850 a month removes the completion cap and gives you a monthly allowance of premium model requests. For a full-time developer this is the tier that makes sense. Annual billing works out cheaper if your card can handle a single larger international charge.

Pro+ at roughly Rs 3,315 a month is aimed at people leaning hard on agent mode and the most expensive models. Most developers do not need it. Try Pro for two months and only move up if you are genuinely hitting the premium request ceiling.

The student route matters in India. Verified students get Copilot Pro free through the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Verification usually means a college email address or an uploaded ID and proof of enrolment, and Indian institutions are widely accepted. If you are at an IIT, NIT, a state engineering college or a private university with a working institutional email, apply before you pay anything. Teachers at recognised institutions can also qualify. The pack renews as long as you stay enrolled and re-verify.

Payment reality. GitHub bills international cards. UPI is not an option for a personal Copilot subscription, and many Indian debit cards are blocked for international transactions by default. Recurring mandates on Indian cards also fail more often than people expect because of RBI e-mandate rules, so a card that reliably supports international recurring payments - usually a credit card with international usage enabled in the bank app - saves you a monthly headache. Company purchases through GitHub Enterprise can be invoiced, which sidesteps the card problem entirely.

How it compares to Cursor and Claude

The honest summary: Cursor is the better tool for sweeping changes across a project, Claude is the better thinking partner for hard problems and messy legacy code, and Copilot is the one that requires the least change to how your team already works. Many developers pay for two of the three, which is not extravagant when the combined cost sits near Rs 2,500 a month against Indian developer salaries.

Real workflows it fits

A Bengaluru product team of twelve. They already run everything through GitHub - issues, PRs, Actions. Rolling out Copilot Business means the engineering manager flips a setting, not runs a pilot. Copilot review as a first pass on every PR catches the small stuff before a senior engineer reads the diff, and the team saves the most valuable review time for architecture.

A freelance developer taking Upwork contracts. Every new client means a new codebase in an unfamiliar framework. Copilot Chat pointed at the repo answers the orientation questions - where is auth handled, what is this helper doing - that used to eat the first two billable days. At around Rs 850 a month, that pays for itself on a single contract.

A Pune services company doing maintenance work. Much of their revenue is keeping older Java and .NET systems running for overseas clients. Copilot in Visual Studio and IntelliJ helps with the tedious parts: writing missing unit tests, adding logging, explaining code with no documentation. Management should still insist on human review, because these systems are exactly where a plausible-looking wrong suggestion does damage.

An ed-tech startup in Hyderabad. Two founders and three engineers, shipping fast. Agent mode drafts the CRUD scaffolding for new features so the team spends its attention on the parts students actually notice. They keep a rule that no agent-written PR merges without one human approving it.

A final-year student building a portfolio. Free Pro through the Student Pack, used mostly for explanations. The trap here is real: if you accept every suggestion without understanding it, you will struggle in interviews. Use it to learn, not to skip learning.

Limitations to know

Copilot is confidently wrong often enough that you must read what it writes. It invents function names that do not exist in a library, it uses deprecated APIs, and it will happily produce code that compiles and behaves incorrectly. On security-sensitive code it is a genuine risk rather than a small annoyance.

It is weaker than Cursor on changes that span many files at once. The plugin architecture that makes it easy to adopt also constrains how much of your project it holds in view at one time, though this has improved.

India-specific gaps are worth naming. There is no rupee pricing and no UPI, so you need an international card. There is no Hindi or regional-language interface, and while it understands prompts written in transliterated Hinglish reasonably well, it is not designed for that. It also knows very little about Indian-specific systems - UPI deep links, GST return formats, Aadhaar or DigiLocker integrations, NPCI specifications - so for that work you are back to reading official documentation. Do not trust it on Indian compliance detail.

Data handling deserves a look before a team rolls it out. Business and Enterprise plans commit to not training on your code and offer policy controls; the individual plans have their own settings you should check. If you work on client code under an NDA, read the terms and get the client's written agreement rather than assuming.

Finally, the premium request allowances on paid tiers are easy to burn through if you use agent mode heavily. Watch your usage in the first month before deciding which tier you actually need.

How to get started

1. Sign in at github.com. If you are a student or teacher, apply to the GitHub Student Developer Pack first and wait for verification before paying for anything.
2. Enable Copilot on your account. Start on the Free tier so you can judge it without a card.
3. Install the Copilot extension in your editor. In VS Code, search the Extensions panel for GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat, then sign in when prompted.
4. Open a real project, not a toy one. Write a clear comment describing a function you actually need and see what it proposes.
5. Open the Chat panel and ask it to explain a file you did not write. This is the fastest way to judge whether it understands your codebase.
6. Add a custom instructions file to your repository describing your conventions - naming, error handling, preferred libraries. Suggestions improve noticeably.
7. Try agent mode on a small, low-risk task with a clean git state so you can discard the changes easily.
8. Only after two or three weeks of real use, decide between staying free, taking Pro at about Rs 850, or going to Pro+. Enable international transactions on your card in your bank app before the first charge.