GitHub’s Copilot vs Replit’s Ghostwriter: Which Programming Assistant to Choose?

Replit's Ghostwriter generates or transforms code in 16 languages, similar to GitHub Copilot

Replit's Ghostwriter is an AI-powered programming assistant that can make suggestions to make coding easier. It works within Replit's online development environment and resembles GitHub's Copilot to recognize and compose code in various programming languages to accelerate the development process. According to Replit, Ghostwriter works by using a large language model trained on millions of lines of publicly available code. This baked-in data allows Ghostwriter to make suggestions based on what you've already typed while programming in Replit's IDE. When you see a suggestion you like, you can "autocomplete" the code by pressing the Tab key. But when it comes down to GitHub's Copilot vs Replit's Ghostwriter, let's find out which one is the best programming assistant for coders.

GitHub's Copilot

GitHub's Copilot is an AI pair programming assistant that helps you write code faster and with less work. It draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions instantly. GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pre-trained language model created by OpenAI. It is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).

GitHub's Copilot is not intended for non-coding tasks like data generation and natural language generation, like question & answering.

OpenAI Codex was trained on publicly available source code and natural language, so it works for both programming and human languages. GitHub's Copilot extension sends your comments and code to the GitHub Copilot service, file content both in the file you are editing, as well as neighboring or related files within a project. It may also collect the URLs of repositories or file paths to identify the relevant context. The comments and code along with context are then used by OpenAI Codex to synthesize and suggest individual lines and whole functions.

Replit's Ghostwriter

Ghostwriter sports an ML-powered pair programmer that completes your code in real-time, tools to generate, transform, and explain code, and an in-editor search utility that lets you find and import open-source code without leaving your editor (think Stack Overflow in your editor). Replit says that Ghostwriter performs best with JavaScript and Python but supports 16 languages, including C, Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby. It also supports HTML and CSS for web development and SQL for database queries.

Replit's Ghostwriter includes four main components: Complete Code (which analyzes what you've written and suggests continuations), Generate Code (which creates new code based on your suggestions), Transform Code (which helps you refactor or modernize code to fit standards), and Explain Code (which analyzes existing code and explains its function using natural language).

A ghostwriter is like a Multiplayer in that you collaborate in real-time with someone else. However, in this case, you're not coding with a person; instead, it's an agent representing the entire programming knowledge of the human race. Experts believe this programming assistant will leapfrog traditional IDE features. A ghostwriter is the next major evolution of our platform. This will radically change how people write code on Replit — and in the process, will change software writ large. Forever.

So, in GitHub's Copilot vs Replit's Ghostwriter, it is definitely hard to say which one is the best programming assistant for coders because both offer features and are helpful.