GitHub has announced the availability of its new Copilot Chat tool — a ChatGPT-like experience aimed to assist developers with coding — as a restricted public beta for corporate enterprises and organizations. The Copilot Chat beta will be available to “all business users” via Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code applications, according to GitHub.
The chatbot was unveiled in March as the centerpiece of GitHub’s Copilot X program, an upgrade of the company’s original Copilot code completion tool that combined with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. The tool’s purpose is to save time by allowing engineers to “execute some of the most complex tasks with simple prompts.”
According to GitHub, Copilot Chat is aware of the code being written into the code editor as well as any error messages, allowing it to deliver the most relevant support inside a developer-specific environment. GitHub Copilot Chat’s key features include real-time coaching suited to individual coding projects, coding analysis that explains code recommendations and difficult coding ideas, and “simple troubleshooting” to discover possible errors.
Mario Rodriguez, GitHub’s vice president of product, makes some big statements about Copilot X’s ability to enhance developer productivity in a blog post introducing the beta. According to Rodriguez, the program will enable even unskilled engineers to design “entire applications or debug vast arrays of code in a matter of minutes instead of days” and will enhance productivity tenfold. “This means 10 days of work done in one day,” Rodriguez explained. “10 hours of work completed in one hour.” “A single prompt command completed 10 minutes of work.”
The Copilot Chat feature isn’t the only one being worked on for GitHub’s new Copilot X system. For example, the business is working on introducing its “Hey, GitHub!” voice-to-code interactions to the program. GitHub claims it is ready to deliver the other Copilot X capabilities, but no timetable has been offered. We have asked GitHub for clarification and will update this story if we receive a response.
