GitHub announced a major upgrade to Copilot, its AI-assisted development tool. Now in public preview, GitHub Copilot X utilizes the new GPT-4 model, adds chat and voice capabilities, and brings Copilot to the command line, pull requests, and docs.
“With AI available at every step, we can fundamentally redefine developer productivity. We are reducing boilerplate and manual tasks and making complex work easier across the developer lifecycle. By doing so, we’re enabling every developer to focus all their creativity on the big picture: building the innovation of tomorrow and accelerating human progress, today,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a blog post.
The new chat capabilities are intended to provide a “ChatGPT-like experience” in the editor. It natively integrates into VS Code and Visual Studio and can recognize code that has been typed and what error messages are shown, enabling it to provide analysis on what the code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and provide bug fixes.
There is also a voice component to this that will enable developers to give prompts by speaking.
Another part of Copilot X is that it will be able to generate descriptions of tags and descriptions for pull requests. The company is also working on a feature where it will warn developers if a pull request doesn’t have sufficient testing and then suggest potential tests.
Copilot is also being integrated into documentation, with a chat interface that will allow developers to ask questions about the languages, frameworks, and technologies that their code is using. It has already created this functionality for React, Azure Docs, and MDN documentation, and plans to also bring this to internal documentation as well.
“From reading docs to writing code to submitting pull requests and beyond, we’re working to personalize GitHub Copilot for every team, project, and repository it’s used in, creating a radically improved software development lifecycle,” Dohmke wrote.
