A quarter of a year in the past, GitHub unveiled Copilot Chat, akin to its ChatGPT, but geared towards programming, and liberated it from private preview, granting access to entities wielding a Copilot for Business subscription. Presently, it elevates this offering by extending the Copilot Chat beta to all existing GitHub Copilot for Individual subscribers within the realms of Visual Studio and VS Code. Access to Copilot for individual users carries a price tag of $10 per month, and Copilot Chat stands as a gratuitous augmentation to this prevailing subscription.
Much like its kin in the realm of conversational AI, Copilot Chat finds its abode within the IDE’s periphery, affording developers the means to indulge in multi-turn dialogues concerning the art of coding. However, its true virtue lies in its ability to field inquiries pertaining to the code that presently consumes the developer’s attention within the IDE. GitHub’s assertion upon the initial introduction of this conversational experience underscores the significance of context, elevating Copilot beyond the capabilities of a general-purpose chatbot.
Shuyin Zhao, Vice President of Product Management at GitHub, eloquently conveys the synergistic potential of GitHub Copilot Chat when aligned with the GitHub Copilot pair programmer. This potent amalgamation begets an AI-driven assistant, endowed with the capability to assist every developer in realizing the full potential of their cognitive faculties, all within the confines of their preferred natural language. In essence, this convergence appears poised to redefine the very essence of the software development experience, ushering in a paradigm shift that relegates mundane, boilerplate tasks to the annals of history while heralding natural language as the new universal programming vernacular for developers across the globe.
GitHub further elucidates that Copilot Chat’s practical applications encompass real-time guidance, proffering counsel on best practices, tailored tips, and bespoke solutions meticulously calibrated to the developer’s current codebase. Moreover, it extends its purview to encompass code scrutiny and the rectification of security vulnerabilities, all seamlessly integrated within the IDE, obviating the need for disruptive context switches.
Within the context of this announcement, Zhao expounds GitHub’s lofty aspiration to catalyze “natural language as a new universal programming language,” an ambition poised to democratize the landscape of software development. This overarching theme has resonated in GitHub’s recent messaging, championed vocally by its CEO, Thomas Dohmke. As Dohmke graces the stage at our Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, probing questions on this very subject, along with others of similar import, are certain to punctuate our forthcoming onstage interview.