Back in 2021, GitHub announced the technical preview of GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer. Later in 2022, GitHub Copilot was made generally available to all developers for $10 USD per month or $100 USD/year. GitHub Copilot offered AI-based coding suggestions in your preferred environment. Today, GitHub is announcing Copilot X, an AI-powered software development experience. Copilot is no longer limited to code suggestions; GitHub is taking it to the next level. It is now powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model. Find the details below.
- A ChatGPT-like experience in your editor with GitHub Copilot Chat: GitHub Copilot now adds a chat interface to the editor for developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio. GitHub Copilot Chat can recognize what code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown, and it’s deeply embedded into the IDE. You can get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs. You can sign up for technical preview of Copilot Chat here.
- Copilot for Pull Requests: Using OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model, Copilot for Pull Requests adds AI-powered tags in pull request descriptions through a GitHub app that organization admins and individual repository owners can install. These tags are automatically filled out by GitHub Copilot based on the changed code. Developers can then review or modify the suggested description. You can now sign up for a technical preview of the first AI-generated descriptions for pull requests on GitHub. GitHub is also working on a feature where Copilot will automatically suggest sentences and paragraphs as developers create pull requests by dynamically pulling in information about code changes. GitHub is also working on a feature where Copilot will automatically warn developers if they’re missing sufficient testing for a pull request and then suggest potential tests that can be edited, accepted, or rejected based on a project’s needs.
- Get AI-generated answers about documentation: GitHub Copilot for Docs is an tool that uses a chat interface to provide users with AI-generated responses to questions about documentation—including questions developers have about the languages, frameworks, and technologies they’re using. For now, this tool supports React, Azure Docs, and MDN. You can sign up for waitlist here. GitHub is also working to bring this tool to any organization’s repositories and internal documentation. So, developers can get their queries answered about their internal tooling and development practices.
- Copilot for the command line interface (CLI): GitHub Copilot CLI can compose commands and loops, and throw around obscure find flags to satisfy your query. You can sign up for waitlist here.
GitHub Copilot X is on the horizon, and with it a new generation of more productive, fulfilled, and happy developers who will ship better software for everyone.
