Microsoft’s AI Copilot Is Starting to Automate the Coding Industry

When software developer Nikolai Avteniev got his hands on a preview version of Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot coding assistant in 2021, he quickly saw the potential.

Developed by Microsoft’s GitHub coding platform and based on a version of OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence, the assistant wasn’t perfect and sometimes got things wrong. But Avteniev, who works for ticket seller StubHub, was surprised by how ably it finished lines of code with just a few prompts. All he had to do was press the tab key, and Copilot filled in the rest.

“Instead of using 15 keystrokes, it took three,” he recalled recently. “It was nice a little speed ...