At GitHub Universe, we announced that GitHub Copilot has expanded and evolved GitHub into the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform. A core piece of our AI-powered developer platform is GitHub Copilot Chat, which enables the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language.
Today, GitHub Copilot Chat is now generally available for both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, and is included in all GitHub Copilot plans alongside the original GitHub Copilot productivity boosting code completion capabilities. It is also available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.
GitHub Copilot Chat is now available to all GitHub Copilot individual users. Enterprise and organization administrators can grant their development teams access to Copilot Chat by enabling the Copilot Chat setting for their users. If you’ve been using Copilot Chat in beta or have already provided access to your development team, no additional actions are required.
Powered by GPT-4, available in any natural language
Powered by GPT-4, GitHub Copilot Chat is a contextually-aware AI assistant designed specifically for developer scenarios. Teams of developers and individuals alike can prompt Copilot Chat in the natural language of their choice–from German to Portuguese and beyond–and receive real-time guidance without ever leaving the IDE. From explaining complex coding concepts to detecting security vulnerabilities and writing unit tests, Copilot Chat can help every developer innovate at the speed of thought.
With so many capabilities, you might be wondering how to begin incorporating the magic of GitHub Copilot Chat into your day-to-day workflow. Copilot Chat is personalized to each developer and their unique coding practices, so it’s really up to you to decide where and when to use it. For some inspiration, we’re excited to share how developers here at GitHub are using it to stay in the flow, and build better, more secure software faster than ever.
Seamless translation between programming languages
There are many reasons why I need to translate between programming languages, including standardization efforts, breaking up monoliths, and looking for performance benefits. Copilot Chat makes it easier than ever to do exactly that by helping me understand the code that needs to be translated, and then actually translating that code into the target language. This not only saves me lots of time rewriting code and transferring logic, but also reduces cognitive load and mental effort so I can focus on quality and design.
_> I recently had to do this for a demo where I translated a JavaScript Application to Java, and then again to C#.
Given some fundamental differences between the languages and the frameworks, the first step was bootstrapping an initial version of the app in the target language and framework. With Copilot Chat I used the @workspace /new-Slash-Command to have this up and running within a minute. After that, a simple prompt like
Translate this File to java/C#would often be enough for Copilot Chat to present a high quality result, automatically picking up the traits of the target language and framework. Finally, to ensure quality and performance, I used the @workspace /test-slash command to generate unit tests with ease.
- David Losert, Principal Solutions Engineer_
Getting real-time answers to coding questions
_> I routinely find myself opening up Copilot Chat to quickly turn an idea I have into a bash command that gets me the information I’m looking for, and saves me from having to stop what I’m doing and look up specific command flags that I routinely forget. Recently, I opened Copilot Chat to convert a helper function I had been using in my Ruby tests to valid Typescript so I could use it in part of a new project I’m working on.
Being able to quickly pull up Copilot Chat, ask a question, and tweak the results to get exactly what I’m looking for has been a welcome change from hunting through pages of search results._
Justin Herrick, Staff Engineer
Instant refreshers on coding practices to free up time for bigger thinking
_I've worked on many different tech stacks and products over my career, and have held several different roles with many teams at GitHub, too. What happens to me more than I'd care to admit now is looking at the screen and waiting for the fingers to start typing, because I know I've done this before but I'm struggling to remember how exactly. Where I used to try to hack at it again, search my history, or just search in general, now I can bring up Copilot Chat to rapidly jog my memory, and maybe even learn a few new tricks on top of that. I still enjoy pairing with others and collaborating on the big things because that's where strong relationships develop and big growth happens, but using Copilot Chat to reach what's just out of reach in memory or get me started on the basics of something new is so helpful.
Looking at my most recent interchanges, I've blasted through translating complex SQL syntax to KQL, generating a wild regexp, testing an API scenario in my Codespace, and … oh, wow, I asked it to explain Dependabot as a pirate so I could answer my teenage son's question and make him laugh at the same time. I appreciate that it's always there and keeps me going, so I can focus more on the big thinking.
- Liz Saling, Staff Engineer_
As the global home for developers, we’re hyper-focused on how we can bring AI to the entire development lifecycle to help developers do the best work of their lives and have fun while doing it. From our own experience using Copilot Chat at GitHub, we’re confident it can do just that. Check out our guide for getting started with GitHub Copilot Chat. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with it 🚀.
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