If you’re an R programmer hoping to try GitHub Copilot, you’ll need to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. Here’s how to set up and use VS Code for R.

The original AI-powered code completion tool stemming from early OpenAI technology, GitHub Copilot, now comes in a free tier for the Visual Studio IDE and Visual Studio Code, along with other editors.

GitHub Copilot is only compatible with Visual Studio 2022 17.6 or later. So before you can install the extension, you need to make sure you have the right VS version installed on your machine.

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight IDE from Microsoft for developers to write code in a variety of languages like Python, PHP and more. It has inbuilt support for Git as well.