Practices and Challenges of Using GitHub Copilot: An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how developers use GitHub Copilot, highlighting popular languages, tools, benefits, and challenges, and providing insights into its practical application and limitations in software development.

Contribution

The paper offers the first comprehensive empirical analysis of Copilot usage practices and challenges based on data from Stack Overflow and GitHub discussions.

Findings

JavaScript and Python are the most used languages with Copilot

Visual Studio Code is the primary IDE for Copilot users

Main challenges include difficulty of integration

Abstract

With the advances in machine learning, there is a growing interest in AI-enabled tools for autocompleting source code. GitHub Copilot, also referred to as the "AI Pair Programmer", has been trained on billions of lines of open source GitHub code, and is one of such tools that has been increasingly used since its launch on June 2021. However, little effort has been devoted to understanding the practices and challenges of using Copilot in programming with auto-completed source code. To this end, we conducted an empirical study by collecting and analyzing the data from Stack Overflow (SO) and GitHub Discussions. More specifically, we searched and manually collected 169 SO posts and 655 GitHub discussions related to the usage of Copilot. We identified the programming languages, IDEs, technologies used with Copilot, functions implemented, benefits, limitations, and challenges when using Copilot. The results show that when practitioners use Copilot: (1) The major programming languages used with Copilot are JavaScript and Python, (2) the main IDE used with Copilot is Visual Studio Code, (3) the most common used technology with Copilot is Node.js, (4) the leading function implemented by Copilot is data processing, (5) the significant benefit of using Copilot is useful code generation, and (6) the main limitation encountered by practitioners when using Copilot is difficulty of integration. Our results suggest that using Copilot is like a double-edged sword, which requires developers to carefully consider various aspects when deciding whether or not to use it. Our study provides empirically grounded foundations and basis for future research on the role of Copilot as an AI pair programmer in software development.