GitHub Copilot in 2026 is not what you think it is anymore

If you still think of GitHub Copilot as "the thing that autocompletes your code," you're about two years behind. That's not a criticism - the product has changed faster than most people's mental models of it. This post is an attempt to give you an accurate picture of what Copilot actually is right now, what the research says about its impact, and where the real limits are. What it does under the hood Every time Copilot generates a suggestion, it builds a prompt from whatever context it can gathe