GitHub says it rewrote the Copilot agent runtime, the engine behind its Copilot command-line tool, app and SDK, from TypeScript into Rust, using Copilot's own AI agents to do much of the porting. By 21 August it was all Rust: 832,378 lines of production code and 468,689 lines of unit tests, replacing an estimated 430,000 lines of TypeScript over a window of about fourteen and a half weeks in which it shipped 135 releases. The author, Stephen Toub, says the work was done primarily by a single developer, at a rough cost of about 120,000 dollars in AI token spend plus about three weeks of his own time, though he adds that in the end it was a team effort. For people who use Copilot, GitHub measured the runtime's own overhead for a one-turn session falling from 5.25 seconds to 1.33 seconds, not counting the AI model's time.
A federal appeals court rules GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex did not strip copyright information, because they make new code rather than alter old code
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on 16 September that GitHub's Copilot and OpenAI's Codex did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's rule against removing copyright management information when they produced code without crediting the programmers whose work they trained on. The panel wrote that one who creates a new work and fails to include CMI cannot be said to have removed or altered anything, because removing or altering requires changing an existing work rather than producing a new one. The ruling closes one legal theory and no more. The panel noted separately that many copyright cases involve the creation of a work that is substantially similar to the plaintiff's without attribution, which is an ordinary infringement claim and a different question this ruling does not touch. This item is Confirmed because this desk read the opinion itself, not reporting about it.
A company that issues corporate cards measured what its customers spend on AI. The middle firm spent 11.95 dollars per employee per month. It is a real measurement of real payments, but of that company's own customers, who lean towards startups and technology firms rather than the whole economy.
Before code goes into a project, someone reviews it. GitHub says an AI agent is now involved in more than one review in five. GitHub is describing its own product, so it is the only party that can see this number and the only one vouching for it.