GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex bring LLMs to programming
GitHub launched Copilot as a technical preview, an AI pair programmer powered by OpenAI Codex, a GPT model fine-tuned on public code; the Codex paper introduced the HumanEval benchmark.
Key facts
- Copilot technical preview announced 29 June 2021
- Codex paper 'Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code', arXiv 2107.03374 (July 2021)
- Introduced HumanEval (164 hand-written Python problems)
- Copilot became generally available in June 2022
What happened
Copilot offered inline code completions in editors, generating whole functions from comments and context.
Why it matters
The first mass-market generative AI product for professionals; coding became the flagship LLM use case, leading to coding agents like Claude Code.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning ★★★★★
- Claude 3.7 Sonnet (hybrid reasoning) and Claude Code preview ★★★★
Sources (3)
- paperEvaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code (arXiv)
- officialIntroducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer (GitHub Blog)
- discussionWikipedia: GitHub Copilot
id: 2021-06-29-github-copilot-codex · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline