Hacker Trends › “copilot” trend
“Copilot” was mentioned 30,262 times on Hacker News between 2007 and 2026, peaking in Jul 2021 with 1,457 that month.
Every month from 2007 to 2026, counting how often “copilot” appears in Hacker News stories and comments. Each point is a live date-histogram over ~45M items, computed with Upstash Redis Search.
The word copilot appears from 2007 in various senses, but the coding-assistant meaning took over in mid-2021. The curve peaks in July 2021 with 1,457 mentions, when GitHub Copilot launched, and the lifetime total is 30,262 mentions.
Discussion quickly turned contentious: threads on Copilot regurgitating Quake code, framing it as open-source “code laundering,” and the fact that all public GitHub code was used in training. The topic stayed active through 2026 as AI coding tools proliferated.
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