Question

A developer at a fintech company types code in their IDE and receives a Copilot ghost-text completion. Their security lead asks you to explain, in order, what happens to the request from the moment the developer pauses typing until the suggestion is displayed. Which sequence correctly describes the GitHub Copilot code-suggestion lifecycle?

Accepted Answer

The IDE extension assembles a prompt from surrounding context, sends it through the Copilot proxy to the model, the proxy applies post-processing filters (such as duplication/public-code matching and toxicity checks), and the filtered completion is returned to the IDE for display.

Answer

The IDE sends raw source files to the model, the model stores them for retraining, generates a completion, and returns it directly to the IDE without any intermediate filtering.

Answer

The proxy builds the prompt on GitHub's servers by cloning the repository, the model generates a suggestion, and the IDE applies toxicity filtering locally before display.

Answer

The IDE queries a local cache of previously accepted suggestions first, and only contacts the model through the proxy when no cached match exists, bypassing post-processing entirely.